Kiddicraft Twist And Turn 1970's mechanical playset toy

thingiverse

This project is THE reason I purchased a 3D printer... My parents managed to save a wonderful plastic toy from my childhood that I would like my daughter to be able to enjoy, and as far I can tell it does not exist to buy and the original plastic is getting brittle and cracking. Kiddicraft is the company that produced it (apparently the actual inventor of Lego) in England. I have found very little information about the original product, comment if you had one, and if anyone has the story of the original design, share it! Let's put the historical record here. After a couple months of learning, printing and hacking around in OpenSCAD, the result is a fairly accurate reproduction with 2 versions of some parts, one reproduces the moulded plastic the way the original toy is made, and the other is an FDM 3D printer friendly version that is just as good, if not better than the originals for strength and safety. Another change I made is the nut parts have threads all the way through, whereas the original parts have the barest whiff of a thread right in the middle, mostly because of the limitations of the way they were manufactured. Take care printing the threaded rod part, have a look at the Print Settings section for some slicer ideas. I have added a shorter rod (that still fits all 3 nuts) for those having trouble getting the full size one to print and also activated the customizer with the relevant OpenSCAD file so you can create a custom rod of any length. Big thanks to the creators of the Poor man's openscad screw library and Nut Job code that got me going on this project.