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[Brian Sommers]

I have not had a chance to find sintra being a holiday weekend all the custom sign places in my town are closed until Teusday, and the fact my home pc is down (hard drive crashed). I thought I would take the time to ask what I need to form, mold, and shape sintra as I have never worked with this material before? What tools will I need and so forth?

[Riya Morut]

A heat gun will be good.  If you can't get one of those, a hair dryer will do; you just have to heat the plastic longer.

[Slade Kel]

The bare minimum tools are a razor knife to cut it and a heat gun to shape it. You can grab one at Walmart or Lowes for about $20-30. You can also cut with tin snips, though for long cuts it'll cause the sintra to crack. I usually only use snips for trimming edges and whatnot.

Alternate methods are 'baking' and 'boiling'. For the former, you put the plate in the oven on 350 for about two minutes and for the latter you boil a pot of water and dip the plate in it until it becomes flexible. If you bake it, make sure you give the oven a moment for fumes to release when you first open it. Boiling ruins the pot, as the heated plastic releases toxic chemicals, so you can't use that pot to cook food in pretty much ever again.

[Zevlar Rayco]

I've discovered that a heatgun and a hot knife are just about all I need for sintra work. heat guns are usually dirt cheap from harbor freight tools and the hot knife can be found at hobby lobby or michaels.

[BLUERAM]

Yep harbor freight has them on sale right now for $9.99 usually $20, don't know how long the sale is.  For large peices I have been using a small space heater( the kind with the glowing nichrome wire) with the elements face up.  Does a wonderful job but you have to remove some of the safety features to do this, namely the tip-over cut out and I also removed the HI-temp shut off.  Definitely not the safest thing to use but,  as long as you don't leave it unattended you should be fine.

[Brian Sommers]

Which is on sale the heat gun or the hot knifes I was just at my local Harbor freight and the heat gun was like $40 what wattage heat gun is preferable to use on sintra.

[BLUERAM]

Sorry, the heat gun.  They have 2 that I saw here locally: 1 usually $20 and 1 around $40.  I bought the cheap one a 1500 watt model with 2 power settings  122-570 F and 1112F.  I only briefly tested the gun and found that the low setting is more than enough to form sintra

[Brian Sommers]

Cool my pick one up but a cowork bought one for a one time project and is going to give it to me if she can find it. I am off on Wed and hope to find a local sign company that uses sintra so I can purchase some.  Have to buy a new dremil too my cat chewed my cord in two so that has also set me back.

[BLUERAM]

You know you can just replace the cord (or repair with butt-splices and tape)

[Salvo Mereel]

Never, EVER make butt armor, it's...stressfull... 

[Brian Sommers]

Well its like this the cord it uses  has a built in voltage regulator. its the mini from Harbor Freight and tool and its actualy in twom pieces and the cat chewed the voltage regulato cord in to two pieces and it gives me an excuse to but a larger more powerfull unit.

[Zevlar Rayco]

as the toolman woud say MORE POWER! (insert gorilla grunts here)

[Brian Sommers]

Have a new more powerful dremel actually its a black and decker rotary tool and it works better than my original. Still looking for a sintra supplier found one who is not to expensive but am still looking. Also purchased a heat gun with an accessory pack and a 5 -1 hobby tool kit which is a hot knife as well as a soldering iron. So I hope to pick up working on jet pack real soon.

[Dar Kyram]

If you have difficulty finding sintra, I suggest trash can. It's the way I went for my armor.

[Brian Sommers]

My armor is complete for the most part, I am needing flat peices to make my jet pack so its not too heavy. I have found that with my design trash cans are to curved.

[Dar Kyram]

Oh, okay