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Comment by bediger4000 | Hacker News Reader

There were some very weird toys in the 70s. I recall an actual injection molder (not the "Thingmaker", that was just heating thermoplastic) that could be used to make small soldiers that smelled vaguely of dog excrement. It had a hopper that you filled with pellets of some kind of polymer, and a plunger that injected melted polymer into a mold. I coveted this one. I haven't been able to find anything on this one, due to information camouflage: all I can google up is references to injection molded toys, and companies that do injection molding. The toy I'm remembering had you doing the injection molding yourself.

There was also the Mattel Strange Change: https://flashbak.com/youll-burn-your-fingers-remembering-mat...

Just like the "Thingmaker", everyone burned themselves on this one.

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> information camouflage

Ooh, a term for a relatable problem, apparently coined yesterday by this blog post, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32241020

"when piece of information A has a name similar to another, very different, much more popular piece B. This makes searching for A difficult because you always get results for B instead."

(Wow, Yandex was what found the HN submission, not Bing or Google, in whose results it was ironically camouflaged by other consecutive uses of the two words)

Toys with similar functionality to the Strange Change exist today, only they're made from polymers that expand upon absorbing water. Some are packaged in literal capsules - the pharmaceutical kind.

https://www.google.com/search?kgmid=/m/05p85hp

Close, but the Strange Change machine had a vise. You'd reheat the monster until it was rubbery, then cram it into the vise and squeeze it back into a square lozenge. Let it cool, and it stayed a square. They only lasted maybe 5 cycles before they didn't keep the square shape.

I'd love to know what that injection molding toy was if you ever figure it out. There's still a Crayola crayon maker toy which forms molds from heated crayon wax. Not as intense as actual injection molding though

https://www.amazon.com/Crayola-03-9000-Crayon-Maker/dp/B0029...

Looks cool, but I can't help thinking about how the plasticizers in stuff like that helped reduce male fertility to the 50% we see today compared to the 70's (yes, I know, we sit around all day too, and there are many more causes, just saying perhaps there is a reason this is not distributed like this anymore).

The 90s had something similar (but made to 90s safety standards so a little more boring).

It was centipedes and the like made out of a rubbery material that you melted into moulds.

My search led right to this discussion: https://ask.metafilter.com/114668/vintage-injection-molding-...

The Kenner Electric Mold Master sounds like what you remember.

I think that's what I remember based on the illustration of the kid working the injector. I vaguely recall that the soldiers could be made with a wire skeleton, making them posable. Smelled moderately bad.

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