Profilo


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’.

Image courtesy: museumrotterdam.nl

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 stoneConcrete
Size: 40x20x20 [mm]
Single color pieces
Bay size20 [mm]20 [mm]

Library information

According the manual 12 parts only:

Part list, from manual box 1-4

Overview of the parts library:

The single Profilo category, consists of these part types:

Part groups:Colors:Unique shapes:
Full blocks41
Halve blocks41
Frame elements13
Roof elements37
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.


Model 403 – Central station w/o train

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.