I am about confused about the rules regarding the use of polycarbonate or other legal plastic sheets which are 0.07" or less in thickness. Based on my understanding of the rules, parts could be cut from a single sheet of 12"x24" legal plastic. In a recent email I saw a ruling that allowed a team to use two individual sheets of 12"x12" legal plastic which was of two different thicknesses.
This rule provided my team an additional challenge of fitting all custom parts onto the single sheet. In addition, it provided us with an added challenge of drawing our cutting template to present to the inspectors. I am just a little confused with the wording in the recent email. It kind of sounds like we can add up the area of all of out scrap pieces and then purchase a new full sheet of plastic of equivalent size. Could you please clarify this ruling? Thank you.
Essentially as long as you can reassemble all the pieces of polycarbonate being used on your robot back into a 12"x24" area, it doesn’t matter how many actual sheets you cut it from. The intent of this rule is to force teams to use less than 12"x24" of lexan that could be acquired from a single sheet, however we are not trying to force teams to only use a single sheet.