Register To Comment
Page 1 of 2 12 LastLast
Results 1 to 10 of 14

Thread: Nylon 6 Vs HDPE

  1. #1

  2. #2
    It's always hard to know what to suggest without seeing detail plans of your project, as to my own experience of HDPE Seraph is made almost entirely of HDPE it has been hit with MD's hammer and spent a while in the pit with Little Hitter doing it's best to knock a hole in it. Neither did any real damage,

    I would not advise tapping into any plastic, this has been a problem even on THZ, use angle brackets, Blind hole captive nut or bamboo bolts (this is a stud (threaded) bar that goes through the whole robot with a nut on each end that holds everything under compression.)

  3. #3

  4. #4
    If I can afford it, I prefer to use Nylon 6 for the chassis and if I want cheap armour, I tend to plump for HDPE. Having said that, I have used HDPE for a chassis before and plan to use it for the first chassis of Drumroll II so I can afford to have it ready for the champs in September (will rebuild it from something more durable after that)

    HDPE can work for a chassis if you have no major load-bearing points, otherwise it will deform. On the previous Kaizer, I attached my lifting forks to an HDPE bulkhead but it simply bent whenever I tried to lift anything, so I had to brace it with a length of box-section steel. I replaced the HDPE with a bit of polypropylene in the current version and got rid of the steel and the results were much better. There is still a bit of flex in the material, particularly if it's lifting something heavy, but it is an improvement over the HDPE. Replacing the polypropylene with Nylon would be a further improvement still.

    Tapping into both HDPE and Nylon can be done. Many people advise using wood screws over bolts when tapping into HDPE but I've never had a problem using the latter. There are loads of tapped holes in the Nylon chassis of Drumroll and only some of them are beginning to slip in their threads; that's after three years and numerous times being screwed and unscrewed.

    The machining properties depend on your definition of machining. I would say that if you're using hand-tools such as a saw (or jigsaw) or cordless drill, then HDPE is the easier material to machine. But if you are getting it machined by mill or CNC machine, then I would imagine that Nylon 6 would be the better material to machine (although I could be wrong on that).

    Here are a couple of data sheets to compare the properties of each material, and also a page of data graphs:

    HDPE - http://www.directplasticsonline.co.uk/p ... asheet.pdf
    Nylon 6 - http://www.directplasticsonline.co.uk/p ... truded.pdf
    Graphs - http://www.directplasticsonline.co.uk/graphs.html

    As the others have said, if you let us know what your design plans are it'll give us a better idea of what would work better.

  5. #5
    Having recently been playing around with both Nylon 6 and HDPE on my micro mill, I have found that the Nylon gives a much nicer finish for the same cut, but the HDPE allows far deeper cuts, allowing it to be rough cut quicker. Not sure if that is at all helpful, but here it is anyway.

  6. #6

  7. #7

  8. #8
    Is cost an issue?

    If not, go for the Nylon. If you'd prefer to save some money and/or have an easier-to-work-with-using-hand-tools material, then go for the HDPE.

  9. #9

  10. #10

Register To Comment

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •