ABS (Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene)
ABS is one of the most versatile plastics, and if you are a designer it is an easy choice on a bill of materials and might be the plastic you specify when you can’t think of anything else.
It can be rigid, colourful and shiny and its use in Lego shows how it is almost unbreakable for the more than 400,000,000 children who play with Lego every year. As a ‘workhorse’ of plastic, ABS achieves an extremely high degree of manufacturing tolerance, which is 0.002 mm. This high tolerance is what makes the ‘stud-and-tube’ principle of a product like Lego work continually, so that the Lego bricks always stick together.
ABS is a part of the styrene family of plastics and is made up from three components or, in technical ...
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