The Space Needle Was Destroyed? Again?!?!?!

What The Ferret!?!?!?!  Now this just isn't fair.  My Lego Space Needle has been standing for about 4 years, with only one major "accident" as I learned about moving it.  It collapsed almost a month ago as I turned it Green ago due to differences in the brick sizes.

But now it's been destroyed again in less than a month :(  Someone at work accidentally knocked it over, and neatly cleaned up the parts into a recycling basket.  I wonder what her expression was as it came crashing toward her?

Because I never want to have to do this again, I made a time lapse video of rebuilding it this time.  It turned out pretty cool:

In order to take the time lapse pictures I had two options:

1. I could've bought $100 camera thingy from the store (cheaper ones were out of stock).
2. Or I could build a Lego Mindstorms robot to trigger my camera using my existing remote trigger.

Guess which I chose? :)

We're getting better at this.  This is probably the most damaged it's been, but it only took 4 hours to get all 4500 pieces back together again.  I feel like I spent longer trying to get the camera trigger to behave!  It took a frame every 13 seconds or so, and was surprisingly reliable.  It was also surprised that neither the camera nor the RCX needed it's batteries changed.

Objects on the table may be shorter than they appear...

The other day I mentioned that the Lego Space Needle fell over.  It's been standing for years, so that's a bit odd.  As I mentioned in that post, a major contributing factor seems to be that the bricks I was using weren't the expected size.

Here's a video where I demonstrate the problem.  (You might have to go full-screen to see the seams between bricks)

I didn't measure exactly, but if you build a big long tower of the 3-tall Lego bricks, and another of the 1-tall Lego bricks that are nominally the same size, then we discover that the 3-tall Lego bricks are a bit shorter than one would expect.

In this example, 35 of the 3-tall bricks (white) should be about the same height as 105 of the 1-tall bricks (green).  In practice, the 3-tall bricks were a tiny bit too short.  Yes, they are all very firmly attached to each other.

At Comicon, I asked Dan Parker, LCP, if he'd noticed anything like that before.  Apparently there are some bricks where the tolerances add up and things don't align as one would expect.

Makes me wonder what I would've done if I'd originally build the model with the other bricks.  Would I have made shorter legs or made the center tower taller?

The Space Needle Fell Over :(

Ugh, not again!  The Lego Space Needle crashed, time to play 7,000 piece pickup...

LL protecting herself from falling pieces

It's 10:30 PM on Thursday Feb 28th.  Too bad there's not a Feb 29th, 'cause Comicon opens on the 1st @ noon.  That's not a lot of time to put 7,000 pieces back together :(

It's ironic, I keep telling people how stable this thing is, then, once every 4 years or so, this happens.  Worse, the move from work to ECCC went great, very little damage (it always breaks a bit when I move it, but apparently I'm getting better, took only 30 min to put back up when I took it back to work).  Apparently I shouldn't have mentioned that an hour ago.

Worser, I was filming putting it up... and the camera died about 30 min ago.... :( 

Worsest, there're no instructions.

We fumbled around for a bit, but then they turned out the lights and we called it a day.  In the morning my sister & I spent some time fixing some of the critical spots.  We were back at ECCC around noon to begin reconstructing it.  With the rest of SEALUG's help, it was back on it's feet by 6.  For some reason, RC relegated me to the back table.  (Something to do with insurance premiums and the guests or something).

What happened?  I mean, this thing's been standing for over 3 years.  I've always figured another Nisqually Earthquake would be it's doom, but nothing was going on.

Well, for ECCC, I figured that it should be "Emerald" in honor for the "Emerald" in "Emerald City Comicon's" name.  That, and the real space needle's green on top with a painting of trees, so I was gonna do that anyway.

So we rebuilt all of the white leg pieces in green.  At the same time we went from ~4500 pieces to ~5500 or so, primarily because the white legs are 2x2 wide by 3 bricks tall.  Lime green doesn't come in 3 brick tall forms, so the plan was 3 times as many bricks one tall.  (In practice I ran out, so I had to use 4 1x1x1 bricks for every 2x2x1 brick, so we ended up at ~7000 bricks).

Once the bottom legs got rebuilt, up to where they hit the tower in the middle,  something wasn't right.  The top half of the tower wouldn't fit on!  It's like the green legs were longer.  So I padded the tower with a plate (a plate is 1/3 of a normal brick).  Apparently that wasn't a great plan because it crashed.

On rebuilding we were more careful, and, indeed, the legs were too long.  We ended up removing a plate from each of the lower three legs.  Additionally the same error happened with the top struts, and they were also shortened by a plate. 

When I mentioned my observation that the bricks weren't the right heights, Dan Parker belatedly confirmed that sometimes the tolerances creep in and things that seem like they should work in Lego, don't.  I'll blog a bit more about that later.

The Emerald Lego Space Needle made it up for the rest of Comicon, where people queued up to see it.  (Well, maybe they were looking for Hogwarts, but they had to get past me first.)  I even think I saw a Unicorn.

Now it's back at work.  Took a bit to get all the green out, but only 30 minutes to unload the car and put it up, with the green roof representing the real needle's trees.

Lego Angry Bird Space

A while back I built a Lego Space Needle (which I've dropped in the past :( ). 

Someone decorated the real Space Needle with an Angry Bird with the "launch" of Angry Birds Space (which apparently NASA helped with). 

After a few years of sitting there, my Lego Space Needle was getting a tad mundane.  When my boss mentioned sticking an Angry Bird on it, I laughed him off.  But them my sister mentioned having a red Lego apple.  It turns out that apple's and birds don't share a lot in common, but we managed anyway.

Like the Space Needle, I managed to drop the Angry Bird too, several times.




A bit later, the Space Needle went to the 2012 Emerald City Comicon (ECCC), so the Angry Bird joined it as well.  Lots of nice comments there.

Since it was a comic convention, the Angry bird was joined by Batman and some other Lego comic figures (from sets). 

Lego Disney Wonder Cruise Ship

The Lego Wonder

Recently, I built a model of the Disney Wonder, in Lego.  It's displayed at work, where I'm known for building Lego things, see "Shawn Dropped the Space Needle".  It's been displayed at BrickCon 2012 and is currently at work in Building 85.

There's also a YouTube video with my Lego at Lego Disney Wonder.  I've gotten a lot of questions, so here goes:

Lego Disney Wonder

The Lego Wonder is as accurate as I could make it, which took about 4500 pieces.  The stats: it's about 4 feet / 1.2 meters long.  It took about 6 days (Lara says 60 hours) to build, as we were interrupted by shows on the ship, ports of call, etc.  As there are few Lego stores in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, we spent a couple weeks planning before the trip.

It Just Happened One Day

Prototyping

I blame it all on my wife, Lara.  We were planning on a cruise (one guess which ship), and she pointed out that on long cruises they sometimes have boat building contests.  She also mentioned that the judges might like to see their own ship, and, besides, it's a pretty ship.

With that conversation in mind, a few weeks before the cruise I noticed that our Lego store had a sale, and so I grabbed some bulk bricks. 

Of course when I got home and tried to do some research, and discovered that all my guesses were all wrong.  (I usually underestimate how many pieces I'll need for these things).  In the store there were 1x3 yellow bricks that I thought might work for life boats.  I also guessed that 16 studs wide would be about wide enough for the detail, and figured it'd be maybe 2 or 3 feet long.  Once I got the dimensions of the real ship I found how long and skinny cruise ships really are.  

My width, and the structure of the balconies also sort of forced the scale.  If I wanted it 16 studs wide and ledges for the balconies, then it was going to have to be 150 or so studs long....

All Those Little Details

Figuring out Lifeboats

My 3-stud lifeboats weren't going to fit at that scale.  But the store didn't have any bricks the right color, so I was going to have to order bricks online, and we only had a couple of weeks before we left on the cruise.  I browsed through parts lists and came up with a few different ideas, but I wouldn't really know what worked for sure until I had the bricks in hand to play with, so I ordered parts for several different ways of building each lifeboat.  Enough for 10 lifeboats on each side.  I tried a few things at home, but crossed my fingers that the parts would work when they came.  That went for the parts for several other details as well.  The stacks for example, I only had a vague idea about, and so I tried to find a few different options that might work.

My biggest problem is that I remembered the hull being blue, but that didn't work in the rough mockup of part of the hull.  I went back to the store and got black, which worked a lot better (the hull looks black in a lot of photos of the real ship), but I still wanted better.  Unfortunately the right color was very rare and difficult to find. 

I managed to order some at the last minute, but it didn't seem like it would arrive in time.  I gathered some black just in case.  On the last day before we left I checked the mailbox, not really expecting anything.  There were some letters, so the mail had come, but no bricks :(  Not terribly surprised that they hadn't come, I walked up to the door, and there was a small package.  The missing bricks had arrived!

Ironically, later, on the ship, after that work on the colors, one of the other guests asked why it wasn't black, and I had to point out that the real ship wasn't black!

Index

• YouTube - Lego Disney Wonder
• Page 1 - The Lego Wonder
• Page 2 - Like, What Do You Mean There Aren't Any Instructions
• Page 3 - Building the Lego Wonder
• Page 4 - Land Ho!
• Page 5 - All Done with the Lego Wonder

Shawn Dropped the Space Needle

I Dropped the (Lego) Space Needle

Around work I'm well known for the Lego bricks in my office (counting in the 10's of thousands of pieces).  Last summer I was tricked into building a Lego Space Needle for a space in our old building. 

As you can see, I dropped the space needle when moving it to the stairwell in our building.  It’s about 4250 pieces (+ 1 minifig if you can find it).  I dropped it around noon, before x-mas, took it home, and it was repaired by that night :)

After repairing it was even better (I didn’t like some of the top, and parts were made a bit stronger).  There’s no glue, except for a dab on the spire.  I started it last summer.

More recently I've built a Lego Disney Wonder.