How can plastics be bent or curved

JavaScript seems to be disabled in your browser. For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser. Did we ever tell you that there are two main categories of Engineering Plastics? You probably knew already though or had heard something about it before, but as with everything else we try and bring you at Direct Plastics, we hope one day this just may come in handy.

Heat has no malleable effect and plastics such as Tufnol fall into this category. Why this may be important While the thermoplastic are great as they allow fabricators to make all sorts of tremendous things. If as an engineer you machine an item out of a thermoplastic and it gets anywhere near its softening temperature during its life, it will stand a good chance of changing shape particularly if its under load. To bend your acrylic sheet with a hair dryer, we recommend that you keep the outflow opening at least 5 centimetres away from the surface of the sheet.

From time to time, pull lightly on the edge of the acrylic sheet to check flexibility. When bending acrylic, place a batten along the fold line to get the straightest possible fold.

Handy tips if you are going to bend with a convection oven: Never place the acrylic sheet on a grid, but on a flat, heat-resistant tray. Place the tray in the oven to preheat it and allow it to heat up gradually.

When the set temperature has been reached degrees Celsius , leave the acrylic sheet for 4 to 5 minutes. Thinner sheet thicknesses up to 5 millimetres will be ready to bend more quickly. To make a sharp fold, leave the acrylic sheet on top of the heat-resistant tray and fold it along a batten. It will now remain in the form you require without springing back. After cooling, the material retains the shape of the mould. All thermoplastic synthetic materials can be bent when heated. Polycarbonate and PETG can also be bent temper shaped when cold.

This technique involves forcing a plastic sheet into the desired shape in its cold state. The sheet is then heated up to a lower temperature max. This removes the tension from the material, which retains the desired shape after cooling. The advantages of this processing technique are that there is no visible difference between the unprocessed and processed material, and the cost of producing a large series is relatively low. We are able to bend virtually any plastic sheet for you into any shape and for various applications.

If you need an 'extreme' shape and maximum shape retention, then opt for heated bending.