MSRaynsford

The vacuum former came supplied with a wire mesh in the bottom of the bed. This lifts the item you're forming off the bed stopping it from blocking the vacuum hole. I decide to make myself a new vacuum bed that fills the area snugly and has a more uniform arrangement of holes. Thankfully the laser cutter is very good at making sheets of holes. I cut it out of 5mm acrylic, a sheet full of holes was held aloft on smaller dots that allow plenty of air flow under it. My thinking was that although the acrylic will eventually warm up I'm only heating the plastic for a minute or two and the plastic sheet provides a perfectly smooth surface. I was wrong, after I vacuum formed half a dozen items at once the sheet ended up pretty flexible and started to warp so I ended up remaking the whole thing in 6mm mdf instead. That's currently working very well but if it shows signs of degradation I'll just send off to have one laser cut in metal instead.

I was inspired by the Colibri Hummingbird Automata  to make this flapping wing version of my own automata. The flap isn't quite so good but the mechanism is a little simpler and it will suffice as a prototype for now.

About 2 months ago I was talking about getting some parts vacuum formed so I had a quick look on ebay to see how much vacuum formers were and found one very local that was going cheap (comparatively). It needed to be gone by Monday morning, I found it Saturday morning, and it was a big industrial beasty that would probably need a van with a tail lift to move it. A few quick emails/phone calls later and I'd booked a van, spoken to the sellers, found a friend to help and things were all set for Monday morning. I'd gone from thinking about vacuum forming parts to owning a machine in the space of a few hours. Moving day was fun, the machine is indeed big, heavy and very industrial. The machine had been unused for a while and the previous owner had it wired directly in to the wall because high currents kept blowing fuses. It was fair to say I was nervous about what I'd just bought but worse case I could just sell it again on ebay (and not being in a rush I would probably ma...