I recently ran across a really sweet collection by LEGO fan Jens Ohrndorf, recreating classic wooden toys with LEGO bricks. The idea was to capture the look and feel of wooden toys with their simple shapes and bright colors. Wooden toys tend to be blocky, which makes them look like they should be easy to recreate in LEGO. However, they also often have subtle curves that require more advanced LEGO building techniques. The result is LEGO models that look deceptively simple until you take a closer look. 🙂
The first project in the series is titled “Childhood Memories”, and includes a wooden elephant, and some building blocks. The elephant is a particularly interesting build, with modular sections that connect with LEGO Technic pins.
The second project includes a couple of wooden race cars and trees. Again, the models mimic the bright, primary colors and simple rounded shapes of wooden toys. While the wheels on the cars are not just standard LEGO wheels, they do work.
The third, and most recent project recreates a wooden toy train set with a classic style engine, train car, and some accessories. The bright colors look so nice, and the pearl-silver 1×1 round tiles on the wheels look perfect!
While it is inspiring to see large and complex LEGO models, sometimes simple is best. These LEGO wooden toys can bring back fond childhood memories, and even take us back to the roots of the LEGO company with its earliest wooden toys. If you like these LEGO creations, I recommend checking out Jens’ flickr gallery, as he has a number of very nice projects. And, if you would like to create similar wooden toy models, the LEGO Classic brick boxes are excellent for providing basic pieces and some useful specialized pieces in a rainbow of colors. They even provide instructions and suggestions for building simple shapes for animals, buildings, and vehicles, which would give you a good start for projects like the ones featured here. See the LEGO Classic section of the Online LEGO Shop.
What do you think? How do you like these LEGO wooden toys? What other classic toys do you think would be good candidates for recreating in LEGO? Feel free to share and discuss in the comment section below! 😉
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Oh! This will be a great project for the kids! Thanks for posting. Love the shapes and colors!
They look deceptively simple. But I’m looking at that elephant. That’s some great shaping!
I like the trees!
These are nice! I agree with Hayato, that they look simple, but once you look at them closely, you can see some cool techniques. My favorite is the train. Nice colors!
I like the racing cars.
I don’t remember orange Brio trains from my childhood, so perhaps I’m judging the train too harshly…
You might think of the orange as faded red. Which was quite common with those early painted wooden toys. 😀
I actually considered that, but I wasn’t sure that was the intention.