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Mold-a-Rama Machines Still Alive and Kicking
theodp writes "The Chicago Tribune reports that bubble-topped Mold-a-Rama machines are still delighting folks, cranking out kitschy get-em-while-they're-hot plastic Abe Lincoln busts, triceratops, and charging rhinos. Some vintage figures are commanding over $150 on eBay — a Paul Bunyan figure from a Minnesota machine no longer in operation recently fetched $210."
Buwahahahahah!
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Will someone please post the article text??
The age of new media that was so greatly proclaimed in the early days of the internet eventually turned out to be news stories with plain text and NOT A SINGLE FUCKING PICTURE of the thing they were talking about. NOT ONE SINGLE FUCKING IMAGE of a 'Mold-a-rama' machine.
No, I'm not googling for an image. The story should include an image or three, one of the machine, one of an expensive bit of plastic from a long time ago, and another of a new bit of plastic.
Get with the technology. People demand visual satisfaction. No wonder everyone eventually ends up looking at porn online. Visual Satisfaction.
As the article notes, they have them at the Henry Ford Museum.
I have Abe Lincoln's head (the museum has the chair he was sitting in when he was shot), a figure of Henry Ford and a locomotive.
I think they also have machines that make the Wienermobile and other museum attractions as well.
Not the best reason to check the place out, but HFM and Greenfield Village are great places to go. It is an amazing and sometimes weird collection of the industrial era.
Old technology proves a modern-day classic
By Eric Benderoff
Published September 4, 2006
One of my favorite things in the technology universe doesn't surf the Web or plug into your ears. The end result doesn't do anything actually, yet the process has thrilled millions of people for four decades.
Odds are strong that if you've visited a zoo or museum since the Johnson administration, you've bought at least one of the delightfully kitschy and colorful products these bubble-topped time machines create: an Abe Lincoln bust, a triceratops or a charging rhino.
The best part is they look the same today as they did back when Elvis ruled Las Vegas. Perhaps better, at $1.50 a pop they remain the most affordable souvenirs one can buy during an afternoon marveling at elephants or a World War II-era submarine at the Field Museum.
The Mold-a-Rama machine still delights because you watch the made-on-the-spot process before gingerly picking up your still-warm memento.
I bought five Mold-a-Rama creations this summer, an elephant and rhino from a recent trip to Brookfield Zoo and three dinosaurs from a visit to the Field Museum.
"The Field Museum is all dinosaurs. We used to have a gorilla mold there, but it wasn't selling very well, so we turned it into a T-Rex mold," said Bill Jones, who, with his two sons, keeps the 21 Mold-a-Ramas in the Chicago area humming. (A gorilla from the Field Museum recently sold for $85 on eBay, by the way.)
Keeping the machines working is no small feat, considering a Mold-a-Rama machine hasn't been built in 40 years.
There are 11 Mold-a-Ramas at Brookfield Zoo, two at the Lincoln Park Zoo, four at the Field Museum and four at the Museum of Science Industry, where you can buy Bill's favorite, a replica of the U-505 submarine.
The William A. Jones Co., based out of Bill's home in Brookfield, operates 68 Mold-a-Rama machines across the Midwest and in Texas. You can buy a bat mold at the Milwaukee County Zoo, a Komodo dragon in San Antonio or an "antique car" at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.
"We couldn't do a Model A or a Model T, so it's a combination," said Bill, who got into the business in 1969. "I thought the machines were 40 years old then."
As the end of summer looms this Labor Day, the efforts of a 70-year-old man who gets to the Field Museum before 6:30 a.m. once a week to make sure a toddler and his dad still can enjoy the spectacle of making a plastic T-Rex should be applauded.
"We'll all be working Monday," said Paul Jones, Bill's 40-year-old son. "We just don't know where yet."
The charm of the Mold-a-Rama is its mesmerizing and simple technology. In the left-hand corner of each machine, you see the mold each makes. If you want one, and Bill figures roughly one of every 10 people who pass a Mold-a-Rama do, you pop your money in to activate the machine.
Four hydraulic cams start to move. The first and last closes the two sides of the mold together. Then another cam pushes plastic between the molds, followed by one that blows hot air in to make the figure hollow. Coolant then chills the mold because the figure was cooked between 225 and 250 degrees.
After roughly a minute, the two sides of the mold open, revealing your dinosaur or dolphin, before the final cam, that operates the scrapper, pushes your mold forward and drops it into the holding bin. But you need to wait a moment: It is still too hot to pick up right away, as my son always warns.
The dolphin at Brookfield Zoo is Jones' top producer.
"It outsells everything," he said, noting that machine produced 350 molds in one day during the height of summer.
Across the country, there are 130 machines working at 28 locations, said avid Mold-a-Rama collector Brennan Murphy, who owns 600 to 700 of the figures.
Murphy, 45, who grew up in Riverside but now lives in Florida, has 30 different colored T-Rex molds.
"The colors are different than the ones today," he said.
A Paul Bunyan figure f
You know what they say.. One man's trash in the hand is worth $200 on eBay.
Or something like that.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Found an image on Flikr there are some closeup shots of the insides as well. I'd never heard about these things before (coming from the UK) and this article piqued my interest.
I am NaN
wonder what a smoosh-faced wax lion goes for...
Mold-A-Rama is more than a cheap souvenir, it's a minute-long event. The noise, holding them upside down, the almost-too-hot plastic, the smell...they're a flash to childhood that only costs $1.
Just as long as the lion with the smooshed face doesn't start talking to me...
This guy's the limit!
From the article summary:
plastic Abe Lincoln busts
Well, naturally, that's something everybody should have: a plastic mold of Abe Lincoln's busts on their desk.
Shoot... I used to EAT those things. Kids just don't know the value of the stuff they're chewing on.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Wow, I have a small collection of these --somewhere(I think) --from when I was a kid from the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago. I didn't realize the machines were already 20 years old at the time.
I wonder if someone could make these machines today, if they chose to.
Nothing says "enlightenment" like a statue of a meditating Siddhartha Gautama Buddha with the word "Hollywood" inscribed in his robes. Next time I'm down that way I'll see if the Mold-A-Rama machine that made it is still in working order. Ommmmmmmm.....
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Many years ago I had a Lion made at the San Antonio Zoo.
I seem to remember it being a plastic that was slightly bronze colored, but the things I remember most about it was it being hot after the machine spit it out, and how amazed I was that it was hollow.
I have no idea what ever happened to that thing.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Mattel's Vac-U-Form was kind of like Mold-A-Rama, the Home Game!
Going to the bowling alley as a kid with my parents, this was the most amazing machine to me. Think this might be why I got into robotics.
Should modify them to mold chocolate...
Here's a good link http://www.replicationdevices.com/about_us.html
If you go to Niagara Falls, be careful of the one at Wonderfalls is still broken. All it ever puts out are smooshed-face lions.
Here's an interesting article about the Mold-a-Rama from the Business & Finance section of the Los Angeles Times, October 29, 1962: http://www.billyseven.net/mar/images/timesarticle. jpg
My favorite part is the final quote:
In the future. O'Dorisio said, the consumer will be able to purchase everything from a set of dishes to pocket combs, vases, goblets, ash trays and wearing apparel in the Mold-A-Rama.
Hey, does anyone know where there is a mold-a-rama girlfriend mold? $1.50 is pretty low cost, plastic is emotionally stable, and I bet she might fit in my coat pocket.
I had a ton of them and tossed them out! Dang. I had like a space shuttle (Challenger), Abe Lincoln, and a bunch of other stuff.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I take my not-so-narrow ass down to the Field Museum today for the King Tut exhibit (ALWAYS go as early as possible, it gets brutal later on).
As I'm hitting all the exhibits, I happen by the Mold-a-Rama machines downstairs near the McDonalds (the one with suitably outrageously inflated prices) and am thinking "Wow! They still have these things! How cool is that!"
And now you're reading my damn mind again!
Grrr. Lemme grab my tinfoil hat...wait, those would actually AMPLIFY the signal. CRAP!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
A triceratops and an unknown. Indeed, they do seem too hot to hold when they first come out.
http://mcdermot3.home.mindspring.com/Moldarama/Mol daFrameHome.html
l darama3.html
This shows some of the piping:
http://mcdermot3.home.mindspring.com/Moldarama/Mo
Table-ized A.I.
I've never seen one of those (that I remember). They don't seem to be very common on the west coast. I read where there is one in Hollywood, but I've never seen it (but haven't checked out every tacky little shop either).
Table-ized A.I.
I had a Mattel Vac-U-Form when I was in grade school back in the 1960's. I think I still remember how it worked. I would select a metal mold and place it on one side of the unit. On the other side I would insert a thin rectangular piece of plastic which I would would heat over the heating plate until the plasic was soft and warm enough to start to sag slightly. Then I would flip the plastic sheet over onto the mold and press the vacuum lever to suck the plastic tight against the metal mold. After it cooled enough to touch, I would cut out the molded plastic parts from the excess plastic. It was lot's of fun, I had my own little plasic factory.
My friends and I could buy the packages of plastic sheets at a nearby drug store. The metalized plastic sheets cost slightly more but looked best. Sometime later they came out with the "Creepy Crawlers" add-on for my Vac-U-Form which used the same heating plate. I got the add-on "Ceepy Crawler" set instead of the completely seperate "Creepy Crawler" set that several of my fiends had. With the "Creepy Crawler" add-on, I would select a different kind of mold and place it on the heating plate and squeeze some kind of liquid rubber or plastic into the mold. After cooking the rubber I would have several flexible rubber bugs to be removed from the mold. My friends and I would show each other the best bugs we had made in various colors.
I wonder what ever happend to my old Vac-U-Form and "Creepy Crawler" set? It was one of my favorite toys back when I was in grade school. They were the first plasic and rubber parts I had ever manufactured as a kid.
A couple of weeks ago I caught a 6 1/2-inch long by 1-inch wide centipede between my computer and my bed. I see them now and then here in Northern Arizona where I live. Well anyway, after freezing it in the freezer I found myself thinking that if I still had my old "Creepy Crawler" set, perhaps I could have somehow made realistic rubber replicas of the thing. It is really disgusting looking and not the kind of thing I would want to have in bed with me. Everyone that I showed it to gasped in horror and took a step or two backwards. Before freezing it, I placed it on a flat-bed scanner next to a ruler and coins and a paper clip for scale to record how big it was. It was not totally dead yeat and nearly got away. Stepping on them a time to two does not stop them because they just continue moving quickly with their remaining uninjured legs.
When I was a child, my family used to visit Chicago each summer and we'd usually make a trip to the Brookfield Zoo. We'd always end up with one or two of these molds each time... but sometimes we'd see one that we didn't have, and then the rest of the day seemed like an adventure to search out the aroma of molded plastic, trace it to a machine, and see if it was the particular figure (dolphin, gorilla, train, etc.) we sought.
Ahh, memories... almost makes me want to pack up my own family now, head to Chicago, and spend the day at the zoo pumping quarters into these machines all over again!
All your sig are belong to us.
They still have the machines at the San Antonio Zoo. I think the smell of hot wax is supposed to offset the animal smells or something. It was a lot of fun getting one of those wax castings as a kid. The best part is watching it get made. You put in your money, then you get to watch the two halves of the metal mold come together and get filled with hot wax. after a couple of minutes, it pops out your wax bear, giraffe, lion, elephant, etc. - still warm. You had to hold it just so to allow it to cool and finish hardening without burning your little fingers. What fun!
"Oh, say, can you see by the dawnzer lee light," sang Miss Binney
I remember when I was a youngin' going to the MOSI in chicago and getting, a submarine, and a tractor, and abe lincolns head, and i don't remember the other one :), but I loved watching the machine inject the goo and plop, out comes a buring hot plastic toy for fun to be had by all. In January my girlfriend and I went to the MOSI for my first time since those tike years, the machines were still their, in almost exactly the same spots (i had muscle memory of their exact locations :)), and once again I got all of them, and it was just as much fun, and they burnt my hands just as much as when I was a child :). ..
My desk neighbour has a U-505 submarine sitting on his monitor that he got last year at the Museum of Science and Industry. The mold for it is probably 50 years old and still going strong. (By the way, the new exhibition space for the U-505 is worth a trip to Chicago just to see that.)
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."--Feynman
I remember watching a Mold-A-Rama make me a yellow Space Needle when my parents took me to the 1962 World's Fair in Seattle. I was 5 or 6 years old at the time. My big sister got an orange Space Needle. For some reason this memory is as strong or stronger than actually riding the elevator to the top of the real Space Needle, or any other memory I have of the fair. I remember the smell, the hot plastic that had to cool upside down, and the seemingly interminable wait while the machine did its thing.
My Space Needle got thown away some years later, and though it would be nice to have one now, it wouldn't be worth $150 to me. $5.00, maybe...