Category:Wonderbrix (Lotts Bricks)
| Toy Brands and Manufacturers |
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Wonderbrix (Lotts Bricks) |
| 1948 - |
Wonderbrix ( /Junior Builder) was a comparatively late addition to the Lott's Bricks ranges, appearing in the late 1940s (~1948?).
Wonderbrix allowed users to build a very simple house with just six blocks - two for the front, two for the back, and one at each side – plus a roof. Some of the blocks included doors, some were flat panels with an embedded rectangular window, and others had a bow-front section with a clear plastic bowed set of windows.
Wonderbrix and 00-gauge
The existing Lotts Bricks sets had all been suitable for making buildings that were approximately the right scale for gauge 0 model railway layouts, a fact that had been sized upon by Lott's and exploited with their Lodomo sets and Lodomo railway station set, and with an ongoing advertising campaign that presented the new Lott's Lodomo blocks in particular as being ideal additions to a model railway.
Unfortunately, this was no use at all to owners of the new half-size 00-gauge model railways that then started to appear, first in the form of the Bing Table Railway, and then more popularly with Trix Twin Railway (TTR), Tri-ang Railways and Hornby Dublo. Wonderbrix was Lott's' attempt to access this new market, with a range of block sets whose dimensions were based on those of the "classic" Lotts Bricks, but which were designed to produce simpler buildings of half the height of a normal Lott's Bricks Building - where a "classic" Lott's building would need the user to construct a wall containing a window using a window-piece, two side-pieces and a base piece, in the new Wonderbrix system, a wall (perhaps with an embedded window) was a single readymade block.
Packaging
For Wonderbrix, Lott's used the same size (w×h) boxes as they'd used for normal Lott's Bricks, and kept the idea of using multiple trays to hold the blocks. However, since Wonderbrix had far fewer blocks than the usual sets, Lott's had to resort to the "creative" use of printed cardboard with holes for the blocks to "pad out" the sets, so that a tray would appear full even though it didn't contain that many pieces. This lead some unkind observers to argue that the boxes had more artistic value than the blocks!
Box text
- " The plans are simple, each brick representing in itself a prefabricated section of a house, which only requires to be placed in position as shown in the illustrations.
- Ideal for building model Villages, Railway and Farm Buildings, etc. There are Transparent Window Bricks together with many roofs and plans included with each box. "
External links
Pages in category ‘Wonderbrix (Lotts Bricks)’
The following 2 pages are in this category, out of 2 total.
