by kudzu » Sat Mar 01, 2014 10:08 am
We have a heat gun so a while back I tried heat bending a small 1" thick pink foam panel. Heat only penetrated a certain amount, maybe 1/4 inch, in a reasonable length of time. With the need to keep the heat gun moving back & forth, you can only work on a relatively narrow panel without one end cooling off by the time you've gotten back to the other end. Though with patience the heat does slowly build up in the foam, it felt like forever before it penetrated a reasonable depth. I could get one side to bend but the other side stayed cool. So as the warm side stretched out the cool side just folded & squished with the tendency to try to expand back to it's original form. So you have to heat stretch one side, then go around & heat compress the other but because it's already in a folded, crumpled & mutilated form it doesn't compress uniformly so it is difficult to get it to heat uniformly. Certainly my lack of skill with the heat gun didn't help the process one bit.
You'd definitely need the heat to come from both sides & even then I'd think a 3/4" panel would be the thickest you'd want to try. The combo of using narrower panels, thinner panels, & only bending a small strip at a time made it take far too long. Basically the idea didn't work well for me. I can see how it would be possible but for me it would be impractical. My mind went through many different ways of doing it in a little basement shop. It could be done, I think. Though I'm definitely not going to be the girl to do it. If I was planning on doing a lot of building then maybe, but that's not part of my plan.
Aerodynamics have really been on my mind a lot though. For several reasons, I'm planning a standy. Even being towed behind my high roofline Transit Connect van (a model of poor aerodynamics) it's hard to make a standy aerodynamic & still allow for loading, unloading of my recumbent trike. I'm still going to do my best.