Thermoplastics in FIRST

[kramarczyk]

We used sheet ABS for our control board last year and were pretty happy with it. We basically heat bent it as if it were sheet metal and secured it with rivits as required.

We started by modeling the board and bump in Inventor and imported in the AM step files of the chassis to come up with the dimensions. Then we used the sheet metal functions in inventor to figure out the flat dimensions. We mocked it up in cardboard to make sure it fit as expected and to help figure out the order to do the bends. Yes, we prototyped our control board.

Finally we clamped the sheet to the workbench with a piece of aluminum angle and heated the bend line with a heat gun till we could bend it easily by hand. Repeat until all the bends are complete.

We are pretty happy with the perfomance and will definately consider a similar process in the future.

This is a process that I picked up during my time at 1189.