Reliable Easylock Tower

When I previously talked about Reliable Easylock, I said that they and American Plastic Bricks were the 1940s'-1950s' primary counterpart to Lego.

But that is only partially true: these very brick-like products were only really suitable for buildings (even if I did make cars, trucks, buses out of ours), while Lego from very early on was intended to more widely applicable, and has been extended over the decades into wildly divergent areas.

The flip side is that American Bricks and its alternatives did indeed have some advantages for many types of North American structures. Even if I keep sneaking in such digressions as bead mosaics and firetrucks, structures are still for me the core of Block Play.

Baufix 3001

In January I got a Baufix set off eBay: "Unused in original box with all contents..." As is so often the case, the box may have been original, but it was battered, and it wasn't actually complete. Not the bargain it might have been, but still a nice find.

Fortunately, when I finally buckled down to build this truck today, I was able to come up with substitutes for the missing pieces from an earlier Baufix find.

Altogether, I can now successfully build from a variety of downloaded examples, and I even have an instruction book. Not least, I now have real Baufix wheels. :)

Baufix is good fun, a happy variation of blockplay.