Comments on: Vacuum former toy

By: JB

JB — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 22:18:18 +0000

I can still smell the plastic!

By: Ted

Ted — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 02:38:26 +0000

Just talking with my brothers at christas gathering. We loved this toy.
Where can we buy one?

By: alex

alex — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 03:33:41 +0000

nice post, thanks for the great info, cant wait to read more from you.

By: alan

alan — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 05:16:04 +0000

I have one on my shelf. I bought it 15 years ago form FineScaleModeler’s ad. I also broght it all the way from Louisiana to Taipei, Taiwan.

By: jules54

jules54 — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 21:06:46 +0000

I remember these toys!! They were a lot of fun!

I don’t remember what I made, but the process was entertaining. You had to be careful not to burn yourself.

By: featheredfrog

featheredfrog — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 03:48:31 +0000

A big-person’s vacu-form toy can be built from a book at http://lindsaybks.com/dgjp/djgbk/vacf/index.html

gingery rocks

By: mem

mem — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 09:31:30 +0000

Cheers SlurmMcKenzie for the link, was most enjoyable. I am wishing I got the toy in this article as a kid, still I did get a chemistry set with acids (very diluted) and a bunsen burner – had some great time cooking up stuff with my chem set.

By: John C. Reid

John C. Reid — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:55:59 +0000

@luxorlasvegasnv – naw, they wouldn’t sell anything dangerous to kids. Just make sure to look for the made in china label and you will know your good. P.S. you wouldn’t happen to be interested in a set of lawn darts, would you?

By: ehrichweiss

ehrichweiss — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 21:11:28 +0000

I have one of the new models, and a refill kit(plastic sheets + molds) to go with it.

By: cmholm

cmholm — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 18:44:01 +0000

I made the creepy crawlers as a six/seven year old, without any parental supervision, once the folks watched me make it work the first couple of times.

Just to make this more interesting, this was while I was a Marine brat in a Japanese rental, tatami floors and untreated wood all around, packed in amidst a few hundred similar homes the USAAF had somehow missed twenty years previously.

To top it off, I probably wasn’t the major fire risk… that position held by my mom, who stoked the fire under the cast iron soaking tub whenever we took a bath, Japanese style.

By: luxorlasvegasnv

luxorlasvegasnv — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 18:12:25 +0000

it is dangerous?

By: John C. Reid

John C. Reid — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 17:31:58 +0000

@twistedsymphony – I can tell you from my experience making many molds, even prototyping molds are never “quick and easy”. Typically making a mold takes us several weeks. It does not matter if we make it out of wood or fiberglass, it is always time and labor intensive. If you have a CNC milling machine, that could speed things up however. We no longer do(a fire robbed us of it) so everything is done with a table saw, a drill press, some hand routers, and a large amount of sandpaper and time.

By: twistedsymphony

twistedsymphony — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 16:08:28 +0000

a larger scale garage version of this would be AWESOME for helping to make molds for automotive body and interior parts. I can’t tell you how often I’ve wanted a quick and easy way to make a mirrored version or a duplicate of a small-ish (1sq ft) plastic part.

By: John C. Reid

John C. Reid — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 15:57:01 +0000

LOL! I do this on a MUCH larger scale. We are a small job shop that make things mostly for the RV industry, but all the cutting and finishing is still dome by hand. We basically have two machines with both top and bottom platens, and we make parts up to 100″ in length. To see more you can visit http://www.custommfgidaho.com, but what is really surprising to most is just how little of the process is automated. We even make a large number of our molds by stacking MDF and cutting and sanding it down to the shapes we need.

By: paul

paul — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 15:18:53 +0000

nice copy from gizmodo, I wish this site was posting original material