I know vacuum forming and other methods give (perfect) excellent results when making cases, nice professional quality finish, etc; however it requires a lot of skill and equipment, and cost (for a one-off application) to use correctly. Great for mod-heads but not necessarily for the status-quo.
I know some people make cases using lunchboxes or shaping wood as an alternative.
I tried to use polymorph but found it was hard to make it stick to a surface to strengthen the surface and give a nice plastic covering.
I know this can't give a beautifully smooth surface but will give a perfectly acceptable finish - I have secured the front part of the PSone screen case to a piece of mounting board (picture frame card) with hot glue, attached the controller parts and speaker section; then to give "interest" to the front (and make it rigid), I used bog-standard polyfiller, slightly watered so it is thick but easy to apply, used an old butter knife to apply it, let it dry overnight, gave it a thorough sanding (Dremel sanding attachment, and hand sanding block), touched up any areas needing it, let it dry and re-sanded again.
I then painted on PVA glue onto the polyfiller, and left it to dry. Polyfiller is not very strong and is fairly powdery; the PVA is a glue which binds everything together and makes a very hard surface on the polyfiller - very tough and strong and sealed. You need the case strong after all so it doesn't flex when using - which this does. Without applying PVC the polyfiller is likely to develop cracks and be slightly bendy - PVA is great stuff! PVA also acts as a primer coat before spray painting. If you still have small areas which don't fill in nicely and give a uniform (fairly) smoothish finish, one idea is a fairly thick layer of paint over the whole case front, then sand this down before applying layers of spray paint again. This evens out some imperfections.
As I said, this won't give a completely perfect result, it can't do, but a very good one - however if you don't have the skills or want to spend lots of buying materials to make a case from scratch, this is a very cheap way to make one.
It is just a case then of making a rear casing, which can be made out of lunchboxes (Dremel to size), shaped as required, PVA glue applied (primer), spray painted; and hot-glued to front casing. The rear of a case is not as important as the front as you aren't looking directly at it.
Using the card as the "skeleton", also gives the benefit that it is easy to hot-glue things to the inside of the case as required, and you have a nice flat surface to mount your D-pads, etc.
Anyway, not sure if anyone else came up with this idea before, I just thought I would share this with others. Mounting board, polyfiller and PVA glue are very cheap to buy.
UPDATE:
Forget spraypaint; use standard satin/matt paint, preferably a light/cream colour, and apply it with a small paint roller. The light paint covers up any imperfections (dark shows it), satin/matt helps to also cover up imperfections whereas gloss intensifies it; and a mini-paintroller not only gives a nice effect but also hides any imperfections.
Method works well.
Thougths of a cheap material to make a case with
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