We recently spent a few very nice days at the sea. I knew there would be a beach with very neat sand, and so I prepared some toys for the kids. Before I go into details, I should mention that a short while ago I bought a 3D printer kit (which, by the way, works beautifully).

So, in preparation of the sand beach vacations, I 3D printed a house sand mold and a ‘street roller’.

The house mold allows to quickly build a small sand town, and the roller can be used to lay out the streets between the houses.

Now, in order to bring the town alive, I added several paper cars I had prepared back at home. These are deliberately kept simple and small. In fact, since in their flat, unfolded form they are no larger than a business card, they can be easily carried in a wallet. Very convenient ’emergency toys’ to take everywhere you go.

The cars have some tiny details which make them not exactly easy to cut out, but they are designed so that they don’t need any glue. Which makes them very easy to assemble and disassemble.

Once you have cut them out, including the small notches, simply fold them like so:

Then tuck the four flaps attached to the front and rear bumper over the sides:

The notches are a tight fit, but that’s by design, so that the cars don’t accidentally unfold during ‘use’. By the way, don’t expect them to last forever – this is paper, after all, without any glue. I replenish the stack of cars in my wallet every few weeks.

Anyway, the whole thing was a success – the kids loved it. Here are some more views of the sandy beach town:

Here is the template for the paper cars:

• PDF template

And the house mold and street roller can be found on Thingiverse.

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