What is ABS Plastic? | How to use ABS Plastic. 3D Printing? Lego?

hi everyone welcome back to plascon plastics if you look here we have a sealed lego set lego set 6862 superman if you look here we have the limited edition exclusive anniversary edition of the star wars lego set featuring the snow version of han solo now what do these things have in common well they're both made out of lego because today we're going to be talking about what's inside of a lego brick so you might think to yourself i know what's inside of a lego brick it's magic it's creativity it's the excitement and joys of youth but you're wrong it's abs plastic and today we're going to talk about it abs plastic is short for acrylonitrile butadiene styrene and it contains a whole family of different assortments of abs plastic abs plastic is often used in injection molding but has different applications as well with lego bricks each brick is individually injection molded and because of the assortment of these bricks lego has hundreds and thousands of different injection molding machines around the world in fact if you were to count up all the lego minifigures you would see that this is actually the world's biggest population of 4 billion figures abs plastic is also used in 3d printing however it is not as easy to use as another common plastic with 3d printing pla the reason why abs plastic is more difficult is because it is much more temperature sensitive this means that warping during the 3d printing process can occur as well as cracking or additional warping during the cooling phase working with abs does take some understanding of plastic and 3d printing and is a little more difficult than other plastics just to jump right in abs plastic is extremely hard that is actually one of the reasons why lego chooses it for their bricks it is extremely scratch resistant however because of that it doesn't bend as easily as some other plastics and therefore can be brittle or cracked you may also find abs plastic in construction applications such as wall sockets or the outside of power tools you can also find them often in face guards or shields abs plastic often comes in large sheets as well this makes it great to use to create products that don't require molding abs can be easily cut heated and folded into different shapes this is why the custom car community often uses abs plastic to create things like side skirts spoilers and front splitters at plasco and plastics we also use abs plastic but not in our injection molding machines we often use it in machining during the prototyping phase for example at plasco and plastics we made this prototype folding crate here so it's a just like a box you would use for groceries or maybe storage in the garage and this is actually a prototype made from abs plastic so it is oh there it is so this is actually cut out from large sheets of abs plastic and then c and c routed to create all four panels and we snapped them together now you may have noticed that it was actually kind of difficult for me to lift up these walls that is because abs plastic has pretty poor bearing capabilities so it creates high friction environments so it shouldn't be used in applications like this and we only use it during the prototyping phase to see what it looks like you can probably also hear kind of the brittle tinny nature of this container that's kind of what i was talking about when i was saying it's a brittle plastic this is something that if bent or forced could crack under pressure another con with abs plastic is the uv capabilities although it is okay in weather applications there are definitely a lot of other substitutes at last abs plastic is a number seven plastic if you haven't seen our plastic categorization videos i suggest you check them out number seven plastics is all the other types of plastics because they're all mixed into this one group they have a very low recycling rate and by very low i mean maybe zero percent maybe one percent at best so abs plastic is rarely if ever recycled i hope you learned a little bit more about abs plastic today if you have any questions on injection molding or plastic production in general please leave a comment or visit our website at plasconplastics.com if you have a higher level engineering question i suggest emailing us that question as our marketing team can't really focus and gear down on those questions in the comments

Channel: Plascon Plastics

Views: 12,095

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Id: OsVO1h_fIBs

Length: 4min 48sec (288 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 31 2022