Old Time (before LEGOs) American Plastic Bricks

thingiverse

My house when my brother and I were young kids was awash in building toys. Coming from a family of engineers and builders, I expected nothing less. I promised myself that when I started fooling around with these 3D printers I would recreate one of my most favorite toys, the American Plastic Bricks. Any internet search will yield a whole lot of information on these toys. Since I fell ill a few months ago, and with a lot of free time on my hands I took out my 6-inch caliper and went to work on faithfully reengineering these bricks. I recreated four out of the many bricks that make up my collection and posted them here. If I have some more free time I will start adding adding more files that make up each set of these bricks. Enjoy. Print Settings Printer: Hictop 3pd-18 Rafts: No Supports: Yes Resolution: 0.1 mm Infill: 100% Notes: Due to the thin side walls (1.26 mm +/-) and top (.75 mm +/-) the slower the print the better. I been fooling around with different settings on my printer to see which works the best. After a few fails (ok more than a few). I went with a Print Speed of 5 mm/s. I think slower than this would work well too. My basic settings are: Print bed 70 degrees, Filament flow 100% using a PLA filament. I am currently using Cura version 14.12 for printing. Also I am using a support setting of everywhere, for the unmodified bricks this works ok, but not being an expert of every printer I would play around with this setting to see what works for you. The best print orientation for these bricks (for me anyway) is pins down on the print bed, again try a few in different orientations to see what works for you. Also some filing will be needed. I've included two file for each brick, the mod file is a upgraded brick with a lot of reinforcement added to give the brick some needed support. The other file is the basic brick in its original format. Play around with both and see which one works better for you. Post-Printing Never say quit.... In hindsight I suppose that some things are more difficult to print (with my printer anyway) then others, these blocks were fun to reengineer but might not translate easily (in their current measurements) into 3D printable things for everyone. Since I don't say " I can't" my thinking is I will have to make them a bit larger and thicker. But if anyone else due to better printers or whatever process you are using, please don't hesitate to email me with the results and a picture. Thanks for giving them a looksee.