Just wondering if anyone here has experience vacuum-forming Lexan. Basically looking for someone who can form a roughly windshield-sized piece of probably 1/8" thick Lexan. I've never tried it, and really don't have the spare time to learn.
What I'm looking for is to replace our broken cowl piece on a GT-3 car. We have all new bodywork, except for this piece. What I'm looking for is the circled part. I can get better pix if someone is willing to help out. Thanx!!!
Your biggest struggle will be heating the plastic.
Yeah I've never heard of it being vacuum-formed, but it can be formed with heat and pressure (being clamped in a mold and put in an oven), or you could just bolt it down under stress, which seems to be the most common method for replacing curved glass with lexan on race cars. Lexan is quite flexible after all - that's why windshield support struts are a thing.
Been years...years. My Voc Tech High school had a plastics shop. large Pizza ovens with molds you'd clamp the edges and roll it in to the oven when temp was right apply vacuum to mold and pop the now hot and flexable sheet to the mold.
Got a voc-tech near you?
In reply to 44Dwarf :
Hadn't thought about that, thanx for the suggestion!
Buddy of mine makes lexan rear hatches for his 924 race car with a heat gun and clamps/ratchet straps, using the existing hatch glass as the mold.
For that, I'd build a mold from wood and glued/sprayed on foam, then make a template out of butcher paper or similar.
Apply the template to the Lexan, leave some extra to trim it to fit, then put on soft gloves and go to town with the clamps/straps and heat gun.
It will be a pain to do, but work slow and carefully and you should be able to do it.
Once one is done, try to make another one or two for spares so you don't have to later.
A commercial powder coating company will have an oven big enough to handle anything you want to mold. The trick will be to see if they can drop the temp down where you want and if you can sweet talk them into letting you use their oven.
I looked into this a while back...trying to see if I could get-rich-quick making replacement vintage boat windshields.
I think I remember I learned that moisture in the lexan is an issue and the way to solve that is to do an extended pre-heat of the sheets/blanks before forming. The problem with the moisture (I think I remember) is that it causes bubbles in the plastic when you form it.
You'll need to log in to post.
