Hackaday: One of our favorite things about Hackerspaces is people tend to spend a lot of time building tools, or repairing/upgrading older ones. This is a case of the former. The vacuum former.
[Adam] wrote in to tell us about this vacuum forming machine which he and few other members built for FizzPOP, a hackerspace in Birmingham, England. The device is used to suck hot sagging plastic around a mold. This is accomplished in two parts, the vacuum table and the heating mechanism to put the sheet of plastic into that sagging state.
3 comments:
Okay I’ll admit that vacuum formers are the one of the coolest things to happen to casting, I mean think of the applications for this stuff. (Never mind, they already have!) I understand the easy part, the sucking the air out to form the plastic tight to the objects being cast, but the thing I don’t really understand is just how they get the plastic to melt evenly and not drip or cool unevenly. There’s probably a whole lot of science behind it and the explanation of the hot spots did help. But what kind of problems are they going to have a much larger scale if they attempted this? In the long run, what is this good for? Not commercial use, it can’t be replicated fast enough, home use? What would convince people to buy it? Artistic us is one thing, it would make theatrical mold casting easier I suppose, but is that really a large enough industry to make name in? I’m excited to see where this product goes; there are certainly some aspects of it that could be used if the drawbacks could be hurdled.
This is a really awesome thing that I would probably make in my garage, but not something I would want to rely upon when using vacuform for a scene shop. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an awesome DIY thing that you could do with your friends if you were prototyping something that needed vacuforming, but I’m skeptical that you could consistently provide the level of accuracy that a fabrication shop would. It’s simply outside the scope of what we do, at least what we do well and on a regular basis. Also, as a university, if we really wanted to provide the learning opportunity to students who are interested in vacuforming, then we would likely do something similar to the CNC mill or the laser cutter and purchase a unit and teach a class on how to use it properly. Again, I’m not trying to knock this amazing hack, but it’s more of a cheap replacement for something that can already be done, not how to do a new thing.
Vacuum Forming, kind of like 3D printing, is one of those almost magical fabrication process that without having to think about where the surfaces are or what operations you need to do to make a part, it just makes it. But yes, with out own vacuum forming machine, it is annoying that it is such a finicky and fragile process. While the parts that it makes are awesome, it is often really hard to manipulate the material into doing what you want it to do. I don’t know if this alternative heating method would really help with its ability to mold parts effectively, but if it does, it would be interesting to see in action. On another note, I really like the idea of hacker spaces. In Purnell, it seems like the closest thing that we have to a creative prototyping space is the PTM office, which leaves much to be desired.
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