hey everybody adam savage here in my cave with a tool tip i am extremely
excited about also by the way you might notice that this video is not being shot on a phone
no a real camera is now filming me oh post covet it's starting to happen it's happening slowly
okay this is my vacuum former and i've covered this on the channel before this is my home built
12 by 16 inch vacuum former that i built about 20 plus years ago while fond davis and i were
first putting together our little shops in the mission and uh the excelsior of san francisco
and it's a great machine but it took me a while to put together require some expertise
and i had to do it that way because the the vacuum for machine i was copying to make this is both
insanely rare and when you can find it it's often well over a thousand bucks still the fact is small
discrete reasonably sized vacuum forming machines are still quite an expensive piece of kit for a
new model maker the reason i am having this tool tip right now is not to encourage you to build
your own vacuum for machine which you totally should do and you should check out our other video
which will be linked to in the comments below and you can build your own but if you don't want to
there is finally a much less expensive solution and i'm psyched about it i did a bunch of reading
online as to what people were doing for vacuum forming and i found a lot of reviews of this that
spoke quite highly of it this is a vacuum forming machine made for dentists for vacuum forming trays
for your pallets and things for your teeth that's why it's a discreet five by five inch bed here
it's a very small machine but it rings in at 120 bucks that's crazy cheap for
a vacuum farming machine so i was like let's get one let's try it out let's see how it does
and the results are pretty spectacular um i've got a couple of pieces here of a build i'm working
on and they're great example pieces of the kind of things vacuum forming is really great for
they are they have a flat side which is ideal for vacuum forming so you have it basically it's
sorry i'm getting ahead of myself in case you don't know what vacuum forming is it is a process
where you take a sheet of thermal plastic in this case styrene you put it in a frame and underneath
the heating element which softens the plastic and then you pull that plastic down over a form
and pull a vacuum and when you pull a vacuum there it is it sucks that hot plastic around
the form making a replica of that form you experience vacuum forming every day you deal
with a blister package that's how those are made using the vacuum forming process
you can vacuum form rounder objects this would be possible to vacuum form but you'd have to cut it
in half and add a draft to it and then once you've vacuformed both halves you cut them on the halfway
point and then glued them together often with a lip that is more advanced vacuum form technique
it's not what we're here to talk about i'm just here to run this through its paces and i've got
a sheet of thirty thousandths forty thousandths and sixty thousand styrene and i'm really curious
how these are gonna work for these two forms um they both have fairly a fairly significant
draft like there's a lot of pull so there's a lot of work to do for the plastic
i know it works for the 30 thousandths because that's the one i tested i'm
curious about the other two so here's how these work uh the heating element is in
here the vacuum's down here and you take a piece of your plastic and you clamp it in
clamped now this is something i really dig about this machine is it's roughly five by five inches
but you could do you could actually fit a six by six inch piece of styrene in here and it'll work
just fine um oftentimes vacuum forming frames can be really precise and specific and you like have
to get it right otherwise you don't get the vacuum you want it's just a pain in the ass
this is much much easier the element swings in and swings out which i also think is pretty great
and the um the frame holder has two positions there's one right close to the heating element
and then there's one about an inch down and i've actually been finding it works way better when
i have it an inch down um up here this heating element is too hot it actually starts to roast
the plastic even before it gets to the right uh tensile uh what do you call it the right softness
okay i feel like i've been talking a mile a minute i'm sorry i'm excited that's what's
happening is i just like i i'm so psyched to find such an important tool at such a reasonable price
so here are the forms we're going to vacuform this a little hexagon and this little ribbed
tube thing we put our 30 000 plastic in there we clamp it we turn on the heating element swing it
in and bring this up to first position it takes a while to heat up the first time sometimes five
six minutes but once it's warm cycling is faster it's a little warm right now
i know that five inches by five inches might not seem like a large enough vacuum form bed for you
but most if you're doing model making specifically like spaceships and and tanks and garbage trucks
and other things in in let's say train scales or model scales this is an ideal size you one thing
i can't stand is when i have to vacuform something this big and i got to pull this out and waste a 12
by 16 piece of plastic to get this tiny little shell this is perfect for those smaller jobs
plus it cycles really quickly i i think this is going to get a lot of play here
um i have noticed that as the heating element heats up the the top of this gets
cook your tea hot like it's you could cook with this thing um so i may end up adding some kind
of handle to be able to sort of put this away without uh without burning myself all right
like every vacufarmer as it heats up the plastic bows up for a second before
settling down and starting to droop um the rule of thumb for vacuum formers is you often want them to
droop about as far as your buck is high but with this one the vacuum is so powerful i'm actually
pulling it down a little bit earlier than that now that may change with the 40 and 60 thousandths but
for the 30 thou this heating element is so efficient it gets that plastic real soft
um i don't mean for this video to be a comprehensive video about vacuum forming
but i will tell you if you have difficulty with the plastic conforming all over the part that
you're forming you can dust it with cornstarch and that will provide hopefully a path for air to
continue that suckage until you receive the detail that you were looking for all right we're close
we're totally close i'm going to turn off the heat pull it down vacuum goes on and look at that dude
i know that was alarmingly quick but like check that
that's totally amazing all right let's pull this out
that right there i wished i'd had this device 20 years ago seriously i would have used the living
crap out of it um getting your buck back out of a vacuum form um is not hard it can be hard
but and for these two parts it's not going to be that difficult and they pop right out
and this one too
and there you go i have these two paper thin replicas of the parts
that i started with and that allows me to make models lighter it allows me to make many
iterations of something i might only have one part of it allows me places to fit electronics
and mechanics that almost no other process would yield a thin part to do and this is thirty thou
i tend in vacuum forming like this would be about the thinnest i'd ever try
i don't like working with styrene that's too thin if you make model airplanes
you probably do work with styrene that's much thinner than this um but i'm going to
do another pull with the 40 thou and with the 60 pound we'll take a look at the three of them
together
i really dig this arrangement for the table and it's a nicely
nicely designed little thing and it's just clearly what's here is a set screw with a balti tent in it
that aligns with that hole or that hole and gives you two different positions yeah that's great
i'm happy to say i've just done over this over today i've done several vacuum forms
and the base is not getting overly hot which i appreciate 40 thousandths here this is my
favorite thickness of styrene 40 thou is my bread and butter thickness it's yeah it's the
most versatile to me in terms of its flexibility and its rigidity it's the best balance balance
in general when you're about to pull a form it's good to turn
off the heating element as you turn on the vacuum so you don't blow your fuse
this thing blows the views every time i forget to do that all right you can see smoke rising
off and we're drooping just a little bit i think we're doing pretty good i am going to uh
yeah yeah you know here we go as soon as the droop drops a little bit more okay here we go
yeah look at that look at that at the very beginning of that form
you might have heard a little pop that actually was the plastic
inside the end of this piece here pulling in and popping and that's why i stuck my finger there
because this piece hadn't fully drawn to the bottom
of those channels and the moment i put my finger here the vacuum continued to pull
the plastic into that channel that is a nice powerful vacuum it's a terrific little machine
let's do the 60 towel
now this is going to go pretty quickly because the heating element was already warm and i'm going
to kind of ride it to make sure i don't get the plastic too hot i may actually add a third detent
below those first two to give myself a little more adjustability
yep see how it's smoking i don't want it to smoke
too much so now i'm lowering it a little bit to lower the heat
i'm just doing a little more heat adjustment all right so i think we're pretty close boy
yeah we're getting a real smoke point aren't we let's do it um heating element off this down back
there we go wow wow
okay you can color me surprised at the efficacy of this machine
wow my mind is kind of blown um on a normal vacuum former like this one you would notice
a significant difference in the conformity of the vacuum form between a 30 thou and a 60 thou pull
um that is to say the 60 thou is it's a lot more plastic to have to move into the interstices of
the part that i'm molding here and thus i should expect to see my final form be a little bit softer
with the thicker plastic because the former has to do more work to conform that plastic around
my buck i'm not seeing that here i'm actually seeing that the vacuum former is oh well it's a
little hard to get this part out hold on that's actually yeah come on come on there we go okay
so this is 30 thou this is forty thou this is sixty thou and i don't know about you but i can't
really see much of a difference it's a little bit crisper here on the 30 than the 60 but not a lot
um they sell plastic for this i would tend not to buy it because i don't know how to work with their
dental plastic with model making but styrene works beautifully in it and you can pick this up
almost anywhere black white i'm still trying to find colored styrene but someday um again
i would recommend this for any young model maker any modeler beginning out anybody setting up their
first shop anybody who doesn't have a vacuformer and thinks they might need one man there's a new
sheriff in town and it costs 120 bucks and i'm just blown away by it i i love this bit of kit
uh well thank you guys for joining me for this tool tip i'm so excited about bringing vacuform
to the masses i mean it's not me it's just my recommendation but get the one of these formers
and vacuum form to your heart's content thank you guys for joining me i will see you next time
we didn't just film this vacuformer for this video we also filmed it in 3d
for the oculus and you can check it out by following one of the links below
to oculus tv and get a much more immersive experience of just why i love this machine