Will plexi-glass work?

[Andy Baker]

Originally Posted by Yan Wang

This is not supposed to be mean, but, you have NO chance of surviving a match with plexiglass. It will crack and break and splinter into a million pieces when another robot just barely nudges it... Our team learned this the first match in 2001 @ NYC. Hence why we have lots of lexan on reserve now. Attached is a pic of the shattering (the other robot barely nudged us on the side)...

Good advice. One of the things that many people get confused with is the difference between acrylic and polycarbonate. Plexiglas is the best-known trade name for acrylic and Lexan* is the best-known trade names for polcarbonate.

Many people get these two materials confused. I hope that Mathew is saying plexiglas while his team is really using polycarbonate. Like Yan said, polycarbonate works well for many teams, but acrylic does not.

Mathew - are you sure it's plexiglas and not polycarbonate?

* btw, here is a related piece of trivia: Lexan was the first polycarbonate invented. Dan Fox mistakingly created it in 1963, as he was working at General Electric. GE had the patent on it for 17 years before another company could make it. Now there are other trade names, but Lexan is still the original. (I spent 4 co-op terms working for GE Plastics, making Lexan and Ultem.)

Also... a side note: the density of polycarbonate is 0.043 lb/in^3 while the density of aluminum is 0.098 lb/in^3.