All right, everyone. A lot of you have seen my soda can sculpture collection. All of these things are made out of soda can glue and paint, with an occasional piece of plastic or maybe an LED light. I've said for the longest time that these are soda can sculptures.

This is the bare minimum of what you need, but if you want to get a little bit fancier, you can add a few extra tools and make some pretty complicated sculptures. Once again, if you want to go to the next level, let me show you these

items. One good tool to buy, one good thing to buy would be a doming block set. A doming block set. Basically, you take a corresponding piece—sure it fits—you would take a piece of aluminum. Of course, I've already put a little bit of a dent in there. Make sure it's lined up,

and then just tap it with a hammer, and you will get a pretty good dome. It's kind of hard to see out of that, of course. It works way better with a hammer, and as you can tell, there are multiple sizes. That's how you can get some pretty

nice compound curves. The most expensive tool that I have, and actually one of the less necessary tools, is this English wheel. Basically, you can use the graduated wheel; they go from relatively flat to more curved. You put it in here, you tighten this up a little bit, you put

your metal in, and you roll it back and forth, back and forth, so that way you can get large compound curves, much like a doming block, but these are obviously going to be for larger pieces with less pronounced domes. That English wheel was probably $150. Really, you don't need it unless you

Really want to go all out. Okay, back to some cheap stuff. I have an assortment of debossing tools – basically, just tools with little different ends we can press into the metal and create textures. I have homemade little pokers (not necessary). Also, I have a variety of hemostats to be able to

lock pieces together while they're drying. Straight edges, just a little bit of things that will improve… uh, a place for my pencil, Sharpie, and a ballpoint pen; a place for a variety of different shapes; uh, tweezers that I've made for my

projects. These are custom tweezers; like this one is custom. I heated it up red hot, bent it so I can, like, get into places and hold things. So it's kind of like that, you know, you just… you learn what you need. Another

thing that really helps is a rotary tool that we can sand, grind, cut, drill. That really helps out. And finally, we have a very cool vacuum forming machine.

I just got it; very cool item. And you can get these for under $100 all day long on Amazon and eBay. How does it work? I don't have the vacuum forming plastic yet to show you, but essentially what you do is this controls the heat lamp that is the top unit; it does swivel out of the

way. What you would do is you would open this up, put a piece of plastic that's made for vacuum forming, lock it into place. You'll take whatever you are trying to vacuum form – say, like these little vernier calipers – you would swivel this

Around, find the height that you like. Turn on the heat. Once that uh, plastic starts kind of sagging and it looks like it's soft enough, then you would quickly turn off the heat, turn on the vacuum like that, keep it on though, and drop this down and that

plastic would suck down. Then you would give it a few seconds for it to cool, then pull the plastic off, and you should have a nice piece of plastic that formed around this, or whatever you are vacuum forming. Pretty cool tool! Now, why is that helpful? Some of my cars have wind

screens, also like... we'll see like the Batmobile; those windows. It would have been cool if I could have vacuum formed them. This A-10 Intruder, I used a piece of plastic and a lighter and formed it around a piece of whittled wood, but as

you can tell, it doesn't fit perfectly. See the seam at the back? So that's why it would be helpful. Instead of making a plane that has a hot-glue canopy, I could actually make a clear bubble canopy and test fit it and make it look

more accurate. So there you go; some of the tools that I use to make a lot of these soda can sculptures. I hope that was informative without being too boring. If you have questions, please let me know and I'll do my very best to answer.

Vacuum forming Soda Can Sculptures

JF777

Introduction to Soda Can Sculptures and Basic Tools

The sculptures are primarily made of soda cans, glue, and paint, with occasional plastic or LED additions.

Additional tools can create more complex sculptures.

Doming block sets create domes by tapping aluminum with a hammer.

An English wheel creates larger compound curves, but is expensive and less necessary.

Debossing tools add textures, while hemostats hold pieces during drying.

Other helpful tools include custom tweezers and a rotary tool for sanding, grinding, cutting, and drilling.

An affordable vacuum forming machine is introduced.

The machine uses heat and vacuum to shape plastic around objects.

This is useful for creating clear canopies and windows for the sculptures, improving accuracy.

Example of using a lighter and plastic to form a canopy, highlighting the imperfections compared to vacuum forming.