[Adastra]

Hey all, I've been lurking in the shadows on here for some time, mainly reading and bookmarking projects for reference for my own project which is now becoming a reality.

History;
I've been costuming with a charity group here in the UK for a few years, and about 18 months or so ago I decided to go a bit mad and do some huge GB projects. I sold my daily drive and bought a white Volvo 940 estate which got converted over about a month or so and is now my daily drive [I'll pop up a separate post about this in the Ecto forum] and was also my wedding car back in April.

I built slime blowers for the now Wife and I for a big event with the charity group and unveiled the car at that event [i'll do a quick post about the blowers too later].

I'm lucky to have found a brilliant girl who's also a fan ... even to the extent she was super excited to receive a KUD I built her for he birthday last year anywho ...

The project in hand;
As I'm building 2 (and given I roll with another 6 or so, probably more in time) I decided I wanted to explore vac-forming. I'm an engineer and have experience of working with all sorts of materials from other costume projects and hobbies over the years, but I've never got round to building a vac-forming machine which I've wanted to do for ages.
There's no deadline date for these, but I have set aside a few hours a week and every other weekend till Christmas to try to tackle the bulk of the forming bucks.

I'll post progress photo's and details of how I'm modifying Stephan's plans to account for vac-forming them as I go.

I'll keep this post as a quick reference/contents list for future posts.



Catch you later,

Tim

[Venkman's Swagger]

Awesome pics mate. Can't wait to watch this project unfold

[Adastra]

So the majority of the progress so far has been on the synchronous generator, I've put an album up ... https://imgur.com/gallery/edC3u ... but I'll talk through the key bits.

Building the buck for forming mainly out of what I have leftover from other projects which is mostly mdf and a big sheet of 5mm ply.



Reduced external dimensions by 1.25mm all round. I'll be forming from 1.5mm HIPS so allowing for stretch 1.25mm seemed about right.

Copying that to my baseplate you can see the double lines of the rest of what will be the lower mould.



Many ... many hours/days/about 2 weeks later we get to this, all the basics done for the external walls. Though I brought the external outline in to account for the HIPS thickness you don't change the heights.



I placed small bits of wire under each segment and only glued in spots rather than right across areas. This is to leave small air passages for vacuum, we'll I hope that works anyway.



Gap is less than a mill at the widest here.

I also made all the edges very very slightly off vertical, by about half a mill or so ... hopefully you can see that here ...



Then it was just edge matching and filling or sanding to make the top fit perfectly...



And in the case of the curved top section a lot of filling.


As I'm building the vacuum table solely for this project I plan for the baseboard to fit directly into that table. So I cut a bug hole inside for the vacuum to apply evenly thru all those gaps I left.



Almost done, lastly I'm planning (and have finished but you'll have to wait for that...) to have the cyclatron as a separate mould so I did lots of calculating and double checking and added this to the top of the buck. When moulded the ring will give a surface that will perfectly (I hope) match with the inside of the cyclatron moulding allowing for connection. The X is for improved rigidity.



You may also notice the .75mm holes drilled around the brace piece.

That's it for now, I'll carry on and update when I get further.

Tim