Using the vacuum sealer and indentation mold

After the partial success of using the syringe to create a vacuum, we ordered a $20 "Vacuum food saver".  We were hoping that this would work good enough because real vacuum chambers cost in the hundreds of dollars.

Here's some pictures of reoflex in the vacuum food saver.

   

Notice the level of the material in the middle and the right picture.  As the pressure decreases in the vacuum chamber the air bubbles get pulled out of the cup.  As the pressure decreases the volume of air increases.  (PV=nRT) So, as you can tell by the level of the cup the air inside the reoflex is taking up more volume but it's still in the reoflex plastic.  I think this is an indication that the pressure low enough to pull all the air bubbles out of the reoflex.  If it was all solid material in the cup then there would be no expansion.

It definently helps but it doesn't solve the problem completely.  One more idea we had for the mold was to engrave our names and some product information on the back of the keychain.  To do this the cnc machine would first put our names onto the the material we would make a mold of.  Then when the mold was made of the mold inverse it had raised areas where the text was.  So finally, when the actual mold is made it's an indentation again.

To do a tryout of the concept we engraved the info into a piece of wood we had around the lab.  The text didn't look very good on the piece of wood.  We engraving was too deep.  Since it was just a test we didn't want to spend more time on it so we went with it.  In the picture you can't really tell on the mold but the text is raised on it.  The text looks really bad on the mold.  It stuck to the wood a little when we were trying to take the wood off the mold.  I think if the grooves aren't as deep this will not be as much of an issue.