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Is Kydex actually useful for making things and other makers are missing out, or is the firearm community missing out on other better materials for diy holsters/sheaths? Fire arm folks use kydex as a generalist material for anything and everything. Others don't use if for anything, at all.

I happen to have a huge amount of kydex when I bought some in bulk when I was younger. It's slightly handy when I need a sheet of plastic more generally or if I need some plastic where I have control over its dimension because it's a score to cut material. But in looking for excuses to use it up I haven't found it very handy. Searching for what things others have made out of it not too many other people have found it useful besides gun enthusiasts.

For those completely out of the know kydex is also a thermal plastic, meaning if you heat it up to around 300F you can bend and shape it. You can also score it on the "wrong" side to make angled bends without heating.

Basically in the analogy between metal and plastic, sintering would be 3d printing while kydex would be sheet metal. But no one besides the firearm community finds that useful to have the plastic equivelent of sheet metal and with my own experiences I find you have to think pretty damn hard to find an excuse to use it. Do you think there is anything fundamentally wrong with the idea of a plastic equivelent to sheet metal?

Is Kydex actually useful for making things and other makers are missing out, or is the firearm community missing out on other better materials for diy holsters/sheaths? Fire arm folks use kydex as a generalist material for anything and everything. Others don't use if for anything, at all. I happen to have a huge amount of kydex when I bought some in bulk when I was younger. It's slightly handy when I need a sheet of plastic more generally or if I need some plastic where I have control over its dimension because it's a score to cut material. But in looking for excuses to use it up I haven't found it very handy. Searching for what things others have made out of it not too many other people have found it useful besides gun enthusiasts. For those completely out of the know kydex is also a thermal plastic, meaning if you heat it up to around 300F you can bend and shape it. You can also score it on the "wrong" side to make angled bends without heating. Basically in the analogy between metal and plastic, sintering would be 3d printing while kydex would be sheet metal. But no one besides the firearm community finds that useful to have the plastic equivelent of sheet metal and with my own experiences I find you have to think pretty damn hard to find an excuse to use it. Do you think there is anything fundamentally wrong with the idea of a plastic equivelent to sheet metal?

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[–] • 1 pt

I didn't know this material existed. Now that I am aware of it, I can see many uses in the maker community. Unfortunately Kydex being a chlorinated thermoplastic means I cannot cut it in a laser cutter due to the gas byproducts being quite harmful to the laser optics and metal parts of the machine. I'll have to find another means to cut it with precision, but it does look a good material for custom parts that acrylic, PLA/ABS and wood cannot handle well. I am going to order some sheets and give it a go to see what kind of maker related things I can do with it. It may just be the next great material I have been searching for to add to my maker projects. Thanks for introducing me to this very interesting material.

[–] • 2 pts (edited )

You don't really need a lazer cutter to cut custom shapes in it. I just cut an oval in it a couple minutes before I posted this. The thought came up for this post when I decided to use some. You can score to cut, and the score can have some degree of bend to it without it failing. You can meet multiple score lines to get a compound shape but have a sharp corner where they meet, but such ends seem to be way more responsive to a knife so you can just smoth those out with a box cutter.

I suppose that's not quite as push button or reproducable as a laser cutter but you can definately do it.

What I am using it for today is probably a very silly way of hanging a monitor upside down. I'm going to eventually be doing it with a 50" tv but the display system I'm making could benefit from a prototype in the mean time so I just need a non-try hard way to hang it. I was going to mount it to wood but that would involve drilling through the base of the monitor stand. So instead I'm temp gluing a piece of kydex to the bottom of the monitor stand while leaving an unglued gap, threading a ribbon of kydex through that, and then just screwing that ribbon in. No damage to the mount. The glue shouldn't be that strong so it should be reversable.

But seeing as it's taken about a seven year gap to see any practical use for this material.. it's not exactly a goto material when the firearm community thinks it is for everything (and they are the only ones).