I would like to try to reproduce the piece displayed in the picture with acrylic. I can easily enough cut it out with the laser cutter. Does anyone have any great ideas on how to make the 90 degree bends?
You need a controlable heat source toheat the acrylic to it’s bend temp easy enough to find temp needed online. Then you can use the sheetbender to get angles. Trick is getting whole length to temp otherwise it cracks and shatters.
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Carefully.
I’ve seen it done with a heat gun and chipboard, I have seen it go wrong fast. Hairdryer will get warm enough.
If I had to do more than one I’d use a wood form and a hair dryer and form it upside down. let the sides drop down against the form.
I thought we had someone who used to do this who was that?
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Oh that’s true you’ll need an even heat
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On Thu, Oct 6, 2022, 11:57 Brett Headford via MakeICT Forum <noreply@talk.makeict.org> wrote:
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You need a controlable heat source toheat the acrylic to it’s bend temp easy enough to find temp needed online. Then you can use the sheetbender to get angles. Trick is getting whole length to temp otherwise it cracks and shatters.
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A plastic welder/hot air gun works pretty good.
Clamp one side between some 2x4s and then slowly run the hot air gun back and forth until the material sags. Then take another 2x4 and squish the material down until you have a 90.
That process worked pretty good when I tried to form some 3/16 thick ABS sheet for a 4ft long bend I did a few years back.
Clear plastics are annoying because the second you get them too hot, the plastic will bubble and I haven’t figured out to repair or avoid that kind of issue yet.
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From what I’ve seen, some kind of strip heater to heat precisely along the joint will give you a cleaner bend and you won’t risk deforming the rest of the material as you might with a heat gun.
Something along these lines for a DIY version:
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I was holding onto an old electric radiant space heater to repurpose the quartz tubes for just this use for a few years. But when I needed to use it as an emergency space heater one of the tubes had failed open. I trashed it as soon as it wasn’t needed, partly because it was deteriorating rapidly which included that they hadn’t used proper high temperature wiring insulation and it was quite a mess when partially disassembled.
Quartz tube heaters, especially with a semi cylindrical reflector are (or were) the standard solution to get precision and even heat to bend plastics (and sometimes wood).
Or blister and burn!!!
As an update. I tried the heat gun method and while it did work, as @Christian suggested, it did kind of warp the rest of the acrylic. I’m going to try to build a hot wire bender more or less as described in the video. I’ll update with how that goes and if successful, it will be left in the FabLab for others to use.
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(Don’t forget to follow donation proceedures… it is super easy to forget.)
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Acknowledged. Thanks for the reminder.
Hey, if you need some nichrome wire for heating, hit me up. I’ve got two big spools of the stuff left over from when Lloyd’s Electronics sold out at auction.
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Ive bent long acrylics like this before when i was making guards for a air hocky table.
I clamped a angled board to cover everything except what i was heating left a gap for bend radius and applied a heatgun keep it moving.
It work great
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