Scratch Building Materials

[cparnet]

I know that Styrene is a pretty popular material for scratch building, but i have a friend who referred me to PVC Sheeting (Polyvinyl). I was wondering if there were any of you on here who had some experience working with this material and could provide me with some information before I spend the money on it. One of the brands he recommended was the Palight Project PVC,
Thanks in advance for any insight!

[deemery]

Some thoughts:

1.  There's lots of styrene shapes (Evergreen) and model RR sheets (Evergreen, The N Scale Architect, etc).  There's also a range of cements for styrene.

2.  Not sure what kind of glue you'd use for PVC sheeting.  I know the Plastruct products include both styrene and ABS, and it can be a problem finding a cement that will glue ABS together, and glue ABS to styrene.

3.  Some modelers have built 'subboxes' with acrylic, and then laminated styrene or even wood walls to that.  But again you need some special glues for acrylic, plus some way to cut it.

I'm not trying to talk you out of this, I'll be interested to see what you find in PVC and how you use it.  Rather, I'm trying to give you some ideas about things to check as you look into this.

dave

[bparrish]

This is an interesting question.

I know that Tennax works on the Evergreen styrene shapes as does common Testor's glue in the red tube.

I've done just enough plumbing to know that each plastic has its own glue.  Now for modeling purposes and not UBC code requirements for pressures and such, many others might work.

As for ABS........ that glue mostly comes in black and might not be suitable for modeling.

Also these glues are very thick and have a really volatile distillate rate that is solved because so much of the use is out doors.  If I used such glues at my modeling bench I would become very smart. Recall my theory of Darwinian Theory of Brain Cell Development.

I think a lot of experimentation will be necessary.  Please let us know what you find.

see ya
Bob

[jimmillho]

Does not PVC outgas Chlorine gas over time?

Jim

[bparrish]

Jim...

You sent me off on an interesting search here.

There are thing called Chlorinated PVC or CPVC.  It appears that they use the out gas of the chlorine to measure the quality of the larger product.  It does also appear that this is used for specific stuff and common PVC pipe in houses and gardens are not a part of this stuff.

For our purposes I would think that you would be in a higher exposure to chlorine in a swimming pool on a hot day.  The sun really runs out chlorine thus the recharging of pool necessities.  As chlorine is heavy a lot probably hangs above the pool water level and is easily breathed and / or cleared by a light breeze. 

The only reason I know anything about chlorine is that in 1985 when the car business had to remove R12 from cars I did some research on how much chlorine was liberated on any given day in Southern California vs. leaky AC's in Mercedes Benz cars........  We were inconsequential but we still lost the debate and tons of chlorine come off of pools every day around the world to this day and no one seems to notice.

My guess is that with the small pieces and limited quantities use in modeling, we would never bump into any sort of dangerous walls.

see ya
Bob

[martin.ojaste]

One of my best sources of free styrene comes in the mail from banks and credit card company's with these "get x$ Credit" free cards. I save them up and use them when I need some small pieces.