Welcome to my project, Acrylic Novice! As you can see in the image above and images to follow, I worked with acrylic. I named it acrylic novice as this is my first time ever working with acrylic! This was a very cool experience and learned so many things along the process of making this project. As you can see in the picture above, I decided to make these acrylic shelves like ones you see at target or at TJ Max for organization purposes and to look aesthetic at the same time. Personally, I wouldn't buy these for $30 or more like they sell at stores, so I decided to make them myself! My first acrylic bend shelf came out a little too big than I expected it to be, but for the rest of my bends they came out just the size I needed them to be. The pictures below show the tools and the process of bending the pieces of acrylic.
The tools and materials I used to make these shelves are acrylic (of course ^-^), a heat gun to bend the acrylic, industrial or high temperature hot glue guns for bonding the pieces of acrylic together, the table saw for cutting acrylic to the size I needed, and last but not least, a table to use the edge of the table to make the bend of the acrylic.
The steps I did to accomplish this was first, do some research on how to bend acrylic and asked for help from those who have worked with acrylic before to learn correct technique. Now getting on to the actual building. Using the heat gun to the max temperature (depending on the power of the heat gun), I turned the fan all the way up and evenly went across the acrylic on the area that I wanted to create a bend from one side to another at a steady pace, avoiding direct contact for too long. Even with just a couple of seconds, too much heat can create unwanted bubbles on the acrylic. If you don't have enough heat, it can cause the acrylic to break. I would move the heat gun back and forth on the front side for a little bit, then when I saw the slightest bend taking place, I would repeat the same thing on the bottom side of the acrylic, again taking precaution to not use too much heat. After repeating that several times, you will notice the acrylic will fall almost as soon as it is completely heated up. When it fell then I would create the bend using the edge of the table to make a smooth and straight bend. To bond the pieces together if needed, I used some industrial hot glue on the edges of the sides I needed attached and bonded them together.
For my hello worlding, since I had no experience or prior knowledge with bending acrylic, I searched up information and video tutorials on how to bend acrylic, what tools are used, what to do and what not to do, and most importantly, I asked a fellow senior (Ben Samuels) to teach me the ways of bending acrylic because he has done so many of these sorts of projects. He showed me good technique on doing so and gave me the chance to bend some myself for practice while he watched me and gave me feedback on my technique. That helped me so much on the day of the Hackathon, as I knew better what I was doing. Overall, this project was very fun to make even though my first one did not come out as I expected but learned from mistakes and improved on the other ones I made. I learned many things that I will for sure keep in mind for future acrylic projects and some traits overall that I plan to apply to future projects.
