How it all began: the story of the first pieces

This journal starts where TracksCreationS started: at the living-room table, with a GraviTrax run, some Duplo bricks and a son who wanted both at once.

The first piece: an adapter

My son wanted a tower. Not a GraviTrax tower, not a Duplo tower: a tower that would bring the two together. No shop-bought piece connected those two worlds, so we tried to make one. My neighbour had a 3D printer; we tested, adjusted and started again until we had an adapter that held: one face that clips onto the GraviTrax base plate, one face that takes a brick. Stack bricks between two adapters and you get a pillar as tall as you like, in the colours of your bricks.

That piece is still in the catalogue, almost unchanged: the set of six Duplo / LEGO adapters. It is also the reason I kept the printer.

Then the spinning top

Once the pillars were up, we needed something to put at the end of the rail. The funnel spinning top was born from that wish: the marble comes in from the side, circles tighter and tighter inside the funnel, then disappears through the hole in the middle. The children watch it turn without getting tired of it, and so do I. It slows the run down, and at last you can follow the marble with your eyes.

To this day it is the piece our customers have reviewed the most.

Two entries, then three: my favourites

A few months later, a child’s question: “what if two marbles arrived at the same time?” I drew one more entry, then another. The two-entry top brings together two descents coming from different towers; the three-entry one, a little wider, becomes a crossroads in the middle of the table where marbles meet in the whirl. They are my favourites: they force you to build differently, to make the run converge instead of stretching it out.

A German child’s snail

A year later, a message from Germany. A child had drawn a spinning top that did not exist: instead of a smooth funnel, a track dug in a spiral, like a snail’s shell. The drawing was clear; I modelled the piece, printed it, and gave it to him. The snail top stayed in the catalogue: the marble goes down it more slowly, turn after turn, and the youngest children can follow it from start to finish.

That is, I think, the summary of this shop: pieces imagined while playing, sometimes by the children themselves.

What comes next, every month

This journal will come out once a month. Next post: back to Duplo, with the tracks imagined for my daughter. Then will come the track booklets, the motorised Ferris wheel, the pieces that bring the marble down differently, the clearance pieces, and finally the small marble lifts, our latest creations.