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Just curious what anyone knows about blister packaging. Either how miniatures companies used to do it back in the day or how it's done currently. I was thinking it might be a fun hobby project to create some custom blister packs for some custom miniatures, but everything I've been able to find is geared towards scaled up retail production.

The plastic part is vacuum formed plastic, glued to a cardboard back. If you make your own backs, gluing the blister on would be easy enough.

If you can't find anywhere selling the blisters in small quantities, you could try sourcing used ones from gamers...

You might find it easier to source clamshell packs, as they're more common these days. Like these.

From the limited searching I've done so far I've seen talk of heat sealing the blister to a cardback, so I haven't seen what glue would be recommended yet.

I was thinking about getting a laser printer so that I could color print relatively inexpensively, but I have to see how thick of cardstock I could run through one.

There were many clamshell styles that I came across, but I'd want to do something similar to the old GW blisters. Purely for nostalgia.

Heat sealing requires specialised equipment. If it's just for your own amusement, glue would be considerably cheaper and easier.


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Really comes down to how much money and effort you want to put into it... You can get desktop vacuum forming machines that would let you make your own blisters, but I suspect the cost would be prohibitive.

Although if you used a soft enough plastic, you could possibly do a dodgy job of heat sealing them with an iron... I know that works (well, sort of) on laminating pouches.

You might just send the question to GHQ and see if they reply. Most of what they sell is still in the old blister style.

Actually a vacuum former of that size is about $100 USD on Amazon. Making the buck (the element you form over) of the right shape would be relatively easy, and then you just need some backing, which as you say could be card run through a laser printer (and you can find models that have a straight path, and thus can take a thicker card).

It's a popular thing among toy collector/customizers so you might be able to find a tutorial in that community.