Hello!
I'd like to show you some photos, of a vacuform machine I built myself years ago. After reading about the Mattels, that were almost impossible to get, especially in my part of the world, I decided to build a vacu machne myself. It consists of a vacu table (the lower part), a sliding frame, and the heater (the upper part).
Normally, you put a positive form on top of the vacu table and pull a heated plastic plate over it. The vacuum is provided by a vacuum cleaner.
The vacu table is a metal box with the top side made of an universal printed circuit board - it's heat resistant and has nice, fine holes in it. The heating element is also a metal box, with components salvaged out of an old, russian electric baking oven installed, like the electrical connector, or the ceramic tubes on which the heating wire is strung. The frame can be taken out of the machine, for easier instalation of a new plastic sheet.
Here are some photos:
And here's a 1:33 Bf-109G canopy I made using this machine:
In case of any questions, please don't hesitate to ask. Thanks for reading, and have a nice day
Paweł