You have seen parts from Big Blue Saw being used for robots, lighting fixtures, signs, car parts, electric vehicles, and more robots. But you may be having trouble deciding which material to order. During our Tough and Transparent Sale from Monday, October 17 though Wednesday, October 19, you have two great materials to choose from. And you can save on both of them.
All of Big Blue Saw's polycarbonate and aluminum parts are made using waterjet cutting, which allows us to turn flat sheets of solid mateiral into real parts based on the designs you upload to our online quoting system.
Polycarbonate is a plastic with a high tensile strength of 8000 to 16,000 psi.
Being a polymer, it is lightweight. And it's transparent to boot.
Polycarbonate happens to be one of the tougher plastics around. Impact toughness is the ability of a material to absorb energy and plastically deform without fracturing. To put some numbers behind it, polycarbonate has a notched Izod impact strength of 5.71 ft-lb/in² or 12.0 kJ/m². That's over 7 times tougher than acrylic (Plexiglas®) plastic. So polycarbonate can take a beating without shattering or cracking.
Meanwhile, if you need something much tougher, you could try aluminum alloy 6061. It has a fracture toughness (ability to resist breaking completely after cracking) of 29.0 MPa-m½or 26.4 ksi-in½.
Aluminum 6061 also provides fantastic stiffness for its weight, making it an ideal material for frame parts, trusses, bearing blocks, and the like. It also is corrosion resistant, weldable, and looks good too, which makes it a great choice for a variety of other applications.
If you're looking for stiffness of aluminum or the transparency and light weight of polycarbonate, Big Blue Saw makes the custom parts you need.
During the Tough and Transparent Sale, waterjet cut parts ordered online made from aluminum 6061 in 0.25 inch thickness and polycarbonate in 0.125 inch thickness will automatically receive a quantity discount. This means that when ordering as few as 1 part, you'll get the same discount as if you had ordered 10 pieces. Depending upon the design, you will save as much as 70% off your order.
Upload your design now to our online quoting system to get started.