General Plastics Info

I think the best and most reliable source is still the technical datasheet from the manufacturer. You can also try to contact their technical services department and ask for comparison with specific plastics of interest.

I did a quick search on Google with keywords "plastic property comparsion" which returned several sites. A couple were interesting...you may look these up to see if they are useful to you:

http://www.machinist-materials.com/comparison_table_for_plastics.htm

http://www.machinist-materials.com/comparison_table_for_plastics.htm

Good luck

Thanks for the help.

I also found that site earlier, and their chart has good info on it. I also contacted them for any further info and to ask a few questions about some of the properties on their charts. Unfortunatley, their chart was compiled from many different places (including manufacturer tech specs) and they could nto verify any of the data. In fact, they weren't sure what a few of the properties were. It was still rather useful, but I'm trying to get beyond their chart.

thanks again for the help.

Hi Jake,

a time ago I had a similar problem. "Plastic Manufacturers Associations" of many countries are an excellent resource (plasticseurope.org / cpia.ca / iqsdirectory.com / amba.org; etc).

Most of these pages have the info you are searching for, associations are also willing to provide help about specific issues!

Best luck! Cosme

www.matweb.com is pretty extensive and lets you export to excel with free registration.

I like the simplicity of http://www.boedeker.com/ , and frankly quite hard to beat.

Hey Jake..

Here is you most comprehensive guide to plastics available anywhere:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic

In 1973 my college plastics professor Robert V. Milby used his own book for our textbook. It is called Plastics Technology and available from Amazon.com. It may be an older text, but it can steer you in the right direction on a lot of subjects concerning plastics and then you can seek out the latest information once you have a direction.

New Downloadable Articles on Plastics, How to Find Alternative Plastics‎ From: IDES Prospector (info@ides.ccsend.com) on behalf of IDES Prospector (info@ides.com) Sent: Wednesday, May 16, 2007 9:13:37 PM Reply-to: info@ides.com

I've often had the same problem as I don't work with polymers on a regular basis and there is SO much about them. Makes working with steel duck soup. I think that alot of the technology is changing rapidly too making it hard to keep an up-to-date comprehensive list of properties for that 'best plastic for my application'

Anyways, you may be way past anything that this site has to offer, but McMaster Carr website actually has a very nice very entry level guide to your common, off-the-shelf plastic compounds. Go to www.mcmaster.com and start typing 'plastic' into the search on the left side and you will get an 'About Plastics' option, click that and you get a bunch of info to sift through. Hope that it's worth your while.

While I was back in school I spent as much time in the ME's machine shop as possible; plastics are often choice for little class project things as it's cheap and easy to work with. Several times I just ordered a sample pack from McMaster. Learned alot about machinability and brittleness of different plastics by just shoving a sample of material into the sander or running and endmill through it.