BillyGoat wrote:You'll be even more broke and poor when the plastic bits end up shattering or cutting one of the the kids.
Assume you CAN get someone to cut the CD case or a plastic of a similar ilk. Then assume the kids are still going to be boisterous with them, like the cardboard. Now snap on of your cd cases and see how sharp it is....THIS is what you are to defend against when someone comes running up to you with blood running down their arms or face or a shard of plastic in an eyeball.
Can't you just do your shapes in cardboard and laminate them? All sorts of places laminate stuff. It's quick, easy and cheap to replace.
I think you are asking for trouble unless you buy a safe, SUITIBLE product for what you intend.
BG where there's blame, there's a claim
I think there are plenty of child safe plastic products around, lol. This is after all just a prototype. If it ever went further than this (which is highly unlikely), it would all be entirely child-safe, shatter-proof, non toxic and the pieces would all in general be a bit too big to pose any significant choking hazard. But the idea of a blood spattered room full of kids, horribly injured by using a simple chemistry modelling kit is pretty amusing all the same! :P Hopefully I can do something to avoid this, lol!
Laminating might be an option, but it is still more of a stepping stone than an actual solution I think. Durability and longevity are key in this matter I feel. The pieces themselves will in the end have some relevant markings on them, a bit like the markings on a ruler. Overall in fact the look and feel of the pieces might resemble (somewhat) the feel of a precision plastic tool such as a ruler.
However I do acknowledge that rather than being the simple solution I assumed it to be, regardless of how 'neat' it may be, getting this done in any kind of plastics appears to be vastly more complex than I could possibly have imagined.
