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FormBox: A Faster, Cooler Vacuum Former for the Modern Maker

This week in stuff-you-could-make-yourself-but-won’t news: the FormBox tabletop vacuum former just went supernova on Kickstarter by spelling out its potentially hip and profitable uses. Vacuum forming isn’t new, it isn’t hard, and it isn’t expensive, but it is a path into small scale manufacture that many new entrepreneurs haven’t encountered.

The FormBox campaign offers a quick introduction to what a sheet of hot plastic can do… that 3D printing can’t. Among their proposed uses are custom molds for chocolate, geometric terrarium lids, concrete cacti planters, and what appears to be either loose architectural modeling or really bad tabletop RPG tiles.

If you’ve messed with forming and molding personally, this looks pretty straightforward. But for those without personal vacuum forming experience, the idea of a super fast method for producing formed parts can be shocking. It lacks the internal walls and resolution of 3D printing, but it can be a fantastically easy tool for prototyping, creating small parts, or developing molds for secondary products. 

As such, the FormBox was developed to fit the “modern maker” niche of new designers who might be tech-savvy but manufacturing-limited. The product is small, easy to use and powered by a household vacuum cleaner. But it is also aimed at multi-mode users, with its Mayku online library of projects and instructions, where users can show off their work to share or sell. (Like a Shapeways platform for manual reproduction.) 

They anticipate that a cool 3D printed design, once printed, might be more replicable, scalable and sellable if combined with quick forming. 

The tools of the last decade totally changed small “maker” business, between online platforms like Etsy and Instructables, and tech like 3D printing and ShopBots. These digital and mechanical tools have aligned to make makerism increasingly visible and achievable to people without formal training, and it’s led to the individual-scaling of a lot of processes. 

While this has all democratized certain elements of design and production, it simplifies the products too. The FormBox team explicitly mentions their goal of making both products and tools simpler and simpler, and at least in this case they seem to be achieving it. There are already small forming tools on the market, and enough DIY vacuum forming plans and projects online to fill dozens of Instructables pages, but this standalone tool hit a nerve. 

Can you imagine professional uses for desktop vacuum forming? Are there other types of tools you’ve wished for on a personal scale?