the adventures of teapot the cat

Vacuforming is Fun!

Posted on January 3rd, 2006

“This procedure will help you construct a simple vacuforming device. With it, you’ll be able to fabricate plastic parts or make copies of of objects in plastic. Vacuum forming is a popular industrial process for manufacturing hollow, thin walled, plastic parts. In industrial units, a sheet of plastic is heated, usually by infrared lamps. This homemade vacuformer is made by using a piece of perforated circuit board as the platform, and a project box as the vacuum chamber. A heat gun is enough to melt most thing plastics, and a shop vac provides plenty of ’suck’.”

How many times have a wanted to vacuform something when working on some weird project or other! Well, this DIY vacuformer should do the trick for small projects. I wonder how far you can scale up this concept before the vacuum cleaner no longer provides enough suction. A good alternative for pre-drilled PCB board is that fiberboard stuff with holes in it… Here is a larger scale version DIY vacuformer by George Gassaway.

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