LEGO is a globally recognized brand that needs no introduction. For most of us, the LEGO name is synonymous with the colorful plastic bricks that we grew up playing with. LEGO has indeed been a popular children’s toy for generations. At the same time, it has also transcended its origins as a toy and become a medium of choice for adults looking to explore their creative side or to simply unwind from their daily routine.
Today AFOLs (or Adult Fans Of LEGO) make up a vibrant and growing community of LEGO enthusiasts from around the world. They share their ideas and creations online on social media, as well as in LEGO conventions. These LEGO conventions feature elaborate displays of MOCs (or My Own Creations – a term used within the community to describe models designed and built by LEGO fans) and can draw thousands of visitors.
AFOLs who rediscover LEGO as adults after a “dark age” (a term AFOLs use to describe a period when they lost interest in LEGO) or discover it for the very first time, typically start their LEGO journey with official sets. These are the sets you would buy in a LEGO store or any other retail store that carries LEGO products. Official LEGO sets come with all the pieces you need to build the model shown on the box along with step-by-step instructions for doing just that.
In the earliest days of LEGO, all the instructions needed to build a set could fit on a single sheet of paper. But over the years, LEGO sets (especially the ones geared towards adults) have grown to become incredibly complex. Some of these require 1000 or more separate building steps and the instructions for them come in sizable booklets (sometimes there is more than just one).
Official LEGO sets can be chock-full of new and interesting building techniques (after all, LEGO employs some of the best and the brightest builders out there, as designers) but there is no reason to limit your LEGO journey to just these sets. In fact, you can take inspiration from the official LEGO sets and use that as a jumping-off point for your own exploration of everything that is possible with LEGO.
This book hopes to serve as a road map for that exploration. In this chapter, we will start with a brief overview of LEGO history and see how the company that makes the colorful plastic bricks we all know and love, came into existence. This will give us some context when we examine the qualities of LEGO bricks that can explain their enduring appeal and the allure they hold for adults looking for a creative outlet.
We will then familiarize ourselves with the basic LEGO elements and terminology before moving on to various building techniques that will be covered in the chapters that follow. These techniques will come in handy when you are ready to take the next step towards designing and building your own LEGO creation.
A brief history of LEGO
The story of how LEGO came to be is a great lesson in resilience and turning adversity into opportunity. The company that would become LEGO had its humble beginnings in a small woodworking business in Billund, Denmark that was owned by carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen. When the demand for carpentry work started to dry up with the onset of the Great Depression, Christiansen made the fateful decision to branch out into building simple wooden toys that would be easier to sell. His business eventually transitioned into a toy manufacturing company and in 1934, Ole named this new company LEGO which is an abbreviated version of the Danish phrase leg godt which means “play well”.
When a devastating fire destroyed his factory in 1942, Ole refused to accept defeat. Instead, he used this setback as an opportunity to rebuild the factory and make it bigger and better suited to the mass production of toys. After the end of the Second World War, when it became harder to source wood, which was the primary raw material for his toys, Ole was quick to adapt to the new trend of making toys out of plastic. He took a big risk and invested in an expensive injection molding machine that could be used to manufacture a new generation of toys. In 1949 LEGO released their first building set comprising plastic interlocking bricks which were marketed as “automatic binding bricks”.
Ole’s son Godtfred, who would inherit the family business, had initially been skeptical about the transition to plastic. But he quickly came on board with the idea once he recognized the potential of plastic bricks. He envisioned these plastic bricks as being the basic building blocks of an entire system of related products. Children wouldn’t just be limited to building the model shown on the box of the building set, but they could also mix and match the bricks that came in the different sets to create models that expressed their own creativity and imagination. For this to be possible, LEGO had to ensure that all their bricks fit together no matter when they were bought and which building set they came from.
Godtfred also had to deal with the fact that the first generation of LEGO bricks (the “automatic binding bricks”) were hollow and the models constructed using them were not very stable. He addressed this limitation by coming up with a new design that used hollow tubes on the undersides of bricks (which he patented in 1958). This design (which is used to this day) greatly improved the interlocking abilities of LEGO bricks and made them much more versatile. In 1960, after another fire destroyed their remaining inventory of wooden toys, Godtfred felt confident enough in his new strategy to discontinue the production of wooden toys as well as other plastic toys and focus his attention solely on building sets made up of LEGO bricks.
The rest, as they say is history. Godtfred’s incredible foresight and vision set LEGO on the course to becoming what it is today – a global powerhouse and a household name. LEGO is now the biggest toy company in the world with a catalog that includes thousands of different building sets that are sold in branded stores all over the world as well as regular retail stores. LEGO also has a stake (either directly or through licensing agreements) in a wide range of properties including theme parks, movies, TV shows and video games.
How LEGO clicked: Breaking down a remarkable success story
So, what is the secret of LEGO’s success? Is it the savvy marketing strategy they have always employed, or their decision to enter into licensing agreements with some of the biggest pop culture franchises out there (Star Wars, Harry Potter, Marvel, to name a few) ? These factors may have helped, but it also wouldn’t have been possible without some inherent traits of the LEGO system that were key to making it what it is today. Some of these traits are:
1. System in Play
Godtfred’s idea of a “System in Play” was a new paradigm in the toy industry. This meant that instead of being just a standalone toy, each building set would be a part of a toy system. As a child got older, their interests evolved and abilities improved, the system could grow with them and continue to provide play opportunities that engaged their creativity and imagination. The LEGO pieces that made up each building set could be used in conjunction with pieces from other sets to build anything that the child’s imagination could conjure up. This opened the door to new creative possibilities beyond the models shown on the boxes of the building sets.
2. Backward Compatibility
Take one peek inside a LEGO store (an online store if there isn’t a brick-and-mortar one near you) and you know that these are not your grandfather’s building blocks. The sheer number and variety of sets that are currently available can be mind-boggling. And yet, one amazing thing is that the LEGO pieces being made today can fit together just fine with your grandfather’s building blocks (if your grandfather happened to play with LEGO). Even with all the changes LEGO has gone through as a company over the years, one thing they haven’t changed is the size of the brick itself. The LEGO bricks being made today are fully compatible with the bricks made during the earliest days of LEGO (and they can continue to be used well into the future without any risk of them ever becoming obsolete).
3. Very tight tolerances
This compatibility is assured by the very tight tolerances that are enforced during the injection molding process that is used to turn ABS (a type of hard plastic) into LEGO bricks. What this means is that LEGO bricks are manufactured with a high degree of precision (the maximum allowable deviation in measurements is typically around 0.01 mm which is thinner than a strand of hair). This way, LEGO bricks are guaranteed to fit together perfectly no matter when they were made and in which factory.
LEGO has been a popular medium for building scale models of buildings, ships, aircraft, etc. Tight tolerances are essential, especially on larger models where even small variations in the sizes of the pieces could add up and cause the different sections of the model to not fit together correctly.
4. Superior Clutch Power
Before we talk about clutch power, it would help get some basic terms out of the way.
The first LEGO element that Godtfred Kirk Christiansen patented back in 1958 is the 2×4 brick. The numbers 2 and 4 here indicate that it has 2 rows with 4 studs each.
Studs are the cylindrical bumps that you see on the top of LEGO bricks. They connect to anti-studs (or receptacles for studs) on the bottom of other LEGO bricks allowing bricks to stay together when they are stacked. This simple interlocking mechanism is what makes LEGO work and enables all kinds of wonderful things to be built using LEGO bricks.
If you look at the underside of a 2×4 brick, you will see that it has 3 round hollow tubes that are evenly spaced. Godtfred Kirk Christiansen discovered that these tubes gave LEGO bricks much higher clutch power and stability when they are joined together. Clutch power is simply the grip that holds one LEGO piece to another. It must be just enough to allow LEGO bricks to stay together without falling apart, but not so much that it makes it difficult for children to take the bricks apart. Godtfred saw that with the tubes added, the studs get wedged in between the tubes and the sides of the brick making them stick together with just the right amount of clutch power.
LEGO pieces can usually be joined together and taken apart any number of times without a significant loss of clutch power. This clutch power (along with the tight tolerances) is what makes it possible to use LEGO bricks to build massive skyscrapers and other structures, with sizes that are only limited by your imagination (and other practical considerations like cost, portability, etc.).
5. Unlimited Possibilities
The concept of interlocking bricks may be simple, but it also opens up a world of unlimited possibilities. Two 2×4 bricks can be joined together in 24 different ways and that number goes up exponentially as you add more bricks (with 915,103,765 different combinations that are possible with just six 2×4 bricks). Imagine all the possibilities with the 4000 or so different types of LEGO elements that have been produced in 60+ different colors!
6. Endless Reconfigurability
One of the things that makes the LEGO medium so attractive to children and adults alike is the fact that your creations are never set in stone (so to speak). You can always update your LEGO models months or years after you have built them, to add details that you may have previously missed or to incorporate new LEGO pieces that did not exist before. You can also take your model apart and reuse the pieces to build something that is different altogether.
While it is easy to take bricks apart using your bare fingers, you may sometimes need a little help with other types of pieces that are thinner (plates, tiles, etc.). This is where a LEGO brick separator can come in handy (you may see it included in some of the bigger LEGO sets). This plastic tool is an antidote to the legendary clutch power of LEGO elements. You can use it to take apart LEGO pieces that are joined together, quickly and without much effort.
Basic LEGO elements
We may have used the term bricks to refer to LEGO elements in general, but a brick is also a specific type of element. It is the most common element and the basic building block of the LEGO system.
Bricks come in various sizes. The 1×1 brick with just one stud is the smallest brick that is available. Bricks are normally available with 1 or 2 rows and an even number (going up to 16) of studs per row (1×3 and 2×3 bricks being the exception). All the bigger bricks are essentially multiples of a 1×1 brick (for instance a 2×4 brick has the same size as four rows of two 1×1 bricks placed next to each other).
Plates are the thinner counterparts of bricks. The smallest plate that is available is a 1×1 plate that has the same footprint as a 1×1 brick, but it is only a third a tall (and so you need a stack of three 1×1 plates to match the height of a 1×1 brick).
Baseplates are special plates that come in sizes as big as 48×48. They are thinner than regular plates and don’t have anti-studs on their bottom. They are generally used as the base or the foundation of LEGO builds (though lately LEGO seems to be phasing them out at least in their official sets in favor of regular plates).
Tiles are essentially plates with no studs. They can be used to cover up exposed studs for a smooth finished look. They also come in sizes 1×1 and up. But what do these sizes mean if tiles have no studs? In addition to being the name of the cylindrical bump on the top of a LEGO brick, a stud as we will see, also doubles as a unit of measurement in LEGO terminology.
LEGO tiles usually have a little groove along their bottom edge. This makes it easier to detach the tiles using a fingernail or the sharp end of a brick separator.
In addition to elements with square and rectangular footprints, LEGO also makes pieces that have circular footprints. These round bricks, plates and tiles can be stacked to create structures like columns but their applications are limited given that they cannot be combined in the same way as regular LEGO elements.
LEGO Measurement Units
There are quite a few different units that can be used to measure the dimensions of LEGO elements. You may come across LEGO measurements being expressed in terms of LU (LEGO Unit) or LDU (LDraw Unit), not to forget centimeters (metric units work better than US customary units like inches). While these units may be useful when you are using a CAD tool to design your own custom LEGO element, you may find that as a builder, you can get away with simpler units that are far more intuitive – namely studs and plates.
A stud is basically the width of a 1×1 brick which also happens to be the stud pitch (or the distance center to center between two adjacent bumps on a LEGO brick or plate). You can also think of a stud as the basic unit in the regular square grid of stud (bump) locations that determines where LEGO pieces can be placed. In metric units, a stud is equivalent to 0.8 cm but that is just a nominal measurement (the actual width of a 1×1 brick is more like 0.78 cm to allow some clearance between bricks when they are placed abutting each other).
If you look closely at a 1×1 brick, you will see that it is not a perfect cube (even if you disregard the stud). It is slightly taller than it is wide. The height of a brick is 0.96 cm which is not a whole number of studs. This can create a few challenges as you will see in the later chapters. A plate as we have seen is only a third as tall as a brick (or 0.32 cm). Using a plate as a unit of measurement, a 1×1 brick is 3 plates tall and 0.8/0.32 = 2.5 plates wide. This 3/2.5 or 6/5 ratio of height to width of a LEGO brick is something that will come into play often in the later chapters – especially when we start delving into sideways building or SNOT.
LEGO Technic
LEGO Technic is a line of building sets that was introduced in 1977. Technic sets are intended for more advanced builders that want to take their LEGO models to the next level by adding moving parts with realistic mechanisms. Technic sets include more than just regular LEGO bricks and plates. They also have specialized pieces such as beams, gears, axles and connectors. It is also possible in some cases to add small motors with batteries to mechanize the model.
Early Technic sets used beams which were nothing more than regular 1xn bricks with circular holes in their faces. These holes could accommodate pins, that allowed beams parallel to each other or hinged at an angle to be connected together. The holes could also be used as bearings for axles so gears and wheels could be attached for more complex mechanisms. LEGO has slowly replaced these beams with liftarms that have no studs for a more “studless” style of construction.
We will not be delving into LEGO Technic in this book (there are other books out there that do this in detail). The techniques covered in this book will use elements from the regular LEGO system for the most part (though we may find Technic bricks to be handy for certain sideways building techniques).
Digital Building
Digital building has become increasingly popular among AFOLs. Instead of building a LEGO model using real pieces they can choose to build it virtually on their computer. There are several software options available for this purpose including LDD (LEGO Digital Designer), Studio, LeoCAD and Mecabricks.
These software programs don’t just allow you to build a LEGO model digitally. The processing power available in modern computers also makes it possible to generate photorealistic renders of your models that are hard to distinguish from real photographs. These programs can also automatically create the step-by-step instructions needed to build your model using real pieces.
But why trade in the tactile pleasures of working with real LEGO bricks for the comparatively sterile experience of putting a LEGO model together digitally? Well, the answer comes down to cost and convenience. LEGO is not exactly cheap and not everyone has a large inventory of LEGO pieces available to turn any idea they may have into an actual model made of real bricks.
Using software essentially allows you to have an unlimited inventory of LEGO pieces, albeit virtual ones. Even if you intend to build your model using real pieces eventually, digital building can be a great way to prototype your model digitally and create a list of the LEGO pieces you would need to procure in order to build the model in real life.
There are short cuts available in the software programs that can make the building process less tedious and repetitive digitally than it is in real life. For instance, if you are building a skyscraper with the same design used for each floor, you can simply create a sub-model for the floor and copy and paste it as many times as you need.
Since most LEGO building software is available for free, there is no upfront cost involved. However, there can be a steep learning curve especially for those who don’t have any experience using CAD software. Also, there is no guarantee that a LEGO model that you build digitally is even practical in real life. There are basic connectivity and structural integrity checks available in Studio for instance, but they are not foolproof.
This is especially true for larger models where you can get away with paying little attention to internal structural reinforcements for your model as long as you are in the digital realm. But when you try to turn the digital model into a real one you may encounter some unexpected challenges in ensuring that your model is sturdy enough to be moved around.
The LDraw format
LDraw is a standard file format that is used to describe a LEGO model. An LDraw file is basically a text file with one line devoted to each of the parts that make up the model. This line has multiple fields that contain information about the part type, its color and its location/orientation in 3D space. The coordinates in the 3D space are specified in terms of LDU or LDraw units.
One LDU is roughly equivalent to 0.4 mm which would make the width and depth of a 1×1 brick (also known as a stud) 20 LDU. The height of the brick is 24 LDU.
Most software programs that allow you to build LEGO models digitally can export and import the LDraw format. The simplicity of the format also makes it possible to use programming languages such as Python, C++, and JavaScript to automate the creation of LEGO models such as mosaics and sculptures that we will be covering in Chapters 8 and 9 respectively.