forming plastic polystyrene?

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zaktrain

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i have my titans helmet built except for the visor i picked up a sheet of polystyrene thats pretty thin hoping to place it and form it with a heat gun have any of you tried this or know if it is possible? i dont have a lot of time left to finish my build so any advice would be useful!

Thanks in advance!
 
Since you are doing a small piece you can use peg board and some scrap lumber to build a small vacuum form table. You can use the visor cut out to build the buck you will form your new visor over. There are few on here that have done vacuum forming, you can also google it and find some very useful tutorials. I thermo form kydex knife sheaths but have not anything like visor's or armor yet.

Hope this helps, good luck with your visor and build.
 
the probelm ive run into with the vacuum forming is i made my helmet out of foam so i dont have a cutout to make a visor :unsure
 
Take a piece of foam and form ii to the helmet shape where the visor is going and then make your hard buck to that shape, you can use bass or balsa wood to make the buck. They are easy to sand and shape to the dimensions of the fake foam visor you formed. You can also take a piece of foam and cut V grooves in the back and then fit it in the visor position and tape the back where the grooves are so it holds the shape you need for making the buck. You could also hot glue the grooves so the piece doesn't flatten back out also.
 
Another possible solution if accuracy is important (your short deadline makes it sounds like it may not be though). If you take tabletop epoxy (the hard, clear stuff designed to do coffee tables and bar tops) or some other clear encapsulation epoxy and let it flow over your foam visor section, you'll have a hard, more thermally stable surface to form your clear styrene sheet over and shouldn't have to spend time recarving a shape you've already carved into a different material. Epoxy over foam is, I believe, how surfboards and stuff are made.

If you can build up a few layers of epoxy, you may even be able to separate it from the foam and use that itself as the visor, but I have no idea if that would work as well as it sounds like it should.

Just a couple of ideas, anyway.
 
It is possible to have it done, You can sand the wood with a palm sander with 120 grit sand paper and probably have the buck shaped in less than a hour. If you don't have access to power tools, bass and balsa wood carve well with a knife. Just use the knife to whittle the basic shape then finish sand it smooth. Even this way it shouldn't take but a couple hours to make the form.

It ain't rocket science, its armor building.
 
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