I have been trying out some work with plastics for one of my next projects. I wanted to add a bit of a flange to the end of a piece of PVC pipe. I thought, “What if I heat it up and shove it down over a bottle? Would that work?” It did, and I made the video below showing how it works.
Hi Eric – After a great demo at the S*P*A*M* Conference in Seattle about bending PVC we have totally gone away from using flame or a heat gun to melt PVC. We remove the head of a clothing steamer and use the hot steam. No fumes, no possibility of burning. It’s really slick. We have been able to get some really tight radii on some projects we have done. Thanks for keeping your blog going. My shop looks at it almost every day!
~P~
Bending with steam sounds much better! I’ve been meaning to build a steam box for bending wood; I bet it might work on PVC too.