Vacuum creating

[beefcake]

https://www.mayku.me
I saw this on Facebook. Quite expensive but a vacuum former you can use at home easily. Could be good for making terrain. However the price would not really make it worthwhile. $400+

[nic-e]

To be honest you can do just as well with a home made version. you probably aren't going to get £400 of use out of that mini one and it isn't really good enough to run as part of a production line.

[sundayhero]

Vacuum creating is difficult, in fact the easy part is making the vacuum machine, the hard part is to find a way to heat uniformly the piece of styrene or clear lexan, and to keep it attached to its frame. 

That's a slot car racing enthusiast who says that  Finally, I used it only to make lighter car windows, and small competition light interiors. Making cars was frustrating and not fun. So I can't imagine how to make terrain, even if I know some companies make it (but probably use better tools than me  ).

[Connectamabob]

It's not that hard. At least not for the types of plastic commonly used in modeling. I made one when I was a teen using an electric griddle plate as the heater and a pair of window screen frames as the plastic holder.

That machine was rubbish for a lot of reasons, but it did the heating part well enough.

A few years ago I did something where I heated the plastic by hand using a painters heat gun, because I couldn't be bothered to build a whole machine for one project. It actually worked quite well, just more slowly. I've seen lots of good cheap solutions online that other people have done, like lining a box with foil and inserting a heat gun through a hole in one corner so the hot air swirls around inside the box, or putting a pair of electric hot plates in a box with a heat spreader/diffuser made of dollar store aluminum baking pans.

IMO it's maybe $50 hard, not $400 hard.

The biggest complication is actually what type of plastic you're planning on forming. Sundayhero was probably working with polycarbonate (the most popular material for RC and slot cars, due to its stiffness to weight ratio), which is notorious for being extremely fussy to thermoform. I wouldn't take experiences with polycarbonate as representative of vac forming in general. For our uses (and most uses, TBH), I'd recommend polystyrene/ABS for opaque plastic, and PETG for clear, as they are super forgiving to work with, and accept glue and paint very easily as well. Steer clear of acrylic, polycarbonate, or PVC until/unless you have more experience, though TBH those are special use case materials, so you'll probably never need to go there anyway.

TBH, there's bigger problems with the machine linked to there. Powering a $400 vac former with your vacuum cleaner is lame. Vacuum cleaners can work in a pinch, but if you want to get really nice pulls, spring for a vac pump and a small air tank so you can do a 2-stage setup. The rest of that machine is piddling stuff you can DIY for a few bucks here and there. Including the heating element, which would be super easy since the machine is so small.

Basically, for around $100 (potentially much less, if your scrounge-fu is good) you could DIY something much, MUCH better than the machine they're asking $400 for.

[beefcake]

, so I guess this is for the lazy with lots of money then.

[nic-e]

, so I guess this is for the lazy with lots of money then.

I think of it more as a toy for people who want to thing of themselves as creative but aren't  really going to make much who don't realise that this is a very sumps and basic production technique.

[Connectamabob]

As a rule I'm always leery of any commercial product that appears to reverse the economy of scale. Even a niche product without enough customers to make things truly cheap should still be more economical to buy than DIY (including labor) for a given level of quality. If it isn't, that means whoever's behind it is probably doing things that would make anyone with actual business or manufacturing experience suck air in through their teeth.