Could you just get by with a heat gun?
And I don't know what they use, but I'd check out some tutorials for making a vacuum forming machine to see if they have any good tricks. It's also very similar to your specific usecase.
this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
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I second vacuum forming for this application. The shape you want is tailor made for that method.
Vacuum forming would be perfect for this - you can get cheap DIY kits on amazon or just use a shopvac + picture frame with holes drilled in it, way more consistant results than trying to rig up nichrome wire.
What is the heat deflection temeprature of the plastic you're working with? Unless you really need the red-hot temperature of nichrome wire, use a PTC (positive temperature coefficient) heater instead. They are ceramic (often sold as "ceramic heaters") and as they heat up their resistance increases very consistently and they reach a stable equilibrium at a particular design temperature and wattage. These are the lego of electrical heating you are looking for. They are found in almost every consumer product that needs safe, consistent but not excessive heat. They literally can't reach excessive levels of heat they basically just stop creating more when they get too hot, as if they had a built-in thermostat, but as a physical property it can't "fail". They are safe and reliable, albeit not a particularly efficient method of creating large amounts of heat, at the scale you're working at they're fine and much safer than nichrome wire.
I have several PTC heaters too. The post is really just an example of a straightforward application. I would actually like to try building complex automation using mostly simple base materials and where time is not the primary constraint. Like what complexity is possible using only an automotive battery, a small solar panel array and household recycled waste. Like one idea is to make simple composite tiles from cardboard, rice/wheat glue, and aluminum soda cans. So the quest would be to create a machine that only needs a rough stack of random cardboard, a container of discarded cans, some rice or wheat + water, and something like old thrift store silverware/cutlery or any source of recycled cheap steel.
I'm most curious about a mindset like in situ resource utilization. So how might a machine manage power to maintain itself, like sharpening its own tools and maintaining itself as much as possible to take simple inputs and create a required output.
The nichrome wire is interesting for its broad range of applications, except for how to form it in situ. Like if you had a robotic arm and nichrome wire on mars and all you need to do is make a heater for a special shape of object, it would likely still be a large challenge... Unless there is some easy methodology for forming the heater wire.