Best way to vac-u-form?

MillenniumFalsehood · Post by **MillenniumFalsehood** » Tue Dec 28, 2010 7:15 pm

This post is two-fold:

First, what materials should I make a vac-u-form plug out of?

Second, is there a set of good online instructions for making my own vac-u-form machine?

Stu Pidasso · Post by **Stu Pidasso** » Tue Dec 28, 2010 7:31 pm

Goooooooooooooooooooooogle is your friend...

Bar · Post by **Bar** » Sat Jan 01, 2011 2:36 pm

If you are looking to make a lot of pulls yourself, your own machine will be invaluable, but will entail a bit of waste as you get to grips.
A "cheaper" method is to get your plug made and then take it to a company that specialises in vacforming.
They will be experts, will guide you on what you need to do so that your plug can be formed right away(With you doing all the legwork rather than them doing it), and will have no wastage, and professionally made parts.
I'd recommend car body filler and/or wood for the form.
I recently made a vacform master and got a local company to do the work after i had completed the form.
Their pulls were reasonably priced and way better than i would have got by myself.
There will always be a company locally that can do the work for you.

Ziz · Post by **Ziz** » Sat Jan 01, 2011 5:00 pm

Here's some pics of the simple vac table & frame I built to make the tops for my Tug Container kits.

Frame - built from 1x2s. Hex bolts are countersunk from below, held in with duct tape.

Frame with sheet - a sheet of .030 in the frame, trapped between the top and bottom halves. Total exposed area of the sheet is about 12.5 x 10.75 with about another .5 to .75 at each edge of the sheet being trapped between the frame halves.

Vacuform table - again, built from 1x2s. MDF bottom, pegboard top, which then has the bottom of a lasagna pan duct taped to it with holes perforated by a finishing nail. Keeping the holes small increases the vacuum pressure. The large hole in the front is for the vacuum hose. I found out later that the less space under the perforated table there is for the vacuum to evacuate air from, the better vac pressure you'll get, so when finances and productivity demand, I'm going to be re-building the table void space to be very thin, maybe 1/4", and have the vac hose go in from below or maybe through some kind of piping system.

Heat box - since I'm heating the sheets in my oven, I needed a box to hold the frame and sheet up so that the sheet will have something to sag into as it softens. This is actually the remains of my first attempt at a vac table that I repurposed because it was too thick vertically (more air to remove to achieve vacuum) and a little too small overall for the size of the parts I need to make.

Box with frame - this whole thing slides into the oven. I just hit "Broil" and let it get up to about 200* F. Heating time is somewhere around 5 minutes.

Vac table with frame - the completed apparatus, minus the container master parts. The overall design trick is making it so that the plastic completely touches the vac table. The vertical side rails are to guide the frame directly down onto the table because you only have one shot at getting a vac pull per sheet. If it doesn't work, you can't re-heat the sheet, you have to put in a new sheet and start from scratch.

Mark Yungblut · Post by **Mark Yungblut** » Wed Jan 05, 2011 3:54 pm

When I worked for Kenner we had a Vac machine which was nice but best for large products. Normally we made plugs out of wood. If it was a piece in the round we would use industrial double sided tape to tape the wood together and carve so that it came apart in two nice halves. We had a nice table with a fine grid of 1/16" holes for the air and a large wet/ dry shop-vac as the vac source.

We would then duct tape styrene to a 1"x2" frame and heat the plastic with a heat gun. It took some practice but the gun is nice as once you do the pull you can go in (with the vac on) and soften the styrene to get it snug in areas where it did not pull down all the way.

The heat gun doesn't cause as much fuming as slow heating in the oven does.

When I worked there I found the original plug for the Awing preprod study model and pulled myself two hulls

Mark

Bar · Post by **Bar** » Wed Jan 05, 2011 3:57 pm

Mark Yungblut wrote:When I worked there I found the original plug for the Awing preprod study model and pulled myself two hulls
Mark

You still got them? Did you build them?

Mark Yungblut · Post by **Mark Yungblut** » Wed Jan 05, 2011 4:01 pm

They are on my to build list...

Bar · Post by **Bar** » Wed Jan 05, 2011 4:06 pm

Mark Yungblut wrote:They are on my to build list...

Lol. Post pics of them!