I get a lot of requests to help build helmets and because of it I wanted to develop a relatively quick and painless approach to making one-off visors that look good and don't break the bank. If everything just used a standard motorcycle visor that'd be awesome but we're not so lucky in the world...
I made my former box with a jigsaw, a drill and a hammer so no fancy tools are actually required. If you're talking about the objects to use as bucks you can pretty much use anything rigid enough to not deform under the pull of the vacuum. Wooden objects, clay sculpts, existing objects that are cool and you want copies of them? All are awesome choices to vacuum form.
I made my former box with a jigsaw, a drill and a hammer so no fancy tools are actually required. If you're talking about the objects to use as bucks you can pretty much use anything rigid enough to not deform under the pull of the vacuum. Wooden objects, clay sculpts, existing objects that are cool and you want copies of them? All are awesome choices to vacuum form.
Thanks, I'll probably make my own vacuum former, but I was thinking about making visor as close as possible to the 3D model and that is why I mentioned 3D printer.
You could still make the visor with pepakura, harden it and back it with something like styrofoam or clay so it doesn't deform. 3D printers are great for making accurate models, but that doesn't mean you can't to it in other ways.
Oh yeah, you are right. I didn't think of pepakura. I haven't yet worked with it, but probably an ODST visor would be a good start for me, to learn this technique.
I figured someone would have a post on this. That's incredibly more simple than I imagined to build one. Is this one of those things that takes an afternoon to build the equipment....and a decade to figure out how to get good results from it? Looks like it'd be fun to mess with one. I have some big electric heat-treating ovens that I could use for even heating. How thick of PETG can you do with a typical shop vac as a vacuum?