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Originally Posted by inorbert
My team (5811) has a sponsorer who is a plastics manufacturer; they allow us to have any scrap material we want so we have a stock pile of lexan in our shop. Last season we used it as guide pannels for our intake and decoration. I was wondering if lexan (or other plastics) can be used for more stuctural components in robot build
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We've used polycarbonate in a lot of ways people have already said to good effect, and it's likely the plastic you'll want in main body structural situations (if you want a plastic). But since you're talking about plastics in general, I'll bring up another one: polypropylene.
Polycarb certainly beats polypro in terms of most structural members and loaded applications, but that doesn't mean it's useless beyond paneling. It can take weight with the right shape and volume: you've sat in quite a few
polypropylene chairs, and we love to use it for
battery boxes in awkward places. It has good toughness and impact strength and is less dense than polycarb--the main limitation is its reduced stiffness. Still, that can make it great for some over-the-bumper end effectors. We used it for
our claw an minibot deployer in 2011 (for a regional win as AC2). We rammed the polypro V straight into the minibot pole all season and got the claw bashed up and dragged around with no trouble. Other uses include drivetrain skids (for getting over bumps), game piece ramps (it's slippery), and flexible brackets and guards (nice when you need some flex tolerance). Basically anytime we're about to use polycarb we stop and think 'can it be pro?' since polypro is lighter by volume.
Other novel-ish uses of plastics:
I'm not sure anyone has mentioned pillow blocks, but depending on how your axles are loaded there are a number of plastic options. We've used acetal (polyoxymethylene aka delrin) for end effector blocks before. Really want to analyze and test your loads here, though. We've also used acetal for larger jobs, namely the white skids used to
slide up the pyramid in 2013.