How to Make a Larger Vacuum Former | I Like To Make Stuff

hey I'm Bob and I like to make stuff today we're gonna make a bigger vacuum former over five years ago on this channel I made my first build video and it was for a small vacuum former don't go watch that video it's pretty awful but now it's time to make a better one in a bigger one there's a bunch of different ways to make these and a lot of people have made them so if what I'm gonna do doesn't work for you there's plenty of options out there I'm gonna use this $50 space heater this is made to hang in a garage or a shop and I think it's gonna work great here because it puts out about 1500 watts of heat for the vacuum of the system I'm gonna use a shop vac like I used back in the day because it works perfectly fine and a lot of people already have them in their garages now in case you don't understand what a vacuum former is let me talk about that real quick people use a vacuum former for a process called thermal forming and basically you take a really thin piece of plastic like this you heat it up and get it hot and then you pull it down over an object you add a vacuum from the bottom and it sucks the hot plastic down around the object making a copy so that's what we're gonna do we're gonna make a big machine to copy other stuff this device is made out of basically two boxes you got a big one up top that holds the heating element and we're gonna put this up in there and then the one on the bottom has a bunch of holes in it so it can draw the vacuum down through it so I'm gonna make both of those boxes out of MDF and then mount this stuff in it [Music] I'm just pulling these out because we're not gonna need them and they're just kind of in the way I cut down several pieces of half-inch MDF to make these boxes the box is gonna be 12 by 24 inches and that's just a size I picked you could really do any size based on the heat source that you have also there's no particular reason to use MDF or half-inch it's just what I had around before we assemble the boxes that we have to drill a bunch of holes and two of these pieces one of these is going to be for the top above where the heating element goes and so we're gonna lay the heating element on here to figure out mounting holes and a hole for the power cord to pass through then on the other one for the vacuum box we have to drill a grid of a whole bunch of holes really close together and we're going to use the CNC to do both of these holes just for speed but you can totally do this with a hand drill and it would work exactly the same in the past a lot of people have asked me about making this grid with pegboard and that would work but by using that you get a bigger hole further apart we're going to do smaller holes closer together to get a more uniform vacuum surface we haven't made any mounting holes on the CNC yet so we use some double-sided tape to hold this down into place before cutting the holes [Music] after that piece was done I did a dry fit of the box to make sure all the pieces were cut correctly I pulled off the back panel and drilled a hole to match the size of the hose from the shop factory after I made sure that everything fit well I glued the whole box together with wood glue using Brad nails to hold it in place I didn't seal up all of the joints of this box but you certainly could do that if you wanted to make sure that it was airtight putting a bead of caulk around all these joints on the inside would be one way to do that I made sure to put lots of glue on all the surfaces which kind of seals up all the joints and I used a lot of Brad nails to make sure that all the surfaces were really pressed together while the glue dried if you did want to seal up the box this would be the time to do it before you put on the last piece you could put a bead of caulk around all of the inside seams before nailing on the top after that the bottom box was completely done set it aside and started putting together the frame for the top box we still had to cut the top piece on the CNC adding some vent holes for heat to escape and here again we're using the CNC for speed but you could totally do this with a router and get the exact same result got the boxes built all the holes cut and all that stuff and now it's time to mount the heater up in the upper box now the only thing I really have to do to make that happen is cut off some of this extra plastic that just makes it a little bit wider than it needs to be and then we're gonna mount it in that top section just it I used a cut-off wheel on a dremel to cut away this plastic you can see the smoke coming out of it it's pretty gnarly and it stinks make sure that you have good ventilation if you're gonna do this I pulled off the end cap of the here I needed to reroute the wire through the MDF box so I had to mark the wires that went together and then took off the wire nuts it ended up that these were soldered together and I cut them loose and it was a good thing I had them marked so I knew what went back together later after I got the wire pulled out I fed it back through the MDF top and then put everything back together into the casing and to put these back together I just stripped off the insulation with some wire strippers and then put the wires back together using wire nuts and just to be safe I wrap these with electrical tape to make sure that everything stayed where it should be after putting everything back together I set it on the top and then flipped it over into the box now the heater itself is a little bit deeper than the box that I made for it and that's kind of on purpose I wanted to make sure that I could get this apart so I've pre-drilled some holes and drove in some screws to hold this all together there's a bunch of different ways to mount the heater in the box I wanted to actually get it below the box a little bit so that all the heat comes out rather than goes up and heats the MDF if you can make this box out of metal grate that'd be even better but in this case I really can't so I'm gonna move this box up I've got it sitting on some spacers so that the entire face of the heater is below the box all the heats gonna come down from there so I'm gonna drive in some screws from the outside into the plastic housing to lock it in place I do want to point out really quickly that I drove those screws into very specific places I made sure that I put those into spaces where I knew there was no wiring and no electrical stuff behind there you definitely don't want to drill or screw into an area where there's wiring because you might strip on the wires and cause a short cause a fire that could be really bad I pulled the heater back out and then painted both of these boxes black with a couple of coats of scraping and while those were drying I started working on the brackets to hold the two boxes together the brackets are just four pieces of angled aluminum and I got this at the local home center you can cut thin aluminum with most woodworking tools so I cut these down to length with a miter saw on each one of these pieces I marked the depth of the boxes reference then I made two more marks for the screws we're gonna go and use the punch to make a little indention to start the drill bit in each one of those indentions I drilled a hole all the way through and then came back with the countersink bit to countersink it so that the screw head would sit flush I did the same thing to both sides of both ends of all four pieces it took a while but once I got off we're done I pushed each one all the way into the corner and made sure it was flush with the bottom before adding screws these are surprisingly secure with four screws on each one of the corners once I got all four pieces on I flipped it over onto the top piece and did the same thing we've got the Machine pretty much put together I think it's all ready to go now we got to make the frame to hold the plastic on the inside I'm gonna measure the inside of this just to make sure I have the dimensions right and then we're gonna cut some steel I used my metal cutting miter saw to cut down pieces of flat steel to make these two frames these need to lay flat on the top of the vacuum box so I lay them end to end not overlapping and edit a tack weld to get everything in place after they were tacked together I went back and did full welds okay so the battery in my helmet died there's a battery that makes the glass auto darken when the flash comes from the arc and that died so it doesn't really work so my eyes wouldn't be safe so I'm having to use an old school just cover which makes it almost impossible to see what I'm doing so this is really bad it would not be a good welding job for most other purposes but all this has to do is pull a really thin sheet of plastic [Music] [Music] I finished up making a second frame that matched the first one and then laid on some pieces to act as handles these are on the top frame and they do overlap but they're not gonna be in the way of anything [Music] and after I got all the pieces welded together I went back with a grinding disc to smooth out all the welds now it doesn't really matter if they're smooth anywhere except on the bottom frame and on the bottom of the top frame you want to make sure that these pieces are sitting as close together as possible and they sit flush against the top of the vacuum box [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] after I got those pieces pretty smooth it was time to make some wooden handles so I didn't get burnt by these metal ones I laid a piece of MDF on the metal handles and traced the out side profile then I set the depth of the bit on a small router and routed out the area where the metal would sit into the MDF [Applause] I stayed just inside the line to make sure that I had a nice tight fit once I got one finished I did the same thing on the other one I drew a line roughly half an inch outside this area that I'd cut out and then cut that out on the bandsaw [Music] and once I had those pieces cut out I traced them onto another piece of MDF and cut them out to match this is gonna sandwich around the metal and make a nice wooden handle that shouldn't heat up as much edit some CA glue and activator to get these pieces to bond really quickly and then use the belt sander to round over the edges and make them a little bit more comfortable to hold I suppose you could put some epoxy in these to make sure they stayed in place but mine fit tightly enough that they were gonna be fine I took the MDF off and sprayed these pieces black just to make them look a little bit cooler [Music] the paint on the frame is drying so we're gonna go ahead and make the mounting points on this to hold the frame in place I'm going to drive in two screws one on the front and one in the back right in the middle and that's so that I can use the 12 by 24 frame that I made or make a smaller frame for smaller material in the future I'm going to drive in this screw up to the right height and then put a rare-earth magnet on the end of it that way the metal frame can snap right onto it and when the plastic has heated up I can grab it and pull it right down [Music] I ordered some styrene to test this with but it didn't show up in time so instead we used some really thin plexiglass that we got locally for the first tests I put it in between the frame pieces and use some binder clips to hold the whole thing together [Music] I slid it up into the frame and quickly realized that two magnets was not going to be enough I decided to go ahead and add four more to make sure there was plenty of magnet surface to hold the frame into place most of these use a vacuum chamber the really high-end ones use a vacuum chamber you build up a vacuum and then when you press a button it sucks all the air out of this into that chamber and that creates the vacuum we're gonna use a shop vac it's not as strong but it should be pretty good for most of the stuff that I'm gonna use this for so I'm just gonna plug in I've got it on the highest setting and we'll see how long it takes for this plastic to start to droop it only took a couple of minutes for the plastic to start to droop but this isn't the right type of plastic so it didn't work also I realized that the binder clips were actually keeping the frame from the surface which meant that it couldn't actually seal on the table so I cut out some thin strips of EPA foam to make a gasket around the outside of the box [Music] now you spray adhesive to put down one layer all the way around making sure that it connected from corner of the corner so that it was as sealed as possible [Music] then I laid the binder clips into the places where I thought they would end up being and made a mark I cut some smaller strips of EBA foam to fill in the gaps in between those marks I figured it's not perfectly sealed but it would probably work better than no gasket at all I also went back and adjusted the height of each one of the magnets making sure that they were the same distance from the top [Music] so this is the first test we used Plexiglas because it was the only thing we had in the right size and it's a really brittle plastic abs or styrene will work a lot better and I'm actually waiting on that stuff to show up so we can do a proper test the heating element is only about half the full width of this thing and I knew that going into it and you can actually see it it heat it up in this section and not at all on the sides and this is not a big deal but you're just gonna have to work within the heated area so I can't do something that's actually 24 inches long I'm stuck with about maybe 8 or 10 inches in the middle that's why the only piece of styrene that I do have is actually too small it's 12 inches square and I put it in here but there's nothing supporting the sides of it so it's probably gonna droop all weird but I just want to try it [Music] but immediately after that test the delivery man showed up with the right material then it was time to try it for real [Music] I was really surprised with how much detail came out in the poll especially around the lens area so I decided to try some other things with a lot more detail specifically the Raspberry Pi turned out really really well and you can even see some of the screen printing on some of the pieces of the Raspberry Pi [Music] I'm going to try out this cookie jar and it's probably not going to work but when you vacuum form you should usually put something underneath the item that you're forming and that's called a buck now when I was using the Raspberry Pi earlier I just put some pieces of MDF underneath it and that's so that it gets formed past the object and then you can cut off the plastic to the actual shape that you want we're just going to try this just to see what happens [Music] this thing went surprisingly well I honestly did not think it would work and if you were just making a face mask for the front section this would have worked perfectly now there's a lot to learn about actually getting usable forms pulled from this thing there's a bunch of variables it depends on how much heat you have how far the heat is distributed how thick the material is how tall the thing is that you're forming so there's a lot to learn and a lot of practice is going to go into getting what you want out of a machine like this you have a bunch of different options here as far as vacuum and heat source I got a simple heater off of Amazon that I could just plug up in there but you can also buy individual heating elements and build it out to the size and shape and heat that you wanted it to be and obviously the more vacuum pressure you have at the bottom the better the pulls gonna be so there's a bunch of different things that you can play around with when you make your own I'd love to know what you think about this and what you would use a tool like this for let me know down in the comments I've got lots of other videos that you may be interested in check some of those out over there and don't forget to subscribe also I've got a second channel where we put behind-the-scenes stuff any time we travel there's a lot over there go check it out that's it for this one guys thanks for watching I'll see you next time I'm gonna use a $50 heater here and don't forget to success test we'll see you next time

Channel: I Like To Make Stuff

Views: 1,440,861

Keywords: vacuum former, prop making, vacuum, former, how to, how to make, larger vacuum former, vaccuum, vacume, mold making, plastic, diy, bob clagett, bob clagget, iltms, i like to make stuff, iliketomakestuff, electronics, 3D printing, woodworking, metalworking

Id: 9ynFpxokWlM

Length: 17min 41sec (1061 seconds)

Published: Thu May 24 2018