Snowtrooper standing with his back to the camera, showing the backpack in all it's glory

The Backpack

photo of the metal mold for the backpack.  The mold was made to be flipped over on teh vacuumform table so you could vacuumform both sides of teh mold, ensuring that the vacuumformed pieces  would fit together during assembly.
photo of the final vacuumformed plastic backpack

Our steel front/back mold was made so the mold could be flipped over on the vacuumform table. This allows you to vacuumform both sides of the mold, ensuring that the final vacuumformed pieces would fit together during assembly. The metal fabricators that I had build this mold had never done this type of plug mold before, but I assured them that this was the best way for me to be sure the final vacuumformed pieces would match up in assembly.

metal side plug mold for vacuumforming
vacuumformed plastic of side mold

The side plug mold was milled out of a block of industrial grade Aluminium. We vacuumform this part twice to get the two side plates for the assembled backpack.

There is a sad note to this metal mold proect. IT cost us about $1000.00 to have these parts milled out. After all that energy and money, the molds were manufactured inncorrectly. The side mold was made to the exact specifications provied, while the front/back mold was made 1 cm shorter from top to bottom than specified. This means the parts will not match up immediately. We had to spend about 2 hours cutting/tweaking the final vacuumformed pieces so that the backpack would fit together.

(More Info coming soon)

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