Morphen Jar
New Hunter
:angry Hey I could do it! I'm more carful than that! But all !12 year olds are under estimated.:love 
Any tips for molds
- Thread starter Morphen Jar
- Start date
MandoMan
Active Hunter
I don't think careful is the issue here. The big one would be do you have experience? As in experience with potentially dangerous power tools and access and knowledge of safety equipment to use against dust and fumes. I'm a careful person, but does that mean I want to dive right into foundry work, dealing with molten hot metals without experience? Nope.
Morphen Jar
New Hunter
Im pretty expeirienced and im smart.:love
Morphen Jar
New Hunter
Fine
Morphen Jar
New Hunter
Now no ones talking to me cause im twelve. You'll all see! You'll all see! Im gonna make some kick butt armor. Then you'll all see!:angry :love
GrottyFurball
Active Hunter
atleast he's not trolling
And just so you know morphen, you don't NEED to vacuum form armor. you can use other materals and just bend them with hot water. You might even be able to get a member here kind enough to cut you some.
Morphen Jar
New Hunter
How would you bend it into something?:love
Morphen Jar
New Hunter
or wait you put it in hot water and then suck it onto the mold?8)
GrottyFurball
Active Hunter
no, cut it out and bend it to the shape after warming it in hot water, use sintra. it's a cheap form of armor that will just be upgraded anyway. I think there is a member on this board that makes armor that should be about your size. do a search for it.
Morphen Jar
New Hunter
you mean bend it with your hands:facepalm
GrottyFurball
Active Hunter
Not unless you have highly skilled feet.
CombatBaby
Well-Known Hunter
Hahahaha,
Anyways, given that you are 12, I don't know if explaining the process of building the vacc oven and the forming table are such a great idea. You are better off like the others say heating up sintra somehow and forming it that way.
To Tuba,
The forming table if you're interested in the cheapest piece. It just takes awhile to construct. I made mine out of wood, mdf, steel, and vaccuum attachments. The box is made out of wood with mdf reinforcements. The forming surface is a sheet of mdf with steel on the top. Then I measured out a grid of squares every inch. Holes are drilled at every intersection (this is where most of the time is spend making it
). The bottom houses the vaccuum attachments. This site is good for showing how to make the oven http://www.tk560.com/vactable4.html, otherwise you could also just make a hardibacker cement board box and put a grill in it or some heating elements if you don't want to wire an oven with nichrome wire and ceramic posts.mdfs I'm going to start by are some of the best molds. I've used plaster, insulation, clay, and resin/fiberglass but i still get the most pulls from mdf molds. Plus they are super easy to repair. All you have to do is sand them a bit and smooth them off with bondo if you start getting damage to them.
Most of it is covered on the tk site if you have other questions
-=QuinN!
tubachris85x
Well-Known Hunter
yea, Ive been using his site for awhile now actually. Im just trying to figure out what I want to make it out of. I think I may go with makinng the molds out of MDF, but then I would need to get some better tools, LOL my little dremel can get me only so far. Its seems pretty self explanitory on how to do molds from it, stack layers of the general piece's shape, and stack those pieces until you get it tall enough to sand off and shape. Seems alot easier then doing the sculpting, plastering and then having to cast again. Fortunatly, one of my buddies who's making stormtrooper armor has a vacu-form machine, and a "**** load" of polycarbonite sheets he has left over from something he said having to do with cars. He says he was wondering if we could make the armor casts out of that, but I dont know much about polycarbonite. Thanks guys.
-tubachris
-tubachris
It's not clear to me that using lots of boiling water and massaging the boiling-hot plastic with your hands is safer than vacuum forming it.
Baking plastic isn't much more dangerous than baking cookies, except for the fumes. With good ventilation, it should be safer than what people usually do with sintra. (Especially if they use a heat gun. Now that's a scary tool.)
To Tuba,
The forming table if you're interested in the cheapest piece. It just takes awhile to construct. I made mine out of wood, mdf, steel, and vaccuum attachments. The box is made out of wood with mdf reinforcements. The forming surface is a sheet of mdf with steel on the top. Then I measured out a grid of squares every inch. Holes are drilled at every intersection (this is where most of the time is spend making it
If you can get by with a 12 x 18 or 12 x 20 oven, you don't need to do any of this.
You can make a decent 12 x 20 oven out of a 2-burner hot plate and some disposable aluminum pans, for around $30, and you don't have to do any wiring. (You don't have to modify the hot plate at all, except maybe to remove end caps.) The most dangerous part is cutting the thin aluminum pans---thick aluminum foil can give you a nasty "paper cut"---but it's skill level 1 if you're careful with your tin snips:
http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=621858
If you use a portable electric grill and make an over-and-under (top heater) machine sorta like Ralis Kahn's, you also don't have to build a hardibacker box---just turn the grill upside down, put it on stilts, and put an aluminum flashing skirt around it. (Again the most dangerous part is cutting thin aluminum.) That's skill level 2, maybe. (The only electrical wiring you need to do is to open up the thermostat gadget and clamp it closed with a nylon wire tie.)
Here's Ralis Kahn's design:
http://www.halloweenfear.com/vacuumformintro.html
Here's a thread about it you should read over at tk560.com if you're considering something like that:
http://www.tk560.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=390
(One nice thing about hot plates and portable grills is that the electrically live heating elements aren't exposed... the steel jacket on the calrod element is electrically neutral.)
Which raises the question... how big a vacuum former do you need? What are the biggest dimensions of your armor pieces?
(I'm building a 2 x 2 foot nichrome wire oven myself, because I do want a big one and am comfortable with electrical wiring. But people shouldn't overlook the easier smaller possibilities.)
-=QuinN![/QUOTE]
Morphen Jar
New Hunter
does the Vacuum Forming table have 2 tables? Like one has the big hole where the vacuum hose goes and another Piece of wood on top of that with a bunch holes in it?:love
SaxeCoburg
Active Hunter
Dude, kid, you need to take some serious advice here… While I can fully appreciate your eagerness to learn and build in this hobby. This is an adult’s game. It takes a lot more than just saying “I want to build this….” To make this happen. There are good reasons that it is against the law to drive a car until you are 14-15 and even than it’s under the watchful guidance of an adult. The same holds true for the tools and techniques we use in this hobby. I’ve had friends cut their fingers off, light them selves on fire and in general do a great deal of physical damage to themselves doing what you are asking about.
My advise to you is if you want to learn more about this subject, or anything that adults do, go and ask your parents and that’s the bottom line.
(wait… for it…. Wait… for it…. :love :love :love Hehehe!)
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That's a good way to do it.
If you're only making one piece at a time, having a zillion holes does you zero good. One big hole in the middle of the platen works at least as well, as long as you put your mold up on spacers. (Which you should do anyway, because as soon as the plastic is mostly sucked down, all the holes further out are covered up, and the only ones that do you any good are the ones under your mold. At that point, one big hole works better than a zillion small ones.)
If you need to distribute the vacuum across multiple molds, you can put something on top of the platen that lets air travel from around all the molds, under them, and to the big hole.
A lot of people just put a piece of aluminum windowscreen down, so that there's a little space under the plastic that air can get through. That's a little thin, though, and there can be bottlenecks. I have a chunk of pegboard board with thin wooden spacers under it that I can put down across the big hole, and put multiple molds on top of that.
That's roughly how a lot of industrial machines work. One big hole, and if you need to distribute vacuum across multiple molds, you just put a vacuum-distributing layer on top of it. It's not built in.
Having a bunch of holes is a little bit worse than useless if you want to mask off part of the platen for forming small sheets of plastic. It just makes more holes you have to cover up.
With one big hole, you can tape down sheets with different-sized gaskets on them. (Having a bunch of holes doesn't make this a lot harder, as long as they're not too close to the edge---you can just make each tape-down sheet almost the size of the platen. But that does mean you have a somewhat bigger edge you have to make sure is sealed.)
Paul
I have never heard of anybody cutting off a finger or setting themselves on fire by vacuum forming.
I fail to see how this is so all-fired dangerous.
The kind of vacuum former I'm talking about does not even require the use of power tools to build. (You can get by with a hand-cranked drill and a hand saw, no problem, if you have somebody at the hardware store cut the main board to size for you, which they'll do for free.)
I was taking shop class and using a table saw when I was 12. This is nowhere near that dangerous.
I'm not talking about building a Thurston James oven, though. There you're dealing with 120V electricity and exposed conductors. That I wouldn't let my kid do... no, actually, I would. I just wouldn't let them plug it in until I'd inspected it. And I might cut the backer board to size for them, which takes about 10 minutes. Everything else, a responsiblee 12-year-old should be able to do just fine.
Paul
SaxeCoburg
Active Hunter
Just trying to be a good citizen man… :rolleyes
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