Author Archives: Justin Watkins

Offices in London

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I was very privileged recently to be able to visit the offices of The LEGO Group in London. It should come as no surprise that they have a large version of their famous logo right in front of you at the reception area.

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It’s over 2 metres across. Here’s a close-up so you can see what it’s made of:

IMG_1763yup: thousands of LEGO Minifigs with their heads towards the front.

There is also this great gap in the wall between two parts of the office:

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and here is a lampshade.

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The art everywhere is very inspiring, and I’m sure it would be a fantastic place to work.

 

 

The Cake

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I don’t do a lot of cooking. So it was quite a surprise when a friend commissioned me to produce their wedding cake. In a strange way I should have seen it coming.

To cut a long story short, the cake is not made of eggs butter and flour. It’s made of Lego. And the first question everyone asks is “how long did it take you to make it?”

The bride gave me 15 months notice to make the cake. The actual building didn’t take very long. It was the planning that took the time. Planning what it was going to look like. Researching what real wedding cakes look like. Finding out the right sizes of each tier so they look right. And working out how to make circular things with square bricks.

The end result was an amazing success. The bride and groom were very happy with it. From a distance it looked like an ordinary cake. but everyone wanted a closer look, and everyone was taking photos.

There are various ways of making round things out of square bricks. The bottom tier uses a “traditional” method, like “steps” on their side. Most of the models and giant statues at Legoland use this method. I used the Paint program on my PC to draw circles of various sizes, and zoomed in to get a blocky circle on the screen, showing me where the bricks should go relative to each other. Then I experimented to see which size circle looked right. I created a number of quarter-circles in various radii to work out how thick to make the side of the cake (it is actually hollow, but needs a certain thickness so it doesn’t fall apart when you pick it up). This also helped me calculate how many more bricks I needed to buy.

The top tier uses a different method of construction. By alternating the 1×3 bricks and the round bricks, it is possible to create a wall which can be curved. It looks a bit like the Colosseum. My first attempts were very multi-coloured, but this also helped me work out how many more bricks I needed to buy.

The middle tier uses another technique again. The method of construction relies on a special Lego part that was used in a Star Wars set from 2003 and some Lego Technic parts.

This construction method has the studs arranged horizontally around the edge of the cake. This tier is made up of 40 “slices” internally held in place by Technic pins slotted into the wheel, and held in tension externally against the neighbouring slice. The last slice was rather difficult to get into place… especially as I had to rebuild it several times. I didn’t have enough white 2×12 plates initially. Although the first attempt helped me work out how many more bricks I needed, I miscounted, and had to order some more with only a few weeks to go before the wedding. The overall effect is very different from the other two slices, because it creates a much smoother circumference. This tier of the cake is also surprisingly heavy.

The cake has a feature not seen on most wedding cakes – a garage door. Remember I said that the cake is hollow? Inside the bottom tier of the cake is a lorry (the bride has an HGV licence). The door mechanism was quite a challenge. It uses slotted bricks as guideways for the bottom and top of the door to follow. After much experimentation, I found it was necessary to have separate guideways for the bottom and the top of the doors. It’s a bit fragile, and needed repairing several times on the day of the wedding, but it was a great success.

On the lorry’s flatbed trailer are two slices of cake. I take absolutely no credit for this fourth cake design. These come from the genius of Chris McVeigh, who produces all kinds of other amazing things in Lego.

The lorry also helped us resolve a practical matter on the day of the wedding: how are the bride and groom going to cut the cake? About three weeks before the big day, I realised we also needed a knife…

Please leave comments below if you want me to go into more detail. For the record, the wedding was in March 2015, in England.

(This post first appeared on my Blogspot blog on 29th March 2015)

 

Clock Number 1

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Now that I have moved into my man-cave, I am able to start working on a number of projects that have been on hold whilst we rebuilt the house. Stuff like rebuilding a computer, sorting out the XBMC media box, and stuff like that. And building cool things out of Lego.

One of the projects that has been ticking over at the back of my mind is to build a clock. A quick internet search shows lots of ideas of building clock faces out of Lego, and some of these are very artistic. A lot of work goes into making some of these designs, and eventually my clock will have an arty face as well.

For the idea in hand, I am not content to use a purchased clock mechanism. The challenge is to build the mechanism as well. For this, Lego Technic is my weapon of choice, but there are a number of challenges:

  • Lego axles are cross-shaped rather than round, and the gears have a cross-shaped hole in the middle so that the gears do not spin on the axle. The challenge is that a clock has two concentric axles for the hour and minute hand – three if you want a second-hand as well. So somewhere in the mechanism, at least one gear must be able to spin freely on the axle.
  • It is considered extremely bad form among Adult Fans of Lego to deliberately damage one’s Lego. Therefore the drilling-out of the axle-cross in a gear is not permitted. Having said that, I confess to doing exactly that a number of years ago.
  • The minute hand rotates sixty times faster than the hour hand. A gear ratio of 60:1 is required between the two concentric axles. Lego gears are available with 8, 16, 24, and 40 teeth (there are a few others too). I leave the maths as an exercise for the reader.

Over the course of an hour in my cave the other evening, with paper, pen, and the calculator on my phone (a form of cheating), I worked out the gear ratios. I know I can look it up online, but that’s not so satisfying. Then I ran into another problem: how to make sure that the start and the end of the gearing end up on the same axle. I built and rebuilt the mechanism half a dozen times before I worked that out. Some problems can only be solved by trial and error. And the solution turned out to be quite elegant. The mechanism is seen here.

On the front (in the lower part of the picture to the left) is a dark grey part , known as a “differential “. This part is found in many of the Technic vehicle sets, and your car has one too. I use it here, because it has round axle-holes. The dark grey bit itself is driven by the small 8-tooth gear to its right. The axle through the middle is driven from the back of the mechanism (top of the picture).

So here I present, with a simple face to support the whole thing, version 1 of my Lego clock. There is no drive system yet – you have to turn the minute hand manually. But the hour hand rotates at exactly the right speed when you do so. My son called it a Saturday alarm clock – you can set it for exactly the time you want, and it will make absolutely no sound at that time on a Saturday, thus allowing you to have a lie-in. so practical.

If I have nothing else to do on Saturday after my lie-in, I might start work on the drive mechanism. Episode 2 of this saga will follow in a few months’ time. If you can’t wait for me to build mine, have a look at what others have done.

(This post first appeared on my Blogspot blog in September 2014).