Home made

If a fellow wanted to make some custom light lenses how could it be done? Seems like a great way to be a little different in this cookie cutter world.

 

One of the Scandinavian HAMBers did this, it should be in the TechOmatic

 

Tail lights???

Buy lense material that can usually be found at any number of custom car/street rod suppliers. Make a buck ( wood will do) or find something to bend them over then you heat the plastic and bend it over your buck.

You can use a hot gun, or some folks just heat it in the overn on a cookie sheet.

if you want something like a bullet shaped doodad or some other sting extreme those have to be vacumm formed.

 

I've always wondered if resin cast tail-lights would work ok.

 

I saw it done on some show on the speed channel. They made a wood buck then made a silicone mold from that and poured the resin in. The silicone mold made it easy to remove when it was hardened.

 

Some of the 2-part liquid resins shrink a little when they cure. So if you want to try casting a lens, find out how much the resin shrinks and then make the mold bigger so that it shrinks back to that size.

A long time ago I made a silicone rubber mold of the plastic bird insert that goes in the chrome bird on the front of a '61 T-bird. I cast it in 2-part liquid acrylic resin with a little bit of blue-green dye. It came out nice, but it was about 1/8" shorter than the original one. It wasn't too bad looking when it was installed in the chrome, but didn't look perfect if you really looked hard at it.

If you cast a lens, try to keep the thickness of the acrylic the same throughout the lens. If you one area where it's fatter than the rest, that fatter part will kind of dimple in due to the shrinkage in that fatter part and make the surface look wavy.

I think heating and forming solid red plexiglass (acrylic) is an easier way to do it.

The factory made plastic lenses are injection molded -- melted and forced into a mold under extreme pressure.

 

It does, I made some taillights for my old 'vair with Castin Craft 2 part resin and a bunch of the transparent red. if you don't put enough dye in there, where it gets thin it'll look pink. that and make sure there is plenty of space inside for the bulb, resin has a lower melting point than regular taillight plastic.

I just went to ebay yesterday looking for small pices of red lucite, 3/16" thick by 12" x 12" for 4 bucks. remember to get some of that suspended ceiling prism stuff to back it with, or you'll just see the filament through the lens.