Unkljune

Thanks for the encouragement, folks! Much appreciated, and then some!

More or less by request, here's a pic of the old toaster oven I bought at a thrift store, some years ago.



(Note the "$5" price tag sticker that's hand scribbled onto masking tape, on top -- and the revised "$2" tape on the glass! Hadda leave those, just 'cause they make me smile! Heehee.)

I didn't want to hack up a new / good one, and I have some training in electronics, so it was well worth it to me to pick it up for the $2 I paid for it. (That is, if the idea didn't work, I was only out two bucks.) I figured that if the pre-printed temperature settings or whatever were way off, it wouldn't matter much since this was gonna be dedicated just to vacu-forming purposes. I only needed to know where one temperature was, on the pre-printed face of the toaster oven. I used a precise little thermostat to find right where the plastic's recommended temperature was gonna be (that is, ignoring the oven's markings, and watching the thermostat's) and then marked the knob's "just right" position on the face of the oven; using a Sharpie Marker.

It's probably hard to read what's on the thermometer, but just know that it's not a cheapie cooking one. It's a very good one, with a wide-but-precise range of temperature markings. It is made specifically for uses like when figure sculptors need to bake the "Super Sculpey" sculpting material (without over-doing it). It's sold through artist's supply places that carry Super Sculpey.

Other than marking the ideal temperature on the old toaster oven, the only real modification I made to the toaster oven itself was to hack up the little wire tray (cutting most of the center of the tray out -- leaving the rear wire intact, all around; but cutting a big chunk of the front wire off; and removing most of the other wires in that center portion -- and to add some "lifter upper's" that are nothing more than short chunks of split-in-half, scrap 2-by-4 wood. The purpose of those mods being to raise the plastic sheet up, and to give it plenty of room to sag way down, without hitting anything. (That is: if I should feel so inclined: it's not super necessary to get toooo ridiculous, but once in a while, if I'm doing something really goofy, it's helpful to have extra "sagging down" room.)

Anyway ... enough about the heat source!

Next pic: my vacu-forming source for creating a vaccum -- as mentioned in that old Internet Modeler article. The blue stuff is "Kleen Klay" -- used as a quickee sealant where the plywood (bottom) edges of the cheapie, homemade vacu-forming "bed" thingie rest on top of the air mattress deflating device.



Next: a custom "female mold" I made (using various grades of "Milliput") for another bubbletop project, a couple of years ago:



There's a bit more over-kill there than may be necessary, and some experimentation too -- so I'll mainly just show the pic, for now.

(I'll probably throw in more details about using female molds, later ... and may show how to make one ... so for now it feels like enough just to show what it looked like; and to note that the vacuum source is "sucking" from underneath; and that there is a row of five tiny holes in the mold's bottom, so the warm clear plastic can be sucked down into the shaped-and-smoothed mold surface, and held there a while as the plastic cools.)

Next up: an idea of what the clear plastic looked like, as held securely in a pair of plywood scraps that are just big enough (along the outer edges) to fit into the toaster oven. (Any larger, and the door wouldn't be able to close.) This many screw-downs is likely a bit much, in the overkill department ... but hey, at the time I figured "why not?" and went ballistic, clamping them together. One big thing I've found out, by doing a bit of vacu-forming here and there, is that the thicker the plastic is that you're using, the more it will stay between your two clamping "frames" without any fuss. Over-clamping plastic sheet is mainly if you're using super thin stuff. I was actually using some fairly thick stuff -- (0.030 inches, I think it was) -- so this many clamping screws may be over-doing it. On other projects, I used some black ABS or whatever that was nearly 0.125 inches thick ... and got away with threading wire bread ties through four holes; and just twisting them!



And the next pic is pretty much like the one above. You can barely tell, but the newly shaped clear bubbletop is there, inside the clamping frame. A bit of trimming along the edges, and it'll be usable as the final part.

Old enough to know better. But not to old to still know trix. are for kids

Figures of all kinds, building and painting