Plastic Bending
2018-08-21 21:03 - Making
I've had a power supply project in the works for a good while. When I saw a post about bending acrylic plastic to make custom cases for electronics, I knew I'd use that technique. I didn't want to build such a big contraption though, and I delayed quite a bit. I had the system pictured above assembled some time ago, but never operated it.
More recently, I tried harder. I doubled up the length of wire, to half the resistance and thus double the power (at the same voltage). I ended up hooking a laptop power brick to the unit that will be the heart of the supply I'm building, and I finally got the bending system working! Note the spring at the far end. Over the twelve inches or so that I'm heating (in the working set-up), there's a noticeable expansion of the hot wire. The spring helps take up that slack, and keep the wire strung in a nice straight line, near the plastic to be heated.
I added some L aluminum brackets to (maybe) better contain and focus the heat, and (definitely) help me hold the plastic in place correctly. I'm only energizing a short piece of the wire I've got in place. I didn't know at all what sort of voltage or current would be necessary when I started. I correctly figured that I could always connect less of it, if I put too much.
In this shot you can see the successful fruits of my tests. If I hold the plastic still above the orange hot wire, after a little while it heats to the point of becoming quite malleable. Quickly and carefully bend at that point, and the plastic will quickly cool back to being solid. I got three ninety degree bends in the test piece. I'll do a few more tests to figure out how the inside/outside ends up: what's the radius of the bend? If I try to make a box, where do I need to put the bends to know what the outside dimension will be (so it lines up with the other half of the box!)?
Either way, it feels good to have this long delayed part of the project behind me!
