[MR] vacuum forming

[Solomon, Derrick]

actually you can vacuum form plastic of any thickness, even steel is vacuum
formed (or hydro-formed).  for armor all you need is 1/8" to 1/4" thick
polyethylene or abs which can easily be vacuum formed IF you have the rig to
do it.  setting the rig up is a little more tricky.  the rig on that website
looks pretty good and could be altered easily if you felt like going through
the whole process.  also, a commercial pizza oven would probably work better
than your standard home unit.

best of luck

logan

-----Original Message-----
From: atlantia-admin at atlantia.sca.org
[mailto:atlantia-admin at atlantia.sca.org]On Behalf Of Christopher Goodson
Sent: Monday, February 19, 2001 3:06 PM
To: merryrose
Subject: [MR] vacuumforming


The tips on heating the plastic are great, but I doubt the vaccuforming
would help us very much. I've never done thismyself, but I am familiar with
the technique from back when I did a lot of plastic modeling. A lot of
people design and build their own custom plastic models using vaccuforming.

The problem, I think, is that the .08 styrene that works well for
vaccuforming is far too thin for our purposes. Stormtroopers armor must be
great against blasters, but the Atlantian army could could probably smash a
whole Death Star worth of stormtroopers if they were wearing armor made of
this stuff.

Also, having made plastic armor (and using some of it still), I can say that
it is much easier to heat barrel plastic in the manner described on this
site and then hammer and dish it almost as if it were steel. All you need is
a dishing tool or a nice depression in some sand (an anvil would help too).
you can even do knee and elbow cops. Plastic may be kind of ugly when
finished, but it's a lot more forgiving than working with steel.

William of Faleston

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