Tinker Toys Turn Toes Up

Basic Fun Inc., owner and producer of Tinker Toys and Lincoln Logs, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy today in Wilmington, Delaware.

 

Great-great-grandparents rejoice everywhere! The Boomer equivalent of Lego blocks. Step on a Lincoln Log or a Tinker Toy circle in the middle of the night pain sticks with you for a lifetime.

 

This millennial has many fond memories playing with Lincoln logs. Great times as a little Spartan. I think my daycare has tinker toys, but I usually went toward the legos. But Lincoln logs were good times.

 

Oh man, some good times with Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys (could make really cool stuff with the colored sticks and circular joiners). I can still hear the bang of them as you put them back in the cylindrical drum.

Instead of things pre-ordained for a specific structure, I loved how Legos, Tinker Toys and Lincoln Logs encourage you to make something up. That was the part I hated about Legos and my kids (now 22 & 25), there was little variation from what was shown on the box. The most fascinating Lego pieces for me were the wheels and the clear pieces, what cool car or structure could I build?

 

Kenner Bridge and Building sets.

 

Erector sets.

 

I was a Panels and Girders child.

 

My son has a giant tub full of leftover Lego pieces. He told me about an app, BrickIt, that he used to scan the tub and tell him all of the different things he could build with the pieces he had.

He’s built some crazy stuff out of nothing since then.

 

I had all the different configurations: Bridge and Building, Panels and Girders. Problem was, with the newer sets, some of the pillars and beams were a couple mm taller or longer than the older ones, so they weren't really interchangeable -- they didn't form rectangles. And the exterior panels and rooftops didn't fit either. Also the roadway surfaces for your matchbox cars weren't the same width either.



They were fun to play with but frustrating too.

 

God you're taking me back. My father, a chemical engineering PhD, loved the sets with tubes and such for fluid dynamics and would buy them for us so he could, you know "help" us make stuff. He'd often end up cursing the Kenner company loud and long, though he tried to hide it.

 

The Bridge and Building sets exterior paneling -- windows and rooftops, as well as the roadway sections -- were made of an extraordinarily brittle type of styrene plastic, and the mounting holes where you had to
attach them to the structures invariably cracked off the second or third time you used them.

Also, the length of the roadway segments was such that if you we're building approach ramps to bridges of any size, they had an extremely steep incline, so your matchbox cars would roll right off.

All of this stuff was frustrating when I was 5/6/7 years old trying to build things, but paid off later in junior high or high school when I got to geometry and trigonometry and had to figure out dimensions of triangles and rectangles.