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.