Hi there everyone, My business partner and I have started to make a few nose-cones for the Go karts we are racing, We made around 20 of these using a supplier who turned out to be a 3rd party and just messed us around, (wrong colours, 2 x quoted price) our original idea was to use this person and see how the product went, we'll only build around 20 a year, so we are going to build our own Vacuum former through some trial and error, We have got our mould back from the person who refused to hand it back for 2 years, and its time to start putting things together.
After we get the nose-cones sorted, we plan on building door skins and quarter panels for speedway cars, however that's just to make more use of the large equipment and see what we can sell.

The info I'm after, is what to expect when forming an item that is 1200x1200 by approx. 450 high. we have a supplier for the materials, just need to know what size vacuum to start with (I've seen a lot of diy youtube efforts using household vac units, however we are building a much bigger unit, basically scaled up. do we need to pre-heat the mould (its a fibreglass mould, limited life is to be expected, if we get another 20 units we will be happy, then we'll build another fibreglass unit, as we don't have the volumes to build an aluminium unit at this point in time)
do we need to pre-heat the mould to help the forming process? obviously we need to build a decent element based item to heat the plastic sheets, a good sized vac table, and a decent setup to make this work on such a scale. however we are not investing millions into it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks
Dan

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