Thread: This sucks!

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Sorry for the lame pun.

I was just brainstorming an idea I had to make the phalanges of the hand (all the tiny finger bones) using a material I'd played with in another venture, polystyrene rods.

Styrene comes in sheets, rods, and a few other slick shapes, and it's just a thin plastic you can do just about anything with. It's very popular among model railroaders, model builders, and architectural modelmakers.

Anywho, first the idea was to take styrene rods and sand them out to the shape of the fingers, then wire them together. But then I remembered plans I saw for a DIY vacu-former.

Essentially you heat up the sheet just enough, and then put it on the frame. A shop vac provides the suction which then pulls the softened styrene down over your original item. Within a few minutes, the styrene is cool enough to touch, and voila - a hollow reproduction of your original item.

Anyone ever experiment with anything like this? I think it's got loads of potential, either for directly made props, or even for making a mold.

Let us know how they turn out, sound like it has potential