As the title suggests.
There’s a small business in Granville Island that has a truck-load of high quality scrap plexiglas that is getting picked up by the garbage truck this morning. If we can beat it (or promise to grab it later), we’re welcome to it.
This may be a semi-regular thing.
PM/email me or whatever for details.
I should be available to help load/unload
Ty and I ran out in my car. They were amazingly cool people and gave us a tour of the shop where they make architectural models. We hit it off real well and we’ll be getting a call some time next week to arrange for another pickup of more-useful stuff. This trip was mainly dumpster diving for off-cuts but they will be clearing out their scrap storage over the next few weeks so I guess this was partly a test to see who wanted it bad enough. Either way, we got a good variety of laserable material in smallish pieces ranging from paper thin to what looks like 30mm; clear, opaque, and white.
As I’m not a regular user of the laser, someone on the committee may want to go through and re-trash the useless bits but we got what looked like it could be useful.
Pictures to come
Does it have the paper wrapping on the acrylic ?
If not I should probably just to a quick test on the material to ensure that its acrylic and not something else with bad stuff in it.
Some does, some doesn’t.
So we really hit it off with the office manager and it sounds like I’ll be invited back next week to bring some boxes and help sort through their storage room and it sounds like it will be a recurring invite. They were great people.
I asked how she found out about us and she had apparently been down to 45W “once and only once” so I let them know that we have moved and significantly upgraded. We may be getting a visit from them in the near future to check out the space.
It was made clear to me over email that these are their laser-cutter offcuts, and they typically only use very high-quality acrylic because they require tight thickness tolerances.
Also confirmed in person. All scraps are laseroff cuts and “of the highest quality”. That said… burn away 
Holy hot damn, that’s awesome.
I’m going to have to keep an eye out for pieces I could use to build the
alarm clock I’m working on!
Perhaps suggest to them that we’d be much more inclined to take the offcuts if they were chopped into rectangular pieces. Much safer to transport and stack.
Or we could NOT look a gift horse in the mouth and trim it to easily stored condition ourselves...
Where you going to store it? What will you do with the scrap?
A gift horse isn’t always a good thing.
With the rest of the laser material clearly labeled as free to use and the scrap will go in the trash, as with all laser material, I imagine.
FYI, there is some non-acrylic material in there - I’m not sure what it is, it’s not anything I recognize (and the brand name on it isn’t familiar either). I’ll check it out and add it to the acceptable materials list if it is indeed acceptable - but just be aware that simply having a material available at VHS doesn’t necessarily mean it is allowed to be laser cut on our laser cutter.
IIRC there’s a long standing policy of not cutting things if the origin (and composition) are in doubt.
If they’ve mixed a couple kinds of plastic together then the whole pile is a no go coz somebody isn’t going to pay attention and cut something awful.
How much is anyone saving by trucking this stuff over? Is it even worth the time and gas involved?
@iMakeRobots As it is my time and my gas, I say yes it is. As to the rest, I’ll leave that to people who know better. As it was given to us from their laser scraps, and all future donations will be directly from their scrap shelves rather than out of their dumpster, I think it is still worthwhile.
@rsim there were some fibrous cardboard-like materials in there that they had etched but I didn’t think we took any of it.
Maybe use some of this free acrylic to make signs for