Vacuum Forming is Incredible! FORMART 2 Review

this is the my art format ii and it's the first vacuum format i've covered on the channel vacuum forming is a fantastic technology you should be aware of it allows you to form thin sheets of plastic into complex shapes that are lightweight and strong and this video i'm discussing the machine its pros and cons how the technology works and a much cheaper alternative should you want to try vacuum forming at home let's get started [Music] how's it going guys angus here from makers muse as i mentioned this is a vacuum for machine the form art 2 is on kickstarter right now and before i go into the rest of the video i want to put a disclaimer out there saying that this is a pre-production unit that i've been sent free of charge for purpose of review and testing and because the project is a kickstarter it's not the same as a pre-order you don't have the same sort of protections on that platform so back at your own risk i'm not responsible for what should happen with the campaign and the unit i'm reviewing in this video may well be different to what you eventually get from the kickstarter campaign because as i said it's pre-production but with that said what is vacuum forming anyway well technology is quite simple and quite old but has its own special rules that you need to be aware of to get good results so how it works is you have a sheet of plastic that is heated up with a heater to become soft and pliable then you have a master or a buck or a form these terms are all pretty much interchangeable and you put it underneath the sheet of plastic and a sheet of plastic is sucked over that form and a vacuum pulls it into every detail of that shape and then the plastic cools and is released and what you end up with is a near perfect copy of the original shape and the real value add of this technology compared to 3d printing is the fact that you have a huge range of plastics to choose from and the final result is really thin and lightweight but way stronger than a 3d print of the same size ever could be because it's a uniform sheet of plastic and also they can be clear and i mean really really clear we'll be talking more about that later on the video and like 3d printing vacuum forming has its own set of rules and challenges that you need to be aware of when you're making masters and copies for them to succeed for example you have the draw depth that's how far the plastic can stretch over a shape and most importantly you have the overhangs it's very similar to injection molding in a way that you need draft angle that is a slight angle where the parts can release and pull away from the mold and if you don't have that well they just become permanently stuck together you have a little bit of leeway with the flexibility of the plastic but really three to five degrees is a safe amount of draft angle to ensure the parts release cleanly so what could a vacuum former add to your workshop capabilities well these machines are perfectly suited for batch manufacturing and a certain set of tasks that other things just can't do very well for example these are fantastic at making molds because the thin plastic can be formed over a shape that shape can be very quickly replicated it's much faster than pouring up a silicon mold to try to copy something if the shape's simple enough they can just form a sheet of thin plastic over it in a couple of minutes it's also a lot cheaper so a really cool example of why vacuum forming is quite powerful i was at a prop shop and they had a sci-fi set and they needed to have hundreds of dials because they had this really complicated like workstation they needed to make hundreds and hundreds of dials really quickly because prop shops have really quick turnaround times so they had a dial from an oven that they copied on a vacuum forming machine they formed it then they got the mold and they made like eight or ten or so copies out of plaster quick set plaster then they got those copies put them back in the vacuum forming machine and made another mold but this time it had those cavities of the 10 copies then they made several of those copied you know back to back it's only a few minutes per sheet to pull it over and make a new mould then they use those molds to make hundreds of replicas so they went from one to hundreds in just a couple of days using only a few bucks of plastic and some cheap plaster with this machine you can make molds you can make forms you can make packaging it's not going to be as fast as mass production with automation and that sort of thing but for a small shop you can make a lot of things very quickly with just one vacuum forming machine okay but enough about technology what about the form art 2 from mayard well this machine arrived in a huge package and was very well boxed even for a pre-production unit now it did arrive fully assembled but i believe when you back the campaign like with naomi's one you will get a machine that needs to be assembled with these rods to put it all together and that just means the shipping is a little bit cheaper but really that looked pretty simple overall though it's a very very sturdy machine and weighs quite a lot as well i would recommend two people just because it's a bit bulky and awkward to manipulate it into place and the reason it weighs so much is that this machine actually has the vacuum pump and system built into it which is different to a lot of the cheaper hobbyist level vacuum formers in that they're just a heater system that needs an external vacuum system to make them work and a lot of them will use a shop vac which do work pretty well but they can't really achieve the same level of suction that a dedicated vacuum pump can the max forming area is 19.7 by 12 inches which is about 500 by 305 millimeters but keep in mind because of the way the plastic forms over shapes you can't go right to the edges it just doesn't work like that and they say there's a maximum draw depth of 160 millimeters again you'd have a bit of leeway plus or minus from that depending on your shape that's a good idea to gauge what sort of shapes you can form with this machine but the thing with vacuum forms is if you have a large sheet area and you only have a small object to copy you end up with all this wasted plastic which is you know a bit of a shame so what i do like about the format is that it actually has these removable plates that you can actually change the sheet area and fix smaller sheets into it and only use a small portion of that total area if you don't want to waste a huge amount of plastic for a much smaller form the format ii is branded as a smart vacuum format and that's very much in line with the smart laser cutters and other sort of industrial machines we're starting to see these days that take a lot of the manual processes and make them into automated routines in an attempt to make it easier for the end user and the format 2 does this with a built-in library of heat and temperature and timing settings as well as the vacuum settings for different types of material and it detects material with this qr code on the corner of the provided sheets now you don't have to use their sheets i'll be very clear here you can use any plastic you like as long as it's safe to use on a vacuum forming system you don't have to use their material but if you do it scans its qr code in the corner and it will automatically change the heat up time the temperature and everything to do with the vacuum settings to try to get the optimum result possible and it works really quite well the area where you fix the sheets is quite well designed and very user friendly a lot of diy systems use bulky clips or g-clamps and that sort of thing to lock the plastic in place this system actually just has two wheels with a nice locking uh sort of cam lock system that securely holds the sheets in place and during my test i haven't had any sheets pop free from those edges and ruin the vacuum seal which is pretty cool and when you have the sheet in place you want to move it up to the heater to do a preheat and it moves up and locks in place awkwardly very awkward to do from this angle locks into place with magnets the heating element in the system is a carbon fiber element i don't know too much about heating elements and why that's better but they're saying it's a perk either way it's very very effective and very uniform heating but also gets ridiculously hot and i'll talk more about the dangers of this sort of system in a environment with children later the top mostly stays cool which is good um so that's actually means the heat doesn't radiate too much at the top but let's talk about these magnets now it looks into place for the preheating with magnets but when you pull it down uh it's really quite awkward uh you have to really push to break those magnets free and because of the way these rods these little rods have a bit of play in them you can see when i'm trying to move it up like you really have to try to keep it uniform otherwise it binds up there's just a bit too much play in the system there and you have to be really finessed with moving it up to lock it in place and when you pull it down you have to use a lot of force and often more force than i expected and then you have to push it down onto the form i would have preferred a latch i'll be honest i would have preferred something where it's near the uh the wheels that you hold on to where you just push a latch and then it's free to go down and then you can push it down because the magnets break away at an unexpected at an unexpected point and then some as you violently push it down a bit more than you wanted with the machine they've included this demo form to help you learn how vacuum forming works and i will say that it's quite an ambitious form for a newcomer to vacuum forming because it has very shallow draft which makes it hard to remove from the sheet sometimes the ears are quite sharp which can leave little crinkles even even though they include a webbing remover in the box it's very very sharp in those corners which can lead to the the sheets uh crinkling up um and it has this this bold center apart which i found very unusual that they included this little nose that was clipped into it because with vacuum forming the vacuum has to get into all areas so imagine if you have a bowl and the sheet seals over the top the vacuum can't reach inside the bowl so you need little vent holes at the bottom of that to really suck it down and i found it odd that included this little nose for seemingly no purpose to demonstrate that you need the holes but i didn't even know the holes were there and started trying to drill it out so this is pre-production they're going to be adding stuff to the manuals already passed on my thoughts on this demo form the way to find the machine like this if you don't test your own objects to form so here's what i've done i've got a huge range of stuff all around me this room's a tip but i'll show you some of my favorite pools so one of the first things i grabbed in the workshop was just a wrench i was looking for something i didn't have too many undercuts and something i can remove from the plastic and it worked way better than it should have this is the 0.5 millimeter hips high impact polystyrene and this is a quite a common vacuum forming material but you can see the the cat bowl that's before i removed the nose that was built into it it didn't form into the cavity all the way however when i test it later on with those vent holes exposed you can see it just really pulls in nicely and gets a really nice form but again there's a few little crinkles in the ear because it's quite sharp in that area next up i wanted to try to clear 0.5 millimeter pet that myart provided and this sort of thing is perfect for molding specifically i wanted to try chocolate molds because it's something i haven't really done before and i've always wanted a custom chocolate maker coin so the clear ptg was just as easy to use as the hips but i will note that because i was using a smaller portion of the bed i found that it was there was like a small air leak with the suction and i had to push down really really hard to get the best results i could out of this smaller sheet area instead of using the whole machine but these results are really really good i intentionally printed my forms with quite rough layer heights like 0.3 millimeter layer heights because i want to see that texture come through into resulting mold and then resulting chocolate i think it'd be really interesting to have chocolate looks like it's 3d printed but actually it's just pulled from a mold i'll be making a second video on the whole chocolate maker coin process with how i designed this coin to be able to be pulled out of the mould cleanly and how the melting and forming process went full disclosure i have no idea what i'm doing in the kitchen so it was a bit of a disaster but look out for that in future polypropylene there's another material you can vacuum form but it's uh not the best in my experience for vacuum forming it tends to stretch in weird unpredictable ways and i had to heat it up more than i would have liked so these pools were done on the advanced settings they didn't have oranges of color so i just chose red you know whatevs this was just a bowl i put underneath it and i don't think the sheet was hot enough and i think it might have been a bit too aggressive in terms of how far i wanted it to go so it's got some pretty aggressive stretching and crinkles there and the cat bowl i heated up a bit more and it did a pretty good job but again the unpredictable stretching material means it's quite thin here and actually almost blew through where the vent hole is so this is 0.8 millimeter thick polypropylene which um it's quite thick but when it stretches again it doesn't stretch very uniformly at least in my experience so i would limit your polypropylene vacuum forming to more gradual curves at least that's what i would expect to get off this machine so it's pretty obvious that vacuum forming is fantastic for making molds or creating fairly decorative objects but what if you want something really tough well it's a material called polycarbonate that is a really tough plastic it's actually known often colloquially is like bulletproof plastic it can be at the right thicknesses it looks like acrylic but it's nowhere near as brittle and i really wanted to know if i could vacuum form polycarbonate on the system and the first test was really really promising but look at those bubbles this is 0.8 millimeter thick polycarbonate and just like a lot of 3d printing filaments it absorbs moisture from the air that then bubbles away as a sheet is heated so what you need to do is dry those sheets just like you need to dry your filament for 3d printing if it's got moisture in it and i was super happy to see is actually a built-in dehumidification setting in this machine so what you do is you lock the sheet in place and raise it up to the heater heats up to around 70 degrees or celsius or so and then just sits there for a while and then you end up with a dry sheet and this is what it looks like afterwards i am so stoked with this result the form is so good it's better than the polypropylene pulls it's so clean and it's thick it's 0.8 millimeter polycarbonate it's uh it's tough it's really tough i don't know about the uv resistance of polycarb when you vacuum form it polycarbonate's not great in uv light it does go brittle and yellow but using something like this for a remote control car shell or a regulator boat hull or a small like ant weight combat robot chassis the the opportunities are endless and it is water clear so if you wanted to make a dome for something like a for cosplay for like an eye or something it's really really clear as long as your form is perfectly clean because it will copy any blemish and texture onto itself when it's vacuum formed a question i'm sure many of you are asking is can i use pla 3d prints as forms or masters on a vacuum forming machine like this and the answer is yes and no it's not really clear-cut so again with these mecha coins i have two in pla and one in abs the abs by far is the cleanest and that's because the temperature resistance is much higher in abs with the ones in pla i have one with thin walls that's a peewee and i have one with thicker walls printed with a 0.8 millimeter nozzle the one with the thin walls printed with a 0.4 millimeter nozzle and sparse infill collapsed and that's because the sheet is warm enough to instantly transfer that temperature into the pla and even though it's only in contact for a couple of seconds before that that vacuum is released it's enough to sink the form down and ruin it and that was just after one pull in the 0.5 millimeter pet if you wanted to go any thicker any sort of hotter material that keeps its heat longer it would have been worse and worse and worse with the print done with the 0.8 millimeter nozzle it used a substantially larger amount of pla filament and it did survive but you can clearly see it's getting shiny on the surface because it is still slightly forming that pla as it softens with that vacuum and the sheet over the top so if you're okay with just one single pool you could get away with a densely printed pla object depending on the geometry but i would recommend printing in abs or petg for that higher temperature resistance i did see in naomi's video which i'll link here she was recommended to soak the pla prints in ice water but there's no way i'm going to try that because it was leaking out everywhere and that just seems like such a hack to try to make pla to work i would say if you really really can't print in a high temperature material i'll print a thin layer of pla and then fill it up with plaster because that will give the pla support even if it melts a bit it'll stop it collapsing entirely like this one did where you can clearly see the infill and where it's collapsed something to be aware of with vacuum forming is the amount of waste plastic that you end up with now unfortunately because of the technology in the way it works you have a sheet that you put down and then you form it over your object and you turn away the excess you can't really escape the fact that you'll end up with bits of material like this that you can't do much with because even though i haven't used this bit of the sheet it's been heated up and it's been deformed and this at least in australia basically just goes in the bin and into landfill we don't have a good plastic recycling system it's a real real shame i i really really wish we were better but we don't um and especially weird plastics like polycarbonate here so that's something to be aware of you will end up with a lot of scrap plastic that you can sometimes use for other applications but it's not going to be as nice to use as just virgin sheets that haven't been heat damaged and deformed now let's talk about price the part everyone wants to know about how much is this machine and is it worth it and what other alternatives are on the market well it's pretty expensive i would put the format 2 at the upper edge of the proshumer space for maker equipment currently on the kickstarter the early bird price is 1800 us which is pretty high but they're saying the retail price will be three thousand dollars u.s which is very high for a machine especially if it's a niche sort of thing like vacuum forming maybe in your workshop now there is other alternatives on the market i'm listing a few here and they are often cheaper because they're smaller or because i don't have a vacuum system built in but they're a little bit more affordable they may not have the same smarts which is where sort of the value add comes back to this sort of machine but the price is lower but having said that this is nowhere near as expensive as industrial level vacuum forming machines they easily go up to ten thousand dollars plus depending on the size and capabilities those machines though use a different approach to the sheet heating and forming which in my sort of opinion is better what they'll do is they'll actually have a heater that slides over the sheet and the sheet will be warmed up but the actual form will be underneath and raised up into the sheet and what they'll do is they'll actually inflate that heated sheet to form like a bubble they'll raise the form up into that bubbled area and then they'll use a vacuum to suck that heated plastic over the shape those machines are obviously much larger more complicated mechanically and they're much more expensive but they in my opinion will give you a more uniform consistent result than this approach but again this machine has the qr code and smart so i can see it being useful in say a university environment where students can come and buy a sheet of plastic then put on the machine and the machine will automatically scan what that plastic is and they'll get better results than just blindly trying to choose settings and either melting or burning the plastic or not getting a successful pull but what if you want to try vacuum forming and you have no budget well you can make one yourself this is the suck boy 5000 it's my diy vacuum forming table and build around over at punish props has a really good tutorial on making something like this i've used a perforated fiberglass sheet from an old 3d printer but you can just use some thin ndf with holes drilled in it you put your form on this box and you attach a shop vac to the outlet and then you heat your sheet of plastic either in us in an oven or i just used a hot air gun heated up in a frame that's securely clamped in the corners with some aluminium brackets then you form it over your shape with the shop back on and honestly you can get some really good results with a cheap diy solution like this this is the pool i got from the cat mold of my own diy vacuum former this is the one i got from the my art format ii so you can clearly see that you get more detail on this system with the suction i think because shop facts aren't really designed to create really good vacuums so there's not as much on the diy one but for many many applications that would be acceptable and more than good enough for diy packaging and your own home moulds but if you want a really really crisp result you do need a better vacuum system which is where something like this machine is definitely going to come into play finally i just want to touch on safety as i mentioned this machine gets really really hot even though the smart features are clearly aimed at sort of an educational environment i don't think this machine is suitable for children at all because of the exposed heating element here when the machine is on it's just too dangerous for curious fingers to come in and touch something and it's a huge surface area that gets very hot it's not like a 3d printer with just a small nozzle which again i don't really recommend open frame 3d printers to environments with curious fingers and small children it's a bit too dangerous but i can see a teacher being able to use it and the value-added features of having the qr code choose the settings for you might be very valuable in an education setting and as i mentioned in a university you'd think like a 20 year old would have a bit more common sense than to stick their fingers in and if they do it's kind of on them so i can see it being very useful in a university maker space where again you could have the sheets behind the shop and you just sell them a sheet they come do their form and then they go on to do the rest of their project with minimum uh intervention from the actual shop managers if you'd like to check out the format to this link below in the video description to their kickstarter campaign again reminded that it's a kickstarter campaign and that this machine was sent to me free of charge and it's a pre-production unit for me to just provide my unbiased feedback and this video if you found this video useful to maybe consider subscribing because i will be using this machine to do all sorts of stuff starting with my chocolate maker coins and again i don't know much about cooking and melting chocolate turns out is like really really complicated so look out for that video coming soon either way guys i look forward to seeing you again very shortly here on maker's muse catch you later bye

Channel: Maker's Muse

Views: 165,500

Rating: 4.92202 out of 5

Keywords: 3d, printing

Id: -AAgM6n0tRw

Length: 21min 46sec (1306 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 21 2021