The machine needs at least 15 minutes to warm up before use
First, we clamped the styrene sheet under the heater.
We placed our wood piece directly under the styrene on the bottom stand. (Note that the vacuum/suction tube is in the middle of the stand. We placed pennies between the stand and wood piece so that there is a gap for a smooth suction.)
The heater heats the styrene up to a couple hundreds of degrees and we wait until the styrene appears to be quite flexible and hanging down a little (about 2 minutes)
When the styrene is ready, we raised the bottom stand so that the hemispheric molds are pressed up against the flexible styrene.
Then we pulled the yellow valve to activate the vacuum under the wood piece. Air is sucked out through the drilled holes and the gap and we instantly get a styrene mold of two hemisphere.
The foam hemispheres are basically melted to the styrene mold. So we cut the two styrene-foam hemispheres out, placed them on to the wood piece again and repeated steps 2 to 6 to form another layer of styrene over the first one. We did this twice
Since the two layers of styrene wouldn’t fuse together, we can easily remove the styrene-foam hemispheres from the 3rd layer of styrene with a chisel.
We discard the styrene-foam hemispheres and used the 3rd layer of styrene hemispheric mold for our ball.
