Italocremona Plastic City Bricks / Building Blocks

These are replacement parts for the Italocremona Plastic City set. They have been out of production for about 40 years now and can be hard to find. However, they seem to have held up well and my children enjoy playing with them as much as they do our Legos so I decided to create some replacement parts for ones that have gone missing.

Italocremona (or Italo Cremona), known primarily as a doll-making company, existed in Italy from 1922 to 2007. They first began creating the building blocks named Plastic City, around 1960, likely to compete with Lego bricks which had started to become popular years before this. The blocks/bricks were manufactured and sold into the 1980s.

The blocks are typically stamped “IC,” “Plastic City,” and “Brev.” and are physically larger than your typical Lego bricks. The sets, therefore, were larger as well.

I will gradually create more models for this set, starting with the “bricks” and “plates” as I have access to some of these. It is not an exact replica of the original brick, and has been improved with redesigned inner supports to strengthen the brick and reduce overhang.

This model was printed on an Elegoo Neptune 4 Plus without supports on textured PEI. Travel speed was decreased to 50 mm/s to avoid tipping over the posts before they attach to the main model. It does require a tuned machine given the inner posts require a few layers before they start to attach to the walls. I used PLA.

Settings I used:

• Orientation: standard vertical as demonstrated in the photo
• Mostly OrcaSlicer default settings
• Nozzle: 0.4mm
• Both 0.16mm layer height and 0.20mm layer height with 0.20mm first layer
• Infill only takes up 1-2 layers so settings don't matter much here
• No support
• Note: You may wish to use a 1 layer raft or an inside brim to support the inner posts, though it's not optimal. An alternative is to print at an angle with tree supports, though this would obviously significantly increase print time and material used.

Comments and feedback are welcome!

For more information on Italocremona, see the relevant Wikipedia page (Italian only).