Did anyone like to build things when they were younger

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I played with Legos, which were really my brother's. He got all the good toys. But I found Legos pretty limiting. I liked my ordinary building blocks better, because I found them more versetile. I used to build mazes, floor plans and city plans out of them.

I was really into Matchbox cars, and I would also take boxes and make buildings and houses out them to scale to the Matchbox cars. Later on I sectioned out a part of the backyard, and leveled little roads through the grass, basically landscaped a city in dirt to scale. I used patches of moss to make lawns around my box houses and buildings. I used patches of moss that grew under the trees for lawn around the box houses and buildings.

I loved Lego. I built myself an entire space-Lego base, along with ships and robots I designed myself. I still think it's awesome.

In fact, I love it so much that I bought one of the new giant-robot Lego kits, which I have sitting fully-assembled in my drawer at work.

maybe the lego popularity has to do with you being able to focus on the details (shape of the individual blocks) to in turn build something that's more conceptual (a complete structure)

this just seems to go hand in hand with what i read about autistics' inate attention to detail over the overall concept... which is opposite from what i gather as the NT mental processing...

just a thought

One of my earliest memories is of sitting with a big tub of wooden blocks, looking at the picture on the front and spending hours making it. My brother and sister were upstairs playing Team Tactics and my Mum was reading the paper. I think I was 2 or 3.

My favourite Lego thing was when my brother got a Lego Technics motorbike with a motor and everything. I tried to make it and then my uncle took over and I was gutted.

Lego was way too expensive.

I loved building things. Tinkertoys were my absolute favorite (I had some Legos, but my father used to joke that I could have more Legos or a college education...wish I'd opted for the Legos). Building blocks were great, too. Shoot, I'd build things with dominoes if I had nothing else.

I had large numbers of toy soldiers and spent hours constructing elaborate battlefield scenes on my mother's coffee table. That was almost as much fun as the Tinkertoys.

Plastic models--not model cars, though--were a big thing with me, too. The Aurora monster models available in the early 'Sixties gave me endless joy--and a heckuva high from the Testor's cement I used in their construction.

Disassembling things to see how they worked was fun as well, though I never bothered to see if I could reassemble them. My parents tended to discourage this (big surprise) since they valued their appliances.

This thread brings back a lot of good memories. Legos. I remember I used to get a 5$ and later 10$ allowance every few weeks. I slowly added to my Lego collection with those 4-6$ kits.

After a few years I started building with the tekniks. Those were great because of all the gears and moving parts. I remember a 129$ Lego car kit that I tried to build from a picture because I didn't have the money to buy it, but I had most of the parts from dozens of other kits. That was one of the few times that I could actually build stuff that actually worked. I built a gearbox that I could hand turn a fan at several hundred rpms until the gears broke after a few seconds. I spend years of money buying mainly those and books.

Later I bought knex. I even saved up for a weeks and got the 50$ solar panel set. I then went into estes model rockets for a short time. I even took a blurry picture from 500ft up. I've been into building computers and electronics for the last five years.

I've heard that the newer Legos have programmable chips in them. Also read about memory chips and accelerometers in model rockets now that record everything. I might use that as an excuse to experiment with them again. haha. Always built stuff. Always will. The only difference is now I build more expensive and more complex stuff. Recently I built a 200m cat5e network to get Internet to my trailer.

I started with 4$ Lego sets, now I'm up to 200$ computer parts.

Maybe 50 years from now it will be 200,000$ spaceships.

My son loves tinker toys...the plastic ones. He's built me a kleenex box holder when I was sick. His favorite thing to do with them is to build an airplane steering wheel in which he takes us on long trips from our futon whenever he has the chance. He's been taking us for flights for over 2 years and he's 6 yrs old now. He says he's the engineer. I love it ! !! !!

My son loves tinker toys...the plastic ones. He's built me a kleenex box holder when I was sick. His favorite thing to do with them is to build an airplane steering wheel in which he takes us on long trips from our futon whenever he has the chance. He's been taking us for flights for over 2 years and he's 6 yrs old now. He says he's the engineer. I love it ! !! !!

legos...legos...legos...instead of paperdolls I built the little towns...you folded them and slid tabs in slots to put them together...the play mobil building sets( in Headstart a government sponsored preschool)we had at least three open storage benches of these...yay yay yay...lite bright...I could work on that stuff for hours...( a plastic box with a single bulb inside with little clear plastic pieces to punch into a flat plane that made up a design or picture that lit up...( I an not trying to insult anyone's intelligence describing each toy...I am older than many on the forum and some may be unfamiliar with the toys due to less popularity in more recent generations)

Meccano - I was a Meccano addict. I also liked Scalextics slot cars and I could not restrain myself from building new racing circuits every day. I enjoyed that more than actually racing the cars.

Oh god yes!

I was COMPLETELY absorbed by Tinker Toys, LEGOS, Lincoln Logs, Hot Wheels/Matchbox racetracks, and most importantly.....the Mocronauts city!



Ahhhhh.....thanks for this thread! I just remembered where my precious childhood years went when the other kids were playing socially interactive games with each other!

Lego all the way. Unluckily I got few, so I used mostly those of my friends. I use Lego to compensate my lack of toys. I mainly build transformers, but also even games. I build a labyrinth you moved through with your finger blindfolded. I tried to build a labyrinth for guinea pigs, although it came out smaller than I wanted. I build two torsos with sticks from their forearms, the goal was to hit the chest of the other, which would have made the head pop. What I revere as my greatest creation came out of a duel with my cousin. I made a Lego piggy bank in which the lowering of the mandible allowed to open a leg, revealing the hole from which you could take money out. The duel was for my cousin to try to find the mechanism in my piggy bank without dismantle it. The piggy bank didn't last much, but then I build a box with a mechanism similar to a lock. Technically, it had only 256 combinations in the key, but he gave up on that.

I just have too few Lego, otherwise I would like to build Macross' Valkyries.

I know Winston Churchill was obsessive about laying bricks. I was one of his great past time passions along with oil painting.
He also had major speech delays as a child and stuttered when he was stressed. He was also easily distracted by noises and had to prepare his speeches in complete silence.

What does that say about him?