Your all-in-one page of links for "Forming and Joining"

 

Mini-Jector Tutorial - oh yeah. Lots of good links here.

How To Bring up the Injection mold template in Ideas

Vacuum Former Tutorial

Prof. Ted Selker's Vacuum Forming Notes

Investment Casting-Proof that ABS models from the 3D printer do not melt out of a ceramic mold very well during investment casting.

Shop Cam for Inj. Molder and Vacuum Former Is the Shop empty?

Polymers, Metals, Ceramics, and other favorite materials: where to buy them, how to use them, and how they work

A very nice Welding Tutorial by Prof. Chris Csikszentmihalyi (pdf 268 k)

Weld, Braze, Solder, Glue, Screw? How to I join material A with material B? A little overview by *me*.

The Basics of Brazing and Soldering some guy's web page. pretty good.

 

*Wow! An injection molder! I wanna do it, too!:
Do you really? Injection molding is a lot of work. It's hard, and trained professionals may spend weeks tuning up a particular mold for optimal performance. So why bother? Usually, you won't. But it may be handy if you:

need many multiples
need a part made of a particular material
need good material properties
need to prototype a part for masss-production injection molding
need to in-mold parts (mold plastic around an existing part of dissimilar material)

If you don't need anything like that, consider alternatives like:

CNC machining
3D printing
stereolithography
casting (for multiples) using either a soft mold for plastic parts or a hard mold for metal parts
hand forming (clay-like epoxies, sculpey, etc.)

 

 

(collected and typed out, one letter at a time, by hayes@media.mit.edu)