Why I Love Lego.

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Blindman

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I have been a LEGO fan since a young lad. For the past 4 odd years I have got back into it and collected a large amount. Every time I posted anything about LEGO and robotics I was ridiculed by my favorite forum's posters.

I have built bridges, cantilever, suspension, arch, and beam. Cranes of all types. My best a 1.3meter span, 2meter height tower crane. After a 3 week build the project tumbled in an explosion of plastic as I pushed its weight limit to far. Robots of all sorts and the usual artistic space ships and the like.

But now I found a great project that some here on the forum may like.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19848-toydeforce-inside-the-steampunk-lego-lab.html
I am going to try to build it to. There are no plans available but the images and math is there.

I hope that there are other LEGO fans here on sciforums that would like to share their experience and technical builds.
 
i was a big fan of Lego!! i still have a collection of Lego men somewhere and, i once cut my hair short (going for the Ashely Judd look) and it ended up looking more like i had Lego hair.
unlike Pinwheel, i followed the instructions to a T!! i took it all very very seriously!!
 
I just recently got rid of my son's Mega Lego collection at the age of 14 in favor of his own desktop in his room... Legos rock!
 
I used to spend hours playing with Lego as a kid. I won a competition once, we had to go to the local department store, and make a model, I got 2nd prize, and won a load more lego. That made my childhood, and it's the one time I ever received a telegraph, notifying me of my win.
 
Lego is so popular, that we even have Legoland theme park here in California...My kid would rather go there than Disneyland..
 
We didn't have Legos when I was a kid (well Wikipedia says they were on the market but I never saw one) but I spent a lot of time building things out of American Bricks and my Erector Set.

Clever toolsets like these become crafts unto themselves. One need not apologize for creating art or engineering artifacts, regardless of the medium.

There was recently an exhibition in the National Building Museum in Washington DC (which oddly enough is not part of the Smithsonian Institution but everyone assumes it is) of huge-scale models of the world's largest and/or most famous buildings--made out of Legos. Of course one is the World Trade Center, which is five feet tall (1.5m).

I tried to go one day, but the lines were so long that it would have been a two-hour wait. I can't get to any good websites on this corporate workstation, but I'm sure you can Google up some nice images of the exhibition.
 
... I spent a lot of time building things out of American Bricks and my Erector Set.

We had 'Meccano', which was like 'Erector Set', but I always found it fiddly and slow to make anything, compared to Lego.

When Lego Technical sets came out, I think Meccano was pretty much dead. You could make working gearboxes from Lego Technical sets, proper drive trains, differentials, suspension... and it all just snapped together.
 
I have ALWAYS been around legos since I was a little girl!! Squirrel grew up with them also, so of course growing up, I gotta play!! We use to build little houses and whatnot and play with the lego men like you would for house. Squirrel was a trooper for me playing like that as a litttle girl! We would first follow the instructions, then after it was built, it would get taken apart and we would mix all of the legos we had up and build something else...

Now my daughter, whos 4 now, has a lego collection started.. My dads and my collection was wrongly givin away as the times went on.. But shes got a small box full. Just about every holiday that requires gifts, she gets a box of legos.
 
I remember playing with Lego as a little kid..As well as Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys.

But I was more into erector sets...
 
My dad's and my collection was wrongly given away as the times went on.
You just can't beat yourself up (or your parents or grandparents) for giving away the "precious treasures" of your childhood. No one has enough room to save everything they've ever accumulated, and no one can predict what the next generation will regard as "collectible." In fact, the only things that will become "collectible" are the things that are rare precisely because most of them were thrown away!

I had a Flub-a-Dub marionette from the Howdy Doody show. Boy would that ever be worth a fortune!

Fortunately I did hang onto some of my father's toys from the 1910s, like a very nicely built brass and wood motorboat with a wind-up motor. I sold it cheap in the 1970s, but at least it went to a collector who understood its value, even if I didn't, so I'm sure it's still making the rounds of the toy shows. Same for my American Flyer S-gauge model train set.
 
Got to love the LEGO NXT. Bluetooth, C compilers, and a huge variety of sensors. Lego technic now has the power function range with IR controls and a range of motors, lights, and more. I also have a large collection of lego pneumatics. Love making pneumatic logic robots. Check out a V8 lego motor http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZeZnfyng4Q&feature=related this is only 1500rpm some have got up to 5000rpm but i think they are gearing up. Im not going to push my lego to that extreme.

BTW Lego is a plural. Legos sounds silly.

Meccano has lost it. I got two sets recently and they are shit. Many nuts dont fit the bolts, They have dropped the brass gears, spacers, and locking rings in favor of plastic that slip and create unwanted friction.
 
You just can't beat yourself up (or your parents or grandparents) for giving away the "precious treasures" of your childhood. No one has enough room to save everything they've ever accumulated, and no one can predict what the next generation will regard as "collectible." In fact, the only things that will become "collectible" are the things that are rare precisely because most of them were thrown away!

I'm not beating anyone up for it.. lol.. Just gave us a reason to start collecting more again. lol... And a old step brother had taken them. lol.. Life moves on, I am not all tworn up or depressed about loosing them at all.. its not hard to recollect them at all.
 
Some guy even made a full accumulator (Fundamental component of a CPU) from lego. Axles push out and in to represent binary. Cant find the link for now. He tried to go for a register but slack in the system made his design impractical
 
a guy made a working lego printer once:) I think its up on youtube..haha
 
My son has had legos since he was 3 and has loved them every second since. He has created so many things with them and has used his mas quantities of Knex along side them to make guns...robots and everything in between. We have at least 4 storage boxes full of legos and probably the same amount of knex. He never followed those instructions either...built strictly by what he seen in the pictures and what his imagination come up with.
 
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