PLANToys Parking Garage BRIO Conversion

Hi Everyone,

This is a little instructable showing how to simply add BRIO tracks to the PLANCity Parking Garage.

Christmas morning, amidst all the confusion and excitement of two kids under the age of 4 and full of chocolate, attacking the presents under the tree, I couldn't help but notice that the new PLANCity Parking Garage I was trying to build for them had two female BRIO style keys on each end of the bottom car wash/elevator plate, but no track paths to allow for smooth rolling of trains/cars. So naturally, I was excited to have an excuse to zip a set in with my router. :)

Since I had already built the Parking Garage, I had to remove the bottom plate so I could run it through the router.

Turn the structure over and remove the 5 Philips screws, placing them in a plastic bag, along with the two car wash brushes and their dowels that will fallout once the plate is removed.

I attached two straight, BRIO male tracks to the female keys and used a straight edge to draw the path for the actual tracks that needed to be routed out.

Take note of the track depth, you'll want to set the router bit to match the BRIO track depth so there isn't a "clunk" moving between the BRIO track and the Parking Garage track section.

I used a straight cutting bit that was the same width as the BRIO track path and set the router to the depth of a BRIO track.

After positioning the fence (mine didn't go back quite far enough, so I had to remove the bolts and secure it temporarily with several clamps) and triple checking the alignment of the bit to the track path/depth I marked out earlier, I plugged in the router and sent the board through twice. Once for each track rail.

The bit I was using wasn't the sharpest or highest quality on the market (hmm... sounds familiar...), so I used a piece of 600 grit sand paper to clean up any little bits of wood shavings that clung to the newly cut tracks, making sure to keep the paper at a 90˚ angle to the track sides so I didn't round over the track wall.

Using two straight pieces of BRIO track and my favorite dump truck, I verified the alignment and depth of my routs.

So far so good!

Reassemble the bottom plate the same way you took it off.. only in reverse. :)
Don't forget to put the two car wash dowels in before screwing on the plate!

You should now have a working railroad path inside your parking garage... maybe that doesn't make sense... but it was fun to do! :)