Here is what I recommend doing with these.

Collect a ton of the resources. And I mean weeks worth. You have to craft something around 15 times to max out all of it's stats. Get roughly 20 times (having extra is always good) the resources for each thing you want to upgrade, based of the basic crafting requirements. This works on everything with stats. Weapons and armor.

Drink the mindwipe tonic, put everything into crafting skill. Make a base weapon. Your crafting skill will improve it's stats. Use the blueprint station and make a blueprint of it. Use that blueprint and make another. Make a blueprint of the newer item. Basically do that on repeat until the stats are maxxed out. This will allow you to have a max level weapon for the resource price of a non-upgraded basic item. This is absolutely the best way to do this and you will have the best gear and weapons.

For polymer, use natural polymer. Moschops have a drastically higher resource collection that you can upgrade to collect organic polymer. You can put the organic polymer in the upgrade station and it massively increases it's expiration timer. Use the moschops and start a penguin/praying mantis farm and use the moschops attack order to collect the dead bodies and you'll have loads of organic polymer in no time.