The Basics: Vacuum Forming
The process of heating up plastic sheets so they’re in a moveable form is called thermoforming. This means that you can heat plastics and create shapes by stretching them around a mould. When making these shapes, it’s important to get a smooth finish and to make the end product look professional, so that is where the vacuum comes in. The vacuum is designed to suck out the extra air that sits between the plastic and the mould. The most common variety of thermoforming is vacuum forming.
The ‘vacuum’ part of the process means that the mould and plastic are air tight. The mould is an obstacle in the way of the plastic, so it ends up creating a shape around the mould. The shape of the plastic is dependent on the shape of the mould, and the different types and shapes of moulds are countless. You can make just about anything!
Although products created using vacuum forming can be of a variety of different uses, they are all made from a simple piece of plastic. This is a highly specialist technique and can be used to make products such as car dashboards, the casing of speakers and to make product packaging such as blister packs.
Draft angles are important to include in the designs of any product that will be vacuum formed. They result in extra space being allocated in order to make the mould easy to remove and reduce the chance of damage. It also takes into consideration the fact that plastic tends to shrink.
A down side to vacuum forming is that it sometimes restricts you in what you can create, as products with a large depth can often be difficult to form, so it works best for more shallow products. However, there are other types of thermoforming processes that can be used if you want to create bigger products, such as drape moulding, plastic thermoforming and press moulding.
If you want to learn more about vacuum forming then it’s a good idea to carry out research online. Vacuum forming has become more popular recently.. This article, The Basics: Vacuum Forming is released under a creative commons attribution license.
July 23, 2011 | Posted by James Smith
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