Tofa

I do love old blocks. Tumble-finished wood from either side of the Czech-German border is especially nice. This small set is Czech.

Good block play.

Peg Blox

Peg Blox were made by Lincoln Logs in the era they were part of Playskool. More or less a unit-block variation with TinkerToy-like holes and dowels to hold them together & build various objects.

I've had an incomplete set for some time, missing several blocks, all of the dowels, and the instruction sheet.

I recently came across an instruction sheet image that I was able read well enough to find out what lengths & quantities of dowels came with the set.

Even with my recent excursions into doing things with noisy, mentally disruptive power tools, I wasn't going to make a whole bunch of carefully measured dowels all at once.

But using an Easy Cutter, I was able to make enough dowels in proper lengths to build several of the models, and be confident that I could cut more as needed, without having to wait for a power tool acceptance period or go through a lot of rigmarole. Pretty nifty.

The cuts weren't entirely entirely square, but good enough for this.

I cut. I built. I photographed.

Good Block Play

Craft-stick CoinStruction

CoinStruction sets were introduced several years ago with the gimmick of using coins as the construction elements, held together by a variety of clips that were the only elements, aside from instructions for the models, inside the boxes.

At four bits for a package of fifty, pennies are cheap, if you are looking for sturdy little disks, but even then, kids might abscond with them. Using dimes & quarters, recommended for some structural positions in the instruction I have, seems to just cry out for filching.

Besides, I felt that they made unattractive models. They looked all fuzzy from the density of clips, and the coins esthetically detracted, rather than enhanced.

I bought a set when a local store had them on clearance. Partially because I thought I shouldn't condemn them without giving them a fair try, partially because I thought the little clips ought to be good for something, even if their advertised purpose was dumb.

My actual experiments with building with coins impressed me little, and I set the CoinStruction set aside for potential use as clips - and more or less forgot about them.

The other day, I ran across a building toy called TomTecT, from the Kapla folks. Consisting of Kapla-like sticks and clips to hold them in various relations to won another. Intriguing.

Eventually I recalled CoinStruction, tracked it down, and explored various options for the sticks. I experimented with various things, including 100% post-consumer recycled Popsicle sticks, and concluded that most worked just fine, but that the latter would make the best cheap bridge components, in their commercial bulk guise of "craft sticks." About as cheap as pennies in the local dollar store. Cheaper for a box of a thousand at the craft store, but my calculations were that 50-100 would do my bridge.

They did.

I like the result.

So basically, with the clips from CoinStruction, using four of the six different shapes, and a small package of craft sticks, I have a fine new construction set.

Not an emulation of TomTecT - the CoinStruction clips differ greatly in geometries available. But good fun anyway.

As many bridges as I have built with a good many different type of construction set, I learned something new about bridge engineering from building with Craft-sticks+Coinstruction: in general, our models tend to be too strong, at best letting us only explore a single type of structural weakness at a time. CS+C modeled some new weaknesses in joints and gave me some new insights.

Good Block Play.

Mobaco

Hurrah! I made the additional slotted blocks for my sparse sampler of Mobaco, as I mentioned in my last post, and I am quite pleased with how Mobaco works, with cardboard wall pieces & such sliding into grooved wooden posts.

Cardboard & wood. Great fun.

The baseboard should be cardboard as well, apparently in an olive-green color, or tan in earlier editions. My substitute for the time being is 6mm craft foam (Foamies), of which the local craft store gave me a choice of red or black. An early project will be cutting a piece of green paper to go on top of the foam. Or painting the foam, if that works.

That Mobaco link is to a fan site with much good information, including scans of older manuals. The prewar sets were much more extensive & built bigger buildings. Those sets seem to be rare & presumably expensive.

But Mobaco pieces aren't cast in stone (or injected in plastic), they are made of materials that can be manipulated by a mildly clumsy person with home tools. One can even go with simpler substitutes, as my foam base - which may actually have an advantage over the factory bases, in that it grips the posts.

I'm going to make some trial wall pieces from thin foam core, perhaps the self-adhesive, with stiffening card behind, the latter not necessarily with all the detail cuts.

If one had one of the computer driven craft die cutters, such as a Cricut Expression, but preferably a more versatile competitor, one could go to town and make the largest sets ever. Plus variations in color, window shapes, "brick" or "stone" walls, etc. I'm not sure that the Cricut itself can actually do what I want, having had brain fog from trying to figure out how to do it. There are a bunch of competitors, and looking at them gave me more brain fog.

So for the time being, I'd just as soon do what I can with craft knives & paper cutters, which means easier-to-cut materials & small quantities.

My first step is accomplished - I made enough posts & the base, so I could actually build. Next I make the missing wall panels, and extras so I don't have to match the originals too precisely, and can have adjacent pieces similar.

There have been a bunch of different versions of the wall-pieces-in-slotted-posts genre (eg Künstler-Baukasten Architekt, Fox Blox, etc).

With the potential for homemade parts, one could use the others for inspiration and stay with Mobaco dimensional compatibility.

Good fun. Good block play.