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I like them not only that , I was thinking of colour coding my bumpers , but the red / black combo works so well , maybe to the extent that I paint my Vw badge red
Coffee time . A3 Polycarbonate arrived this morning. UV protection on one side which is also thermal protected so it can applied with heat too.
I'd made a simple foil template around the nearside glass lens to gauge the true size and another in card to give me the internal shape for the reflector frame.
I'm trying 1mm sheets to start, figuring I need to practice & trial some forming ideas. A mate with a 3D printer is printing me a couple of "dyson adaptors" for building an A3 vacuum forming box.
A few coffees later, multitasking this and a few other jobs my first "bash" at forming a purely thermallyformed and complicated shaped cover, resulted in a pretty decent job imo?
Read a little up on it last night and started the process at 80°C and raised the temp slowly by 15°C every 10 minutes (mainly to ensure the T4 lens didn't explode with microscopic air bubbles in the glass etc... at 125°C the material starts to react to the heat slowly draping around the glass lens. I opened the oven several times to touch the material and gauge it's flexibility and state (out of curiousity). For vacuum forming I read the best operating temp should be 170-180°C but that still didn't allow gravity to do its thing and form around the full shape of the lens. The UV white protection cover remained intact unless you touched it. As it was a test piece I went beyond 180°C to try 190°C then 200°C. At 200°C the UV cover started to bubble with an air pocket which looks like it's affected the front face. Won't know until I finish. A nice shaping had formed around the lens. Out of the oven it cooled quickly, clamping tightly to the hotter glass! No worries. Once cool I was able to gently prize the plastic from the glass. Out with the Ryobi dremel style tool and the surplus was quickly removed to leave a sort of lens cover! I left an edge as there's a process where you can anneal the plastic further - which I hope will create a better smoother / crease free / fold free cover. It can be refitted to the lens. Annealing next but I already have a few ideas to improve on the thermal forming
Having had a few hours to think about prototype 2, I'm thinking about making a 10mm plywood template with a hole shaped to the lens at its base. The lens' glass lip for bonding to the metal reflector would stop the lens from dropping through. Plywood could be wide enough to sit on the oven rails, where the resized polycarbonate would lie until the oven is upto temp, then with the lens face down use the weight of the heavy glass to 'extrude' it's shape through the shaped ply. Reversing the ply template would give me an identically shaped cover for both sides too.
Next is to anneal the shape with a heat gun and few tools to see if I can improve on Prototype1. I feel pretty confident of being able to knock something up at the moment and easy enough to create spares or coloured covers to fit the original headlight fixings.
The plan is to stay age appropriate with the designs so I'm busy collecting 2001 VAG headlight design images. Creative juices engaged!
oh god here we go......, you'll be buying all sorts of pointless manufacturing kit and boring us with a never ending parade of prototypes and developments - when are you going to start taking orders?
oh god here we go......, you'll be buying all sorts of pointless manufacturing kit and boring us with a never ending parade of prototypes and developments - when are you going to start taking orders?
I'm simply trying to make the one set and thats it. I've bought 5 polycarbonate sheets so after 3 sheets its development over.
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