Do we have a 8-10 foot oven for heating plastic

Machine Shop Plastics & Composites
#1

I’m working on an LED “Neon” Heart sign for one of my favorite daughters’ wedding in late May. Also planning on making a Tooth sign for my other favorite daughter who is in Dental school.

In hindsight I should have asked this last week before I ordered parts…
I need to be able to heat a 4-5’ long 0.6"x1" Light Guide to 300F for 8-15minutes to make it pliable to bend.
GE Tetra Contour
https://products.gecurrent.com/sign-lighting/tetra-contour

The light guides come in 8’ sections, For this project I think I will use 4-5 feet but want to make it 8’ long just in case I need it in the future, I have a 12’ three inch diameter thin wall pipe and bought three 3’ sections of 1" thick mineral wool insulation for it, and three 400F thermometers with probes, so currently planning on making a 9’ oven with ability to extend it if necessary.
My plan is to use my variable heat gun to heat it. Run it at different settings, plot the data, interpolate to get 300F. I could buy an oven for $3,800 or rent one for $350/week, but whats the fun in that.

Do we already have something like this? If not could we use one in the PIG area? And I just now realized at the lengths I’m currently planning on working with I could have done it in the big oven in the metal shop, oh well.
-Randy

#2

You think the powder coating oven should be usable for this? You’d need to check and make sure it’s allowed, but the temp and size are pretty close at “big” and ~400F.

#3

The oven is about 6’X3’X3’
The 6’ being the vertical dimension
People have used it for cooking polycarbonate before.
I suspect that Randy wants a long horizontal dimension.

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#4

Maybe heating it to do a bend to get it into the oven?

#5

Ya long small diameter oven. You can bend small sections with just a heat gun but they recommend an oven for larger radius bends. If my heat gun is not powerful enough I could use the bake oven because the lengths I am currently planning on using would fit in it, maybe. The spec sheet said working time was 3-4 minutes so I would need to setup the bending form in the metal shop which would be inconvenient.

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#6

If you’re not needing to set the curve in the oven, that might fit diagonally with the shelves out, but then you’d need to set the curve as soon as it came out.

#7

Powder Coating in metal shop is your only option. This is exactly the reason me and cgraf brought it into makerspace is so we could handle general purpose tasks like this. It should have no problem holding an accurate temp for plastic forming for you.

Your only other option would to be to heat a small area at a time with a heat gun.

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