Rodney

With a little forethought, you can get as good a crash protection from nylon bolts as you do rubber bands. The secret, use the proper size bolts. For a 40 size plane, 6-32 nylon are more than enough, 8-32 for up to 120 size and #10 for quarter scale. 1/4-20 are usually a poor choice for any plane as they will not shear easily enough, in fact their sheer strength is greater than the tensile strength; just the opposite of what you want. You want the bolts to have adequate tensile strength but a lower shear strength. Then, to be effective, you must have no slop between the wing surface and the fuselage surface where the bolts go through. This creates a scissors action on shear loads like when you land on a wing tip that lets the nylon bolts shear without tearing up structure in the process.