HIPS High Impact Poly Styrene, can I use this?

[Oldmopars]

I have been doing more scratch building and I found a local vendor that has 2 sheets of HIPS that he will sell me very reasonably priced. Far Far less than buying it from the LHS or any online vendor. Other than maybe being slightly more brittle this should work just fine right?

[Ace-Garageguy]

Yup, should work fine if it really IS high-impact polystyrene.

It MIGHT be a little more solvent-resistant than what you're used to in current kits, but it can still be assembled using solvent-type plastic glues, epoxy, and CA.

The specific plastic formulation (and there are MANY that come under the "HIPS" moniker) will determine the exact degree of solvent resistance. Some early Johan kits, for example, though molded from "high-impact polystyrene" are difficult to glue, and require the hottest of the solvents (or epoxy) to get a lasting bond.

HIPS filament-printed parts are one kind of output from some 3D printers, and they also can be assembled with the familiar solvent-type glues.

[Oldmopars]

Cool, I have been using MEK as a thin solvent glue for a while now and I love it. It should work on this too I would think. I will get some and pay with it. For the cost, it is low risk.

What it comes down to is I can get a 48x96in sheet for the cost of a few 6x12in pieces from my LHS cost. And I use "Local" loosely, they are over an hour away.

[Snake45]

11 minutes ago, Oldmopars said:

Cool, I have been using MEK as a thin solvent glue for a while now and I love it. It should work on this too I would think. I will get some and pay with it. For the cost, it is low risk.

What it comes down to is I can get a 48x96in sheet for the cost of a few 6x12in pieces from my LHS cost. And I use "Local" loosely, they are over an hour away.

We used this stuff where I used to work to make templates and patterns. I was the guy who made the templates, and I got to keep a lot of the bigger "scraps" rather than tossing them out. I now have a lifetime supply of the stuff, use it often, and it works just fine. 

[peteski]

The way I understood this is that pure Polystyrene is very brittle. When broken it will shatter almost like glass.   HIPS is Polystyrene resin with some additives which make it more flexible and impact-resistant. It can be bent quite a bit before it breaks, and the break does not result in sharp shards of plastic.  IHIPS should be fine for model work.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-impact_polystyrene

[Ace-Garageguy]

7 hours ago, peteski said:

The way I understood this is that pure Polystyrene is very brittle. When broken it will shatter almost like glass.   HIPS is Polystyrene resin with some additives which make it more flexible and impact-resistant. It can be bent quite a bit before it breaks, and the break does not result in sharp shards of plastic.  HIPS should be fine for model work.

You would be correct.

Small point of historical reference...the majority of "plastic" consumer items since the introduction of polystyrene has already been HIPS, but there wasn't an acronym for everything and its dog back then. And the word "styrene" is, in popular (non-scientific) usage, the shortened version of polystyrene that most folks use to denote it, in an effort to save typing a few more letters, or pronouncing a few more syllables.

Many consumer products in the 1950s and '60s proudly announced on the package (or the instructions) that the contents were "made from the finest high-impact polystyrene"...including many model cars and other models.

If you have vintage kits, pull some of them off the shelf and read the labels. You'll most likely see wording similar to the above.

High-impact polystyrene is nothing new, and it's been standard fare as the material kits were made of for decades. It's only referring to it as "HIPS" that's fairly recent.

When I made the remark above "if it really is HIPS", I was referring to the propensity for some offshore producers to refer to materials as something they're NOT, and as there's often little quality-control when their garbage arrives Stateside, mislabeled materials enter the stream fairly frequently.

 

Edited January 7, 2019 by Ace-Garageguy