This week I’m back aboard good old Spiffy, our 44 ft hurricane-damaged Antares 44 catamaran, staring down a painful reality: our big compound-curved, 10 mm acrylic windows would cost about $20,000 to replace. So I decided to see if I can thermoform our own. No promises, because I’ve never done this before and thick cast acrylic can be a bit of a diva, but if we can make this work it’s a boatload of savings—and potentially a more affordable option for other owners too. I finished turning last week’s “biggest aluminum box I’ve ever built” into a functioning acrylic-bending oven, added insulation, wired up 6 kW worth of heaters, and set up a PID controller so we could actually hold temperature. For molds, I used scrap aluminum test forms and PTFE tape as a release (spoiler: it releases, but it also mars the surface). We ran our first real test at around 165–171°C, and the acrylic formed surprisingly well—compound curves included. The big takeaways: this is extremely promising, cleanliness inside the oven is going to matter a lot (rockwool fibers are not invited), and next up is better heat distribution, better release methods, and scaling up to larger/tinted pieces while we wait on high-temp epoxy for the final window molds.