Where can I order small (~1.5") fake scenery bricks in bulk?

December 24, 2024 7:30 AM

I need a lot of small bricks/blocks for an art/craft project, but I'm having trouble finding exactly what I need in a reasonable price range. I can find cheap or the right size or bulk, but haven't been able to find a decent combination of the three. Imagine I want to build a castle for G.I. Joe action figures, and don't care about the material or looks. That'd be about the ballpark.

I'm looking for small bricks of any material, color, or finish. It's the size I'm having trouble finding in bulk.

They should not be interlocking (no Lego, etc). I need to be able to stack them like a stone wall and be able to make curved lines. Imagine building an irregular shaped castle.

I don't really care what the material is - plastic, cardboard, plaster, hard foam (polystyrene), wood, metal, hard rubber, MDF, ceramic, stone, clay, or some exotic space material. They just need to be fairly hard, I can't use squishy foam or soft rubber.

Size doesn't have to be exact, but somewhere in the range of 1.5" x 1" x .5" would be ideal. Up to about 2" and down to 1.25" is the range I'm looking for.

I also don't care about the color or finish. This is just a mockup for a first draft. I'll deal with the aesthetics later.

I need a lot, so the cheaper the better. These would be okay, but at $50 for 160, they're kind of pricey for a mockup. At that size I'd need at least 800.

Model railroad scenery bricks ends up being too small, and bricks for wargame set building are weirdly expensive.

Mold number 40 from Hirst Arts is just about ideal, but I really don't want to have to cast all them myself. The variety of sizes are kind of nice - I may buy their molds for the final version.

I considered buying polystyrene sheets and cutting them into rectangles myself. But that ends up being a lot of time consuming work, since I'd have to build a cutting rig to get them anywhere near similar sized.

Shipping would be to the U.S. east coast, and pickup isn't really an option.

Thanks in advance for any pointers.

posted by JustAnotherPerson to Grab Bag (11 answers total)

Check out your local library or maker-space. I imagine it would be pretty quick to laser cut some polystyrene sheets.
posted by so fucking future at 7:34 AM on December 24 [1 favorite]

Adding "dollhouse" to the search turns up a lot of results, though the scaling, at 1:12 is about half what you need. (Some eBay results.)

While those aren't necessarily what you need, figuring out what hobbies might use smaller bricks and appending that term to your results may be helpful. Or even just specifying the scale you need.

Running a search for 1:6 scale bricks gives me this listing on Etsy.

Is that close enough?
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:35 AM on December 24 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Teifoc bricks, maybe? They're a German clay brick toy thing, and look to be close to your "maybe" link above. I saw some kits that had 280 PCs for $30? I'm sure prices vary a bit.

They are 30x15x10mm (LxWxH). That's 1.2" x .6" x .4".
posted by AbelMelveny at 7:44 AM on December 24 [1 favorite]

Re-reading the post, I see that 1:6 was already marked as okay but not ideal.

Sorry for the oversight. I will pop back in if I find something a touch larger.

I'm trying to think of other hobbies that would use 1:4 or 1:5 scale stuff so we can append that term to the search...
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:53 AM on December 24 [1 favorite]

it sounds like they don’t need to especially look like bricks, is that right? Would wood blocks in the right proportions work? Anyone with a table saw and a miter saw could make something to your exact dimensions out of a 2x4 in about 15 minutes. If you can’t get them locally for whatever reason, posting to mefi jobs or asking a woodworker on etsy may work. Shipping will likely cost more than time or materials.
posted by supercres at 9:27 AM on December 24 [2 favorites]

1x2 wood is actually 0.75x1.5", so if 0.5" or 1" slices of that would work, it'd be even simpler, just chop chop chop. Or trim comes in a bunch of different sizes.
posted by teremala at 9:41 AM on December 24

These are cubes, but might do, and they're certainly the right price - foam counting blocks
posted by restless_nomad at 9:58 AM on December 24

Mini Materials
posted by amtho at 10:42 AM on December 24 [2 favorites]

I would instead make the wall out of a solid piece of foam, and carve (at about 5:00) the stone texture out.
posted by novalis_dt at 11:05 AM on December 24

There will be a lot of spare styrofoam Thursday, ask in a buy nothing group.
posted by theora55 at 3:59 PM on December 24

Response by poster: Thanks for all the great suggestions. It looks like a combination of Teifoc and bulk kinetic dominoes should do what I need.
posted by JustAnotherPerson at 4:41 PM on December 24 [1 favorite]