4477-051 |
4477-052 |
4477-053 |
4477-054 |
4477-055 |
4477-056 |
4477-057 |
4477-058 |
4477-059 |
Vac-U-Maker 4476 Series Molds and Forms
4476-051 |
4476-052 |
4476-053 |
4476-054 6 B |
An early Vac-U-Form set called Vac-U-Maker contained both Vac-U-Form forms and Thingmaker molds. In addition to the nine common 4477 molds that were included in the set, there was one 4476 series mold and three 4476 series forms that are related to the 4477 Thingmaker molds. The 4476 series molds and forms are much more difficult to find than other Thingmaker molds.
Form 4476-051 is used make turtle and beetle shells for mold 4476-054-6-B.
Forms 4476-052 and 4476-053 are used to make wings for the bugs on mold 4477-055, such as butterflies, bees, flies, dragonflies, etc. Later Thingmaker Creepy Crawler sets included clear plastic sheets that could be used to make wings for use with mold 4477-055, unfortunately, these flat unformed wings aren't nearly as cool as the Vac-U-Formed wings.
4477 Mold Variations
There are several variations of each 4477 Creepy Crawler mold.
The most interesting variations appeared with molds that were produced near the end of the Thingmaker era. These Creepy Crawler sets contained molds with much crisper detail. The detailed molds can be identified by the lack of a suffix on the mold number, for instance, the detailed version of 4477-059-9B has a number of 4477-059. The example below shows the differences using 4477-059 molds:
There are four additonal variations that are basically numbering format differences with and without "plugged" tong holes. This example shows the detailed 4477-052 mold along with the four other number variations. The first row contains the detailed mold, the second row shows the hyphen seperated number without and with the plugged hole and the third row shows the space seperated numbers without and with the plugged hole (click on the image to see a full size comparison of all five mold variations listed above).
4477 Mold Errors
There are also molding errors that made it to market. For example, mold 4477-057 has the original mold with all six legs on the ant present, then an error mold was cast with the ant only having five legs and a final mold with the legs re-cast correctly (although the correction is noticable).