Acrylic bender heating element

Hey every one! Wondering if anyone has made a bender before and if so I got a few questions about the heating element/wire.
So I have the base made with 3x pieces of plywood and an aluminum channel down the middle and a few hinges, basic diy bender. I took a cheap hair dryer apart and took out the heat coil, I tried to rig it up but when I plug it in, sparks fly and the coil gets red hot in a few seconds and then breaks. So, to those who have made one before, how did you rig up the heating element? Can I just cut a basic cord and run one wire to one side of the heat coil and the other wire to the other side of the coil? If so how quickly will the coil heat up and is it going to throw sparks every where? I'd like to try and do something with out the risk of electricuting myself also.
Can anyone chime in, lol tips/tricks or Info on this would greatly be appreciated, thanks in advance as well

I think heating coils require special wire?
I've never made an electric one, but I've bent thin plexi with a torch by heating a pipe. Wire should be better if you can get this figured out.
Either way, I'm pretty certain I could burn the house down without one. GL :2cents:

One of the mods, jason87 I believe had threads a couple years ago where he documented his diy acrylic work and he has/had a bender. Hit him up

I dont understand this build. What touches the acrylic to bend it?

I go ghetto and use a heat gun until the acrylic gets soft and ghen i use a 2x4, some clamps and a table to make the bend. But if there is a better, easier and more accurate eay of doing it then im all ears.

Guess i gotta check out Google and see if i can find what you guys are talking about. :)

Aahhhh...so something like this?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wVEf7PfuKxo

I still dont know what a good heating element will be but something like this video shows is pretty nice since its adjustable.

^^^ yup just like this, issue with this is the variable transformer is no longer avail. As far as the wire. I've seen a few videos of people using a hair dryer coil as the heating element, just not sure exactly how to wire it up with out sparking up a fire or shocking myself. Another option for the heating element wire is kanthal wire which can be found at a vape shop, with this it would be cool to hook a vap mod up to the wire and be able tp control the temp of wire. Overall im just very unclear what would be a safe way to get this to work. Has anyone ever used a hot wire to cut Styrofoam? I'm guessing the wiring would be similar to this.

Hey, I built one a few years back and it worked great. First thing I did was wind it up 2 wires thick. This provided a little extra resistance and kept it from getting too hot. Second thing that kept getting me was the 2 ends of the wire shorting together. Finally figured out this was through the aluminum channel. This sounds like the problem you're having. I have a thread on this buried somewhere here, I'll see if I can dig it out and post it up. I don't have the bender anymore but I'm pretty confident I could build another. I used a PC power supply with the 12V channel. This provided plenty of power, and heat, to bend some pretty thick acrylic. If you do this method just know there are 2 pins on the motherboard power connector that must be shorted for it to function. This is like a built in fail safe on most PC power supplies. I don't remember the exact pins but they are normally a black and green wire next to each other near the center of the connector.

Just noticed, it sounds like you may be trying to use AC power! Don't use AC power, use DC! There is an AC to DC power converter in hair dryers that supplies the power to the wires, they don't get AC power to them.

Here is the thread where I built the bender and used it for an overflow box:
http://www.sdreefs.com/forums/showth...ge3&highlight=

Here is a thread where I built a small tank from the ground up using the bender:
http://www.sdreefs.com/forums/showth...ano&highlight=

Thank you, i appreciate the help. Ill give it a try.

Instead of a bunch of us DIY end up with spools of unneeded nichrome wire, I'm offering up for free sdreefers who can use 26 AWG Nichrome 80 Wire 100'. I only needed 3 feet for my project and the 97 feet worth was ebay bound.

This wire was part of a DC PS bending project on youtube.