Vacuform Machine: Introducing Khaleesi 1.0

I name the workstations in my shop after my favorite female characters of stage and screen.

It gives my friends a reference point when we’re crackin’ wise. So when my little pancake compressor died an untimely death, my upgraded compressor became Sarah Connor. When I piped that compressed air to the clean room and each of the benches, that became… Skynet.

I decided the first major prop-making tool I needed in the way of infrastructure is a vacuform machine. and her name is: Khaleesi.

As far as building a vacuform is concerned in the real world you actually don’t need much. A buddy of mine, has had a flourishing business based on his vacuform, and his table has been in service making parts for about 15 years. I kid you not- it is a plywood board with a hole cut in it, some expanded metal sheet, foam weather-stripping attached to a shop vac as old as the hills on a pedal.

If you get lucky on craigslist, you can literally find an old oven for $30 bucks and slap together a functional table in less than a couple of hours for just a few sheckles. There’s always a trade-off. It’ takes a lot of back-breaking work to pull parts and requires the development of a lot of skill and finesse.

He pulled this quarter inch petg visor on it the other day.

While on the hunt for a better way, I ended up stumbling on Harrison (Volpin) Krix’s Flickr account. Between his two blogs and his various builds are a wealth of knowledge. Let me gush a bit- inspiring is an understatement. His plans lead me over to Workshop Publishing’s Protoform Build plans which are a steal at $65. Buy them, they worth every penny and more.

Proto Form Vacuum from www.build-stuff.com

Finally to cap it all off, just as I was confident enough to just start building- Stan Winston School of Character Arts decided to put on a webinar with Fon Davis in which you build a vacuform from scratch, design and build a Sci-Fi helmet.

How to Make a Sci Fi Helmet with Fon Davis

I can not rave enough about this class. Fon was an amazing instructor. Someday they will release the best of this class as a tutorial and here is the second testimonial of the day: worth the full asking price.

The vacuform machine Fon builds is smaller and made from hacked available parts. He emphasizes not spending alot of time building your machine, so that you can spend more time creating.

One of my fellow Watch & Chat alumni Chris Ellerby of VEX FX was kind enough to throw the plans into Google Sketch up.

Armed with all this… Khaleesi’s Comin Yo!

Links that helped me:

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