Category:Wooden construction toys

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Victorian turned wooden building blocks

Victorian turned wooden building blocks [image info]

1932: Wooden building bricks

1932: Wooden building bricks [image info]

Mangle (Matador)

Mangle (Matador) [image info]

Wooden construction toys.

Building blocks and bricks

The traditional Victorian building blocks continued to be made well into the C20th with almost no changes (and versions are still available today!), but are mostly aimed at small children.

More sophisticated systems

For older children and adults, more complex interlocking systems such as Meccano (and later Lego) pretty much took over.

While wood was a cheap entry-level material for a company wanting to make toys, construction toys had special demands - they usually needed to include pieces that were small, thin or intricate, the extra-fiddly tooling obviated the "working" advantage of using wood, and the need to use very strong woods or composites to avoid splintering or breaking when small hands applied leverage to parts that were supposed to slot together meant that there was often not an obvious cost advantage either, especially when Kiddicraft invented the hollow plastic interlocking brick (quickly copied by Lego), which minimised the material used material by being mostly hollow. Wood didn't have the unbreakability factor for thin pieces of Meccano's metal parts, and found it hard to compete with high-detail bricks that soon started being churned out of injection moulding machines in plastic, with no expensive human hand-finishing required.

However, there were notable exceptions. The American Lincoln Logs log cabin construction toys were an obvious product that allowed wood to be an excellent (and authentic) material, the Dutch Mobaco system got around the breakage problem by using a comparatively large scale for its buildings, with hardwood rods and extremely hard treated fibreboard plates, and the Austrian Matador wooden block-and-peg system is still going today. The Tinkertoy system also appealed to older children and adults due to its ability to make large abstract shapes and crazy machines.

See also:

Subcategories

This category has the following 26 subcategories, out of 26 total.

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Media in category ‘Wooden construction toys’

The following 200 files are in this category, out of 292 total.

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