Vacuum Formed Dust Covers

Vacuum forming was suggested by APHollings to a premier supplier of music concert lighting control consoles, to produce hard dust covers.
The client supplies consoles that fit into a large laptop sized bag, therefore the cover had to be close fitting. Within the design their logo was required to be included, to achieve this a CAD file was provided.

APH machine shop translated this into a CAM cutter path to CNC a vacuum form tool in resin tooling board. The tool was mounted onto an MDF board and vented. Because the finished dust cover was to tightly clip over the console, undercuts were needed. This meant that the forming was locked onto tool once cooled, therefore releasing of tool had to be quite forcible. However our design allowed for sufficient material to be trimmed back leaving a clean part, that was fully finished with smooth edges, essential for the cover and frequent handling. The volumes are ongoing requirement.