Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Building up to Maker Faire: Part 4”.
Hi my name’s Sean Thorson. I make props and costumes for all sorts of different applications and this year to get ready for the Maker Faire, I’m building the giant bad guy robot from the original Robocop movies called ed 209. It’S going to be everything I can do to get it done just in time for the event, and here we go, I welcome back. My name is Shawn Thorson, we’re still continuing with ed-209 project. I’Ve got 43 days left to get the whole thing built.
Let’S go ahead and take a look: the progress mo box that goes on the gun, pod and then in the little window on the gun, pod. There’S the filler piece: that’s gon na go inside. This will be a vacuum formed and when it’s finished, it’ll end up filling this hole and then the ammo box will be mounted over the top of it. Of course, we do have two nice lightweight fiberglass copies of the gun pot itself, so those are shaping up.
Really well got the beginning of the pelvis section for the robot here. This still needs to have the rubber looking waist portion with the corrugated part up here, as well as the corrugated accordion shaped piece that will come off either side and attach to the leg. So it’s still in a fairly early stages of shaping up. Moving on to the next table, we’ve got forming books for the rails that are going to go on the back of the leg.
These are going to be vac formed as well. Then we’ve got the prototype for the hydraulic ramparts that are gon na, go on the upper leg between the hip and the backwards knee joint. Then I’ve got the beginning of the toes shaping up here.
This is the front toe which is very nearly ready for molding. I just got a tiny little bit more sanding and filling to do same goes for the two side toes here, so those are shaping up now. The biggest step forward, since the last time you were here is the actual prototype for the main body.
So I’m gon na go ahead and call this about halfway done. Maybe a little bit shy of that there’s still a lot of filling and shaping it needs to be done with all of the seams on the back end, getting everything smooth out and prepped and painted and ready for molding and then, of course, on the front end. I’M just starting putting together the chin, so this kind of gives you an idea of how big the whole thing is going to be once it’s assembled we’re looking at about five and a half six feet long for the main body here, then, once you go ahead And add the shoulder flaps on either side, it’s going to make the whole monster about six foot wide by Thomas assembled for our skill builder we’re going to be going over vacuum, forming it’s a very simple process.
Where you take a sheet of plastic, you heat it and then you pull it over a form and once it cools, you can actually keep the same shape as the original form. It’S a good way to make very lightweight, very inexpensive parts. So for the demonstration here, I’ve made the world’s simplest vacuum form machine.
This is just a block of wood. I’Ve got it basically built hollow, so I can set it up and attach it to the shop vac here and on the top i’ve grooved it out in a couple of different directions and everywhere, where the grooves meet I’ve drilled a hole through. So it’s a hollow box vacuum attached to one end, we’re going to put our form on it and stretch your sheet of plastic over suck the air out and we’ll end up with the shape that we need in thin lightweight plastic. First step, I’m using a piece of sixteenth inch, thick styrene, it’s just a sheet plastic, very easy to find it’s the same stuff that they make model kits out of, or your coffee lid from local coffee shop. So I’m gon na go ahead and stick that in the oven and heat it up once we go ahead and pull this out of the frame just leave it on the oven long enough until it firms up once that happens, you can go ahead and pull it Off and you’re pretty much good to go. Here’S the finished part it’s nice and rigid and there’s the original.
So you do lose some resolution. You’Ll notice. We’Ve got some really tight grooves in here that don’t quite get pulled all the way there. You can get a more detailed Pole if you either make the plastic hotter or use a higher vacuum source or use a thinner sheet of plastic.
But for what we’re doing here, this is more than enough resolution to get a pretty good detailed finished part, so bear in mind if you’re doing this process at home, that vacuum forming most of these plastics is actually going to release some fairly noxious toxic chemicals. So make sure you’re doing it in a well-ventilated area, if you’re planning on doing it at home in your mom’s kitchen, make sure you ask for her permission first she’s going to say no and she’ll be right to say so. So this one I’ve got a high vacuum source, which is actually going to pull a vacuum on this tank here. So that gives me quite a volume of a very high vacuum and then once it’s done, I’ve also got the shop vac, which is going to evacuate a lot of air in a hurry.
So that gives me kind of a low pressure high volume, and then I switch over a couple of valves and it draws air into the high pressure low volume side. If that makes sense, the pump is actually designed for servicing automotive air conditioning systems. I don’t think I’ve actually got anything in the shop that’s being used for whatever it was designed for little, the your left all right. So that’s the setup. I’M go ahead and take a couple of forming bucks, this one’s exceptionally deep. So it might be a bit of a challenge to get it to work out close off the high pressure side setup with the low pressure.
Alright. So again, the forming table itself is basically like an air hockey table that works backwards. So you can see I’ve got a grid, every inch, there’s a hole, that’s an eighth of an inch in diameter. This whole box is hollow and on the bottom of it, there’s a couple of flanges where all of the actual suction gets ported into the box itself. So done right once the plastic frames pulled down, it’ll actually move outside of this rubber gasket edge and that’ll pull everything tight. Once we’ve got a nice seal on the edge should see it happen, pretty quick and so we’ll start cooking plastic towards me. That’S how it’s done and high-pressure this one’s perfect, this one’s got some webs, try the rope next time. So the next thing we’re looking for.
We got a couple of spots where there’s webbing like this and I’m basically just gon na keep playing with it until it stops moving. And that’s when it’s cool enough that this thing is gon na stay in shape almost notionally. I could take a compressed air nozzle and just cool it off with a high-pressure high pressure air blast.
I think we’re good one, no fit we’re honest life so better and this one will go kind of there and it’s the beginning of sizeable chunk of gun. I keep feeling like this parts too small, probably making them way too small, good, that’s perfect! It’S gon na be really thin good, so much cooler when you karate chop it off right. So these will end up getting seamed together and then, once all the cast parts get added on. This is the upper leg and again I’ll have some stills of the part coming together over the course the next couple of days. So this has been a short version of how to do vacuum.
Forming it’s used just about every day in fairly mundane stuff. I use it just about every week to do things that are either pretty ridiculous or else pretty awesome. So I’ve been neglecting so far to introduce some of the folks that are helping me out with this project.
First, I’m going to introduce newest addition, my team, Kate Davenport here who just recently has started, I’m teaching her how to lay out fiberglass. So a lot of the pieces and parts that you see molded and coming out of the molds are actually her handiwork lately. Thank you. If you’ve been paying attention in the last couple of videos, there’s always one guy kind of hovering around in the background, takes care of all of my sort of routine shop chores and he’s gon na be helping me here with the vacuum forming on a big machine. Today, this is Jason harstad, who does a lot of my rubber molding and casting for just about everything here in the shop after a while. So thanks for joining us make sure you tune in next time, we’ll have another skill builder a lot more details coming together. As the project starts to take shape, there’s 43 days left to go in my high-speed descent into mental destruction, so be sure to tune in you.
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