I needed a safety cover for the electronics. I'd had reasonable luck with primitive "thermoforming" of lucite (from Home Depot), so I decided to try again. The result's not perfect, but it's not bad.

The two sides are just flat pieces, but the top and two ends are all one piece, formed into that shape. To bend it, I clamped it between two pieces of wood near where the bend should be, and heated the area to be bent with a small butane torch. A heat gun, if I'd had one, would have been a lot better, and probably safer. I tried super glue to hold the sides on, but that didn't last. It's now gooped with two-part epoxy. Clamping on both sides of the bend (more like a sheet metal brake works) would probably have worked better.

If you try this, practice bending some scraps first, to see how much heat you need, how much pressure you have to apply to get the radius of bend you want, and how far from your clamped boards the bend will form. Because I didn't know where the bends would form, my two ends came out with quite different lengths, so I had to rethink how to mount it. It came out okay, but it's not what I pictured initially.

Image img_69.jpg

image: Thu 18 Dec 2014 03:08:58 PM