I am looking to do canopies in house.  It would be a pain to ship the molds (expensive), and I want to have control of timing/quality.

I did try to use someone external/local to pull some canopies while I get my setup built, but after a few tries, it isn't going to work out well.  His setup has an oven at the back of the vacuum area.  He heats up the sheet, then it slides out of the oven and onto the vacuum area where the mold is raised then pulled.  2 things created issues, 1 is the time to get from the heat to the form and the other is temp.  The Polycarb cools faster than other plastics so the extra 5 sec or so to get from the oven to the form was allowing it to cool too early and the second was temperature in the building.  Both of them are not conducive to a good pull.

I did just receive the heating units to build a larger vacuum system.  I am assembling them at this point.  More progress to come.

I was using some .060 polycarbonate for my test.  It worked well, but I will need to build a pre-dryer to remove moisture from the polycarb as it is very hydroscopic.  I am going to get a sheet of PETG to see if it can be used without the pre-dryer as it is supposed to be much less hydroscopic.

My former was built with 3 different platens to allow for plastic forming in the following approx sizes 1'x4', 2'x2' and 2'x4' to allow flexibility in the future.  Below you will see the 2x2 and 1x4.

Another update.  I have done several tests with both polycarbonate and PETG.  In both cases the vacuum former performed perfectly.  Very happy with the machine.  I know that Poly gave me major issues with moisture bubbles.  I found that the PETG while significantly better in that regard still gave me minor small moisture bubbles.  Much clearer, but not where I want them.  So, I have been researching building a drying chamber.  To that end, I have an approach and am in the process of gathering up the materials to build the chamber.  I should be starting on it next week.  This week things are very busy and over the weekend we have our granddaughter for the weekend, so I am confident that will keep me busy.

Not quite there yet, but the end is in site or producing good clear canopies.  As a side note, there are a couple of the canopy plugs that I will need to do some work on such as the T28.  I know several of you are waiting on Firefly canopies and that is a mold that I shouldn't have to do anything to.

Here are a couple of pictures for those that might be interested in this very utilitarian item.  Nothing fancy, but it needs to be able to deal with 200F for a sustained period (think 4-6hrs)

I have a little tidying up of wiring yet to do, but didn't want to do that until I tested everything.