My little vacform ‘machine’:
It is as ‘artisanal’ as it gets: it is nothing more than a simple box made from some scrap 6mm MDF, assembled with epoxy glue, with a hole in the front for the vacuum cleaner hose, and a series of small holes in the top.
And the frame for holding the plastic sheet is very simple too: two pieces of 6mm MDF. I made openings at the ‘handles’ too, so I can attach clamps at the sides too. But that proved not to be necessary.
Both the ‘box’ and frame took much less time to make than only one of the plugs took. It is crude, but it works!
This is my setup: The ‘box’ is clamped to the kitchen worktable, and the vacuum cleaner is connected. A plug is attached to the box with a bit of Blu Tack. I heat the plastic sheet over the cooking fire, make a half turn left to the ‘box’ (with vacuum on), press down the frame over the box and that’s it!
Some of the first tries:
The webbing at the stern of the boat that is still attached to the sheet is pretty normal. That is the exact reason why plugs should always be made much higher than the part you want.
And cut down to the needed height:
And all 7 types (I made some spares): British on the left, French on the right:
Sorry for the bad cellphone pics. I’ll try something better next time…
I used 0,5mm sheet. I like to keep the hull sides a bit thicker (0,4 -0,5 mm). That gives better strength, and will be safer when gluing details to it (don’t want to melt through the hull!). And I can easily scrape or sand the top edge for a finer appearance.
The biggest challenge was not to melt the plastic too much, because that causes it to stretch more and become too thin.
Vacforming with thinner styrene would be possible, but 0,13mm would be a challenge I think…
In my opinion, cost is relative… There is a lot of wastage indeed with this technique, however the absolute cost is not very high.
I can get 2 ‘forms’ out of an A4 sized sheet. I didn’t use Evergreen (even though I like it a lot), but sheets from a Dutch brand named ‘Maquett’ (simply because that’s what my local art supply shop had in stock). For the results in the last photo (plus some failed attempts!), I used 9 sheets.
One Evergreen sheet would cost about 2 euro (6 euro for a pack with 3 sheets, according to a quick google). So 18 euro total expense for ending up with 8 boats, so 2,25 euro per boat (plus some spare hulls!). For detailing them, I’ll have to use more sheet plastic and some square rod, but there will be little wastage for that, and the quantities are so tiny that the cost is negligible. So all in all, I would say this is much cheaper than buying another kit that I will never find the time to build…
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I used some cheaper stuff that came per square meter or so...
