Bending Acrylic Sheet With Heat Gun Temperature

Before you bend acrylic set it between 2 pieces of scrap wood and clamp them together with a vice.

Bending acrylic sheet with heat gun temperature. To guard against cracking place the acrylic on a flat sheet of glass in a shop oven not the one in your kitchen at about 180ºf 82ºc for about 1 hour per mm thickness then let them air cool. Acrylic sheet heated from one side may vary from one to three minutes depending on the type of heater and the distance from the heating surface to the plexiglas acrylic. Fortunately today s technology has produced affordable hand held non contact infrared pyrometers that can be used to determine the sheet surface temperature. Then aim a heat gun at the point on the acrylic you want to bend.

To achieve this core temperature the former must calculate the temperature differential on both sheet surfaces. Acrylic sheets are relatively inexpensive pretty and can be heat shaped very effectively. There are blades and tools made specifically for cutting heating and bending acrylic but marija shows. If it doesn t then you re just going to have to be quite diligent.

Ambient oven temperature also affects the heating cycle. To create bends for small scale projects in plexiglass perspex or acrylic 1 8 inch and thinner you can use a small torch butane kitchen torches work well a paint stripping heat gun or an embossing heat tool which is a wand that works very similarly to a paint stripping gun but using a smaller more directed heat flow with a smaller fan. Using solvent based glues on laser cut extruded acrylic can cause cracking due to the internal stresses from temperature differences in the acrylic. Principally using a heat gun to bend a polycarbonate sheet is the same as hot line bending.

You can see this in the video below. Temperature uniformity varies with heater model. Sheet compared with about 10 to 12 minutes for air oven heating. Bending polycarbonate sheet with a heat gun.