“Civil engineering for boys“
Brick construction toy, created by Dutch company concrete factory ‘Duinker & Verruijt’. The system is manufactured between 1943~1946.
This is my first ‘brick’ building toy. It’s a heavy box, different texture feel and nice to build with.
Funny detail: reading the manual, they also encourage you to add cardboard windows etc yourself.
History
According a newspaper, Profilo was invented by C. Verruijt jr. The idea was born 2 years before, when the company was asked to ‘invent’ a modular concrete barracks. At this point the groove system was invented. The production, allocated in Alphen aan de Rijn, was never started. In a quite period following, they decided to scale the idea down, by making a brick construction set out of it.
The manual was written by G.J. Harmer from Den Haag. Including ‘how to build’, some examples of parts (models 1-99) and buildings (models 101-403, where the first number stands for the box number). The manual also to be checked by a child psychologist.
According a Dutch letter from the company towards a toy store: “The concrete bricks are created from fine-grained sand from the Rijn. We proudly present a precise mass production brick building toy. The tolerances of the parts are lower then 0.1 mm.“
(Sources from BW.)
Boxes
Like other systems, there are 4 ‘main boxes’ and 3 ‘supplement boxes’ and 1 ‘junior box’.
Manual boxes 1-4 (Dutch)
Some system characteristics
Here a short list of some system characteristics and how it’s retrofitted into the virtual LeoCAD library:
| Part types: | Original: | Virtual: |
|---|---|---|
| Full stone | Concrete Size: 40x20x20 [mm] | Single color pieces |
| Bay size | 20 [mm] | 20 [mm] |
Library information
According the manual 12 parts only:
Overview of the parts library:
The single Profilo category, consists of these part types:
| Part groups: | Colors: | Unique shapes: |
|---|---|---|
| Full blocks | 4 | 1 |
| Halve blocks | 4 | 1 |
| Frame elements | 1 | 3 |
| Roof elements | 3 | 7 |
| Total parts: | 12 |
Building in LeoCAD
Let’s first start with the example building (model 107) from the manual:
It was satisfactory to build and to follow the guidelines for this example building. Although the building is not very solid, these bricks are easily moveable in horizontal plane.
The biggest model (no. 403) in the manual, a train station, needs box 4 to be completed. In this implementation: 441 parts in total: 318 full bricks, 45 half bricks and some other parts.