I found "repurposed dental equipment" tiktok and now I'm very very close to buying this $120 miniature vacuum forming machine. Anybody out there got one?

#diy #vacuumforming #dentalequipment #upcycling #safetythird

Add Conductive Traces On Vacuum Formed Plastic With 3D Printing

Surface conductors on vacuum formed parts appear in many hacks, from cosplay armor to 3D touch pads and smart objects. But making them has always been painful. Either they had to be hand painted after forming, which looked sloppy and was labor intensive, or they had to be printed with some difficult to use stretchable ink tech. [Freddie Hong] and his group have another solution, using tech most hackers already have - a 3D printer and a vacuum former.

Smart tray created by this method.

They 3D print the traces with conductive PLA filament directly onto a base plastic sheet, and then vacuum form the whole thing. The filament is happy to deform when heated - it's printer filament.

We like this process. We've found conductive filament isn't reliably resistive across vertical layers, but is reliable in the XY plane. Their method only requires one layer. Also, they suggest 3D printing a layer of non conductive PLA atop most of the conductor, like a PCB solder mask.

Conductive filament has a fair bulk resistance. They suggest electroplating it before applying the top mask layer. They also are exploring 3D printing logos, stripes, and such with colored filament, or even making surface detail like rivets on model parts or adding thickness where the plastic thins during vacuum forming.

Designing the 3D print requires guessing what bit of plastic sheet ends up where in the vacuum formed final part. His group used a commercial program, t-sim, to do the prediction and Grasshopper to import the result into Rhino3D. This seems a lot for a home hacker. Drawing lines on a test sheet and vacuum forming seems simpler.

We've looked at vacuum forming before. We did a piece on 3D printing bucks , and covered [Ted Brull]'s Kevo vacuum former back in 2015.

Thanks to [howielowe] for the tip.

#3dprinterhacks #news #3dprint #conductiveink #vacuumforming

Vacuum Forming with 3D Printer Filament

Even if they don't have one themselves, we'd wager the average Hackaday reader is at least vaguely aware of how a vacuum former works on a fundamental level. You heat up a plastic sheet until it's soft, then use a vacuum pump to pull the ductile material down onto an object and hold it there while it cools off. It's easy to build a vacuum forming rig yourself, but small commercial units are cheap enough that it might not be worth your time. If everything goes to plan, the technique is a quick and effective way of duplicating items around the home and shop.

But we were recently tipped off to a variation of this classic technique that's certainly worth further research. As demonstrated in a recent video, [Nathan Martinez] shows how 3D printed sheets can be used in place of the 5″ x 5″ squares of thermoplastic film that his imported vacuum former was designed to use. It's easy enough to do: just model up a square with the appropriate 2D dimensions in your CAD package of choice, and extrude it to a height of about .5 mm.

A printed mesh pattern could be used to form custom shaped filters or strainers.

So what's the advantage? Well for one thing, it's cheaper. Though admittedly, not by much. Going rate on Amazon seems to be about 90 cents per sheet for the real stuff, and some back of the envelope math shows the printed version coming in at around 30 cents given nominal filament costs. Whether or not those savings are worth the extra effort is certainly debatable.

But that's not really the most interesting part. With printed sheets loaded into the vacuum former, you've got access to a much wider array of materials to work with. For example, [Nathan] shows off some very interesting flexible pieces he was able to produce using sheets of TPU. You can also experiment with different surface textures. These can not only be used to give your vacuum formed pieces a bit of interesting visual flair, but could actually have some practical applications. In the video we see how a printed mesh could be formed over a piece to create a conformal air vent or filter.

To be sure, there's some room for improvement here. Not all the pulls were successes, and [Nathan] says getting the printed sheets up to the proper temperature can be tricky. But when it works, it works quite well, and we think there could be some untapped potential in this unexpected melding of new and old methods of at-home plastic production.

[Thanks to Japanfan50 for the tip.]

#3dprinterhacks #classichacks #3dprinterfilament #conformal #mesh #vacuumforming

Vacuum Forming with 3D Printed Buck Tutorial

[Matterhackers] has a nice video tutorial on using vacuum forming to create plastic items. Sure, you have a 3D printer, but vacuum forming has some advantages if you are making thin and flexible items quickly. But don't feel bad. The master item in the process is from a 3D printer. Like a mold, the forming won't produce a duplicate of the master, called a buck. Rather, the buck provides something like a die that the plastic wraps around.

While obvious vacuum-formed items include such things as take-out food containers and plastic blister packaging for retail items, you can also make more substantial items. Apparently, all theStar Wars movies in the original trilogy used vacuum forming to create stormtrooper armor.

Like many fabrication technologies, there are special design rules. For example, you can't have any overhangs or else the plastic will not release from the buck. In fact, ideally, the buck will have a slight slope on all sides so that the bottom is wider than the top to simplify separating the buck from the finished product.

Another concern with a 3D printed buck is that the plastic will completely conform to the surface. So if you have layer lines or other irregularities, they will show up in the finished product also. You may not care or you may want to sand and possibly seal the print. Of course, you can make the buck out of anything that can withstand the heat including, according to the post, including a raw potato. While PLA is iffy because of the heat, the post indicates that they have used normal PLA successfully by increasing the number of top layers when printing. However, using an advanced PLA with a higher temperature, ABS, or PETG is recommended.

The Makyu Formbox hooks up to a shop vac or household vacuum cleaner to provide the negative pressure. The device -- which unsurprisingly [Matterhackers] sells isn't dirt cheap, but we can remember paying more for a 3D printer (the cheapest option is about $700).

If you'd rather DIY, grab some MDF and check out these plans. Or, go for something a little larger.

#3dprinterhacks #plastic #vacuumformed #vacuumformer #vacuumforming

Making Custom Curved Mirrors at Home

Generally speaking, creating custom mirrors is a complex task that involves a lot of careful grinding, and isn't something to be taken lightly if you need precision results. Just ask the folks who provided NASA with a wonky mirror for the Hubble. But assuming you're not working on an orbital space telescope (or even a ground based one, for that matter), [volzo] has recently documented some techniques for producing single and double curved mirrors of reasonable quality using common workshop tools.

The first step is finding something that's a bit easier to work with than glass. After testing various reflective materials such as PVC foil and painted PETG sheets by comparing the reflections of projected test patterns, [volzo] found that laminated polystyrene gave the most accurate results. If you just want to make a simple bent mirror, he shows how you can pop one of these sheets on a CNC router, make the appropriate cuts, and fold them into shape.

That part might seem a bit obvious, but what about a more complex shape? Here, [volzo] points to how the thin sheets of polystyrene also lend themselves to vacuum forming. As demonstrated in the video below, all it takes is a 3D printed plug and some basic equipment to rapidly produce mirrors in arbitrary shapes.

Now obviously the optical properties of such mirrors will leave something to be desired, but depending on your application, that might not be such a big deal. As examples [volzo] shows off a few projects using these custom mirrors, such as a tabletop camera that captures both sides of the table simultaneously and a circular projector. Laminated polystyrene could potentially even be used to create low-cost variable mirrors.

#parts #3dprintedmold #curvedmirror #mirror #polystyrene #vacuumforming