Vacuum formers are still fairly rare in our community, so it was a surprise to see that in the 1960s Mattel marketed one as a toy. It used a hot plate to mold plastic sheets into various shapes. The design was updated by Toymax in the early ’90s to use a light bulb heating element to make car bodies, like some sort of manly Easy-Bake Oven. The home-built machines we’ve seen are a much larger scale. In 2005, we posted [Ralis Kahn]’s version that employed an electric grill as the heating element. [drcrash] has since built on those plans, hoping to develop an even cheaper device.

[via Gizmodo]

Nothing says Christmas like Nintendo 64 and benheck forum member [SifuF] has a treat for you. His Nintendo Sixtyfree Lite-R stuffs all the guts of at Nintendo 64 into a compact handheld package. It features dual joysticks and triggers. The display is a PSone screen with all of the extra board trimmed away. The part that really makes this project shine is the case. It’s vacuum-formed 2mm sheets of polystyrene. Another nice touch was the volume and screen brightness. They’re adjusted by holding down start and then using the other buttons. It doesn’t have internal batteries, but can run off of a 7.2V Infolithium.

[via Engadget]