Building a Vacuum form machine

After studying Adam’s design I have begun to sketch out the design.

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30 day project in the works

A post shared by Travis Clay (@ithinkicanfixthis) on Oct 25, 2020 at 1:05pm PDT

I believe that I have figured out that the most common types of materials I’m going to attempt to use is styrene, and PETG (as it is food safe). I have also found that sheets of each are readily available in 12x15 inch sheets, so I will make the frame and the machine to fit that size sheet.

In researching how I wanted to construct this machine I found 4 videos that really shaped my understanding of what I wanted to make:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gx66mS7U2vY The above video is on a small scale machine that is geared for a “make it work out of other things already laying around” vibe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gx66mS7U2vY In that video the same guy - Bill from punished props, shows how to make a larger, more permanent setup for vacuforming in a shop. Still not quite what I want to go for. I have a decent sized shop, but I don’t think the vacuform will be an every day use, and I would prefer for it to be portable so my art teacher friend could use it if he wanted to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cacr1WeKOzY In this one, Adam savage shows off his large vacuform machine, and gave some nice insight, however this was too large for easy transport again, but he did mention his smaller one…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsXLGT5N2uo&t=2s Perfection, here Adam not only uses his smaller vacuform machine, but also does a deep dive and repair on it. This was the golden find I was looking for. I’m going to set out to replicate this machine from Adam, with some minor modifications based on what I have and can acquire.