Hi guys, welcome back aboard good old Spiffy—our 44 ft hurricane-damaged DIY catamaran project boat. For the last couple of weeks I’ve been deep in what I can only describe as the great thermal forming adventure, because if I can reliably thermoform our massive 10 mm acrylic windows myself, it’s going to save us a truly silly amount of money. This week was all about getting the oven closer to “real-world usable”: I built an outer enclosure to keep the rock wool insulation where it belongs (and out of the oven when the lid opens), tied the inner and outer skins together, and added a thermal break using high-temp silicone so the outside doesn’t turn into the surface of the sun. Of course, Captain Dum Dum (me) didn’t plan everything perfectly, so I had to rip out a hinge idea that wasn’t going to work, weld in a patch because one sheet of aluminum was inexplicably short, and accept that my once-sexy oven might now be… cosmetically challenged. I also walked through the “is this worth it?” math: nearly $20k for a set of windows versus roughly $5k in materials for the oven, molds, and acrylic—meaning about $15k saved, plus the potential to help other Antares owners later. To wrap it up, I ran heat tests up to about 170°C (350°F). The outside stayed surprisingly cool, the handle stayed cold, stratification looked minimal, and the hinge survived—so next week we should be able to jump much closer to actual window-forming tests (and maybe add a counterbalance so the lid doesn’t bonk anyone in the head).