For the sake of not writing too massive a post here I will summarise a stressful week of testing, testing and retesting vacuum forms in order to produce the formed body parts you see in the above image - 2 body panels and 2 bumpers.
So in summary here is how I vacuum formed a body panel:
Although what you don’t want to happen is to over heat the plastic and leave gaps where it might over stretch and burst like this:
So in a nutshell, that’s how that was done! although, due to my slightly hasty and heavy handedness, my moulds were not as good as the should have been resulting in the glossy finish really emphasising the bumps and blemishes of the moulds:
To get around this I have sanded back all the plastic and applied filler (super-rock-solid-car-body-filler no less!) to all the key areas where the finish was not up to par. The matt finish came out really nice while doing this but I think I will spray it back up to a glossy finish. Also the sanded filler makes the body panels look a bit mouldy!