Tonka Trucks

Load it up, haul it away and dump it out! Tonka Trucks brought heavy construction equipment down to sandbox size.

Dump trucks. Bulldozers. Cranes. Front-end loaders. Big, heavy construction equipment, shrunk down to a size that fits in the sandbox.

The classic Tonka trucks were made of pressed steel, and they felt like it. Load the dump truck with dirt or rocks, haul it across the yard, raise the bed and dump everything out. Then do it again. I still have my old, beat-up blue metal Tonka dump truck from when I was a kid. It’s pretty scraped up, the wheels are rusty, but the tailgate still opens and closes and the dumping mechanism still works.

Tonka actually started when three Minnesota businessmen planned to start a garden equipment business. Their company, Mound Metalcraft, acquired another business in 1947 and inherited a toy steam shovel along with it. The toy business turned out to be much more promising than the garden-tool business, and before long the company was concentrating on toy trucks. The Tonka name was inspired by nearby Lake Minnetonka.

Over the years Tonka made just about every kind of truck you could imagine, but the big yellow Mighty Dump Truck, introduced in the mid-1960s, became the classic. These weren't toys you were supposed to keep spotless on a shelf. They were meant to be filled with dirt, pushed through mud, crashed into things and generally treated like real construction equipment.

Today's Tonka trucks come in different sizes and materials (and of course, a lot of plastic now), but you can still find that familiar yellow dump truck. All you need to do is add some scratches and dirt to make it look a little more authentic.