Rasti

Rasti (from the German verb rasten, 'to affirm, to set firmly, to lock in place') is a set of plastic snap-in construction pieces, similar to Kiddicraft, LEGO, Mis Bricks and TENTE.

History

Origin

Its origin dates back to the German family business Modellspielwaren Dr. Hasel & Co., with headquarters in Reichartshausen (Baden-Württemberg).

The Rasti company was created in Argentina in 1965 by the Italian businessman Antonio Dimare who acquired a plastics company. The game was manufactured from 1969 to 1979 by the Knittax company in Argentina and after having become popular in the country's toy market, it was exported to Germany and Canada, among other countries, until the license was granted to the Hering company and its production moved to Brazil, where it was manufactured for a few years, although shortly after it stopped being manufactured.

The Argentine company Dimare, renamed Rasti Toys, bought the matrices and manufacturing rights in 2002 and resumed its sale to the public in 2007.

Operation Rasti Rescue

In 2007, the rescue of the brand and die factory to manufacture Rasti again in Argentina was a commercial success and had an impact in the local press and even in international media, such as CNN en Español, Telesur and magazines from Paraguay.

With the press campaign developed to communicate the launch, in just 55 days, 31 minutes were achieved in newscasts and open television mentions, in addition to 66,655 cm² in newspapers and magazines, equivalent to 64 pages of the newspaper Clarín . Total articles in each medium: 67 in radio, 32 in newspapers, 21 in magazines, 87 on newspaper websites on the Internet, 38 in blogs, 10 in television and 9 in news agencies.

Rasti has a self-managed community of fans called República Rasti, which organizes events, annual exhibitions with creations and a large collaboratively co-created construction and, since October 2007, they produce RASTI TV, the fan group's first Internet television program.

Connotation

This toy was very popular in Argentina during the 1970s and 1980s due to its versatility and quality ("Rasti-Resiste" was the slogan on the boxes). The parts were generally very well constructed—for example, the shafts were chrome-plated steel with snap-in plastic tips—and their popularity became so great that the term “Rasti” came into common use and is used today as generic noun to describe objects that are assembled or disassembled into pieces: "you put it together like a Rasti" or "it came apart like a Rasti."

Description

Its construction method allows the interlocking of pieces by means of pressure and locking by deformation of the semi-rigid plastic (polypropylene) from which they are made. This, unlike other toys made of rigid plastics (ABS), prevents friction and wear between the inserts of the pieces (pins) and the internal surface of the blocks, thus preventing the fragility and instability of the assembled models and providing a robustness not achieved until then with traditional building block systems. However, and due to this same interlocking system between the pieces, it is not feasible to have large flat surface pieces, which limits it compared to other systems.

The main basic block has 2x4 inserts; From there, other blocks emerge by division or doubling of their measurements—for example 2x2, 1x2, 1x4, 1x1, and at half height the strips of 2x8, 2x16 and 2x24—, in addition to a long series of accessories that allow the assembly of toys with a greater degree of realism and detail - such as chains, axles, gears, hooks, propellers, caterpillars, doors, bars, wheels, tiles, windows.

Among its presentations were the sets Box 500, Minibox 600, Multibox 800 and Starbox 1000; the technical kits 501 and 502, the four Rasti Mobil variants (201, 202, 203 and 204) and the two Motobox variants (45 and 90).

For Europe, new colors were used although with the same basic pieces as those in Argentina.

As of 2007, the presentations are four main lines - construction, extreme (dinosaurs), motobox and transport - followed by a number indicating the number of parts the kit contains.