Hello again fischertechnik fans! This time around, I thought I would address something that seems to come up quite frequently. Every week or so, I receive a call or an email from someone who has inherited a box of old fischertechnik parts, but doesn’t have the instruction book and is wondering if we can assist them, or from a teacher involved with a school program who is looking for more model ideas besides those currently addressed in their curriculum. While you can in fact special order some of the instruction booklets for the currently available fischertechnik sets directly from Studica (please contact me directly at [email protected] for more info on this), there are no printed versions of the instructions for older kits available for sale. However, there is another option, and it’s totally FREE.

That option, my friends, is a great fischertechnik ‘fan’ site out of Germany called the ‘fischertechnik FanArchiv”. The FanArchiv offers a large collection of instructional materials from the past 40 plus years of fischertechnik, available in PDF format for download—many in both high and low-res versions.  While the text on the site itself is all in German, if you have a text translating option on your web browser, you should be able to work around this quite easily. If not, well, not to worry, because I’m going to assist you in navigating this site.

The web url for this site is: http://www.ft-fanarchiv.de/ Once you go here, you will see a menu along the left side with various terms in German. The first listing you’ll see is “Startseite”, which translates more or less as ‘Home Page’…which is of course where you will already be.  (That was easy enough, wasn’t it?)

The next section of the site you will find listed is called “Bauanleitungen”, which translates roughly to ‘Assembly Instructions”.  Click on this link to reach a page containing downloadable directions for various fun models such as a Lifting Platform, Helicopter, Hydraulic Dump Truck, Compressor, Telescoping Mobile Crane, Off Road Vehicles, Race Cars, and more.

The following section in descending order is ‘Grundkästen’, which translates as ‘Basic Boxes”. Click on this link to go to a page featuring downloadable instructions for the old fischertechnik ‘50’ and ‘100’ series kits, as well as the original materials addressing Statics, Pneumatics, and Electro-Mechanical models.

Working our way down the list, the next link is “Computing”, which as many of you already know is fischertechnik’s name for the line of kits dealing with Robotics and Programming. This page contains instructions for those original robotics kits using the old, pre-Macintosh, Apple computers, as well as IBM machines. Among the cool models you will find instructions for on this page is a computerized plotter, as well as an early version of the training robots which are the precursor to today’s ROBO TX Automation Robots set.

After this, we have a section entitled “Clubmodelle” which contains PDF versions of a selection of the old fischertechnik Fan Club Bulletins, each containing instructions for building a special model using the parts from several existing kits. You’ll find quite a few cool ideas here.

There are a few more links with downloadable materials here as well, such as the one for “Erweiterungs-Sets”, which takes you to a page containing the instruction materials included with older versions of the fischertechnik accessories (what we now refer to as the “PLUS” line), and finally a page called “Werbematerial”, which contains a selection of vintage fischertechnik catalogs from the early eighties to the present.

There are  many other great resources for fischertechnik materials on the web, and you’ll find links for some of these on our own fischertechnik page at www.fischertechnik.com. Of course, one of the best places to look for fischertechnik ideas is YouTube, so before I leave you, let me share yet another cool video I found there. This clip features one of the great coaster style models you can build with the brand new “Dynamic-Fun with Physics” set (#511-932) , which is now in stock for immediate shipment:

And on that note, until we meet again…Happy Building!!!

Author: Lance Zurek