Re-discovering Lego

 Resurrections: Emerging from the Bin, Technic, Mindstorms:

There is a term for the period in one's life between when one loses interest in Lego as a teen and when one rediscovers it as an adult and becomes an Adult Fan of Lego (AFOL): The Dark Ages. Mine lasted until I was 33, while quarantining at home after being hospitalized with covid while undergoing chemotherapy. I had thought about playing with Lego again while undergoing chemotherapy, but thought that the construction would be too hard on my fragile skin.

The sets were still there, still built in my brother's room. I was a little curious if I could find information on some of the sets. I discovered that there were various websites dedicated to Lego that would help me find information on these sets: number of pieces, original prices, inventories, and instructions. I was re-entering back into the world. There were actually less sets produced each year than I expected and we actually had a good representation of the sets at the time.

As I mostly kept my models fully built, I never build up the alternate models or suggestions on the back of the box. So first I rebuilt the 735 Fire Truck alternates. My next goal was to rescue 8277 from the bin. The build that I never got to do. I started by removing anything technic related from the bin, then moving on to any interesting parts from the bin. Alongside 8277, I found parts for 6835, 6879, 6898, 6889, 6852, and 6341. As mentioned earlier, these sets were early in my Lego life and I didn't even remember them but by cross-referencing that special parts that I found, I was able to deduce that those parts came from these sets. I built those sets and any others that had found their way into the bin as best as I could. I made a spreadsheet listing all of the sets that I suspected were in the bin. I added the sets that were in my brother's room to the spreadsheet. Even a Lego Znap set 3571 Blackmobile is interesting because it contains instructions for many different models!

Helicopter

Giant Model Set Robot

I finished all 6 alternate models of 8277. The large models were impressive. The scale of the 16L bricks combined, and the functions led to a thirst for more. I rebuilt the alternate models for 8445 and 8446, the bricks dusty after sitting on a shelf for so long. Next, I collected all of the remaining technic sets from my brother's room and rebuilt them and their alternate models. Rather than leaving sets built up, I was excited to take them apart so that I could build the next one. At first, the disassembly process was hard on my hands, but now they are tougher. Rebuilding the sets has been another highlight because when I was younger, I would get into a trance while building, but neglect to appreciate the part usage and functions that are hidden from the completed model.

While playing with Meccano, I had another revelation. Meccano has a limited number of unique parts and if one had multiple Meccano sets, it is conceivable that one could build even more official Meccano sets by combining the multiple sets together. Meccano has a similar database of instructions and inventories but what I found was a little disappointing as while they don't release new sets very often, they do update their shapes from generation to generation and larger sets also have larger parts making it hard to build different sets.

In a similar vain, the larger Lego sets did include some specialized pieces that I did not have in my entire collection. But while closely examining some Star Wars sets, I noticed that they included many very old Classic Space elements. From before my time. This led me down an ever expanding rabbit hole. Not only could I build some space sets, there were sets from other themes like Castle (including the classic yellow castle 375, which I did build) and Town that I could build. I could build the skulls from Pirates. I could build classic Technic Sets. My spreadsheet has expanded to include an ever increasing list of sets that I can build although I doubt I will have the time to build all of them. My current interests are the technic sets that are a larger scale and have good functionality and space sets. My experience with Town Jr. has made me less interested in boring town sets. While I had originally cleaned out my brother's room of all technic and space sets, I cleaned out the rest of the Lego to add to the part collection I could use for building other sets.

Classic "yellow" castle

Next to make up for my dark ages, I looked for Lego Mindstorms. Mindstorms had evolved 3 generations since my time and I was able to pick up a set from the 2nd generation NXT for pretty cheap. Alongside the software which included instructions for 4 builds (and more with the education package software), I discovered more websites dedicated to this model released back in 2009 and was able to build and program even more models. Some of these models shared similarities to my other technic builds, cranes, steering vehicles and a switch was turned on in my head: motorizing my sets with the NXT!

Lego NXT Alpha Rex

The first build I attempted with my parts collection was 8450 The Mission. A fairly large technic set, I brazenly begun grabbing parts from sets in my collection, keeping track in a spreadsheet. This familiarized me with the parts in my sets, knowing the limitations. It was a time consuming process, but eventually I got it finished and fortunately never ran out of parts or encountered a roadblock requiring a special part. The finished model was amazing and again I was impressed by the scale and features. The time was eased when I was quickly able to build the alternate models because the parts were already sorted out. I refined my system for later parts bin builds by choosing a more similar Lego bag to base the build out of and taking greater care into making sure that I had the parts to complete the build.

8450 The Mission

8855 Plane

These builds introduced me to many different building techniques and interesting ratchet mechanisms. The time that I had sunk into building these models encouraged me to troubleshoot these models to make them work with the parts I have.

Battle Droid. These Technic Star Wars models aren't very well liked, but I enjoyed the non-machinery application of Lego!

While I hadn't integrated the NXT into my sets yet, I started to integrate it into my parts bin builds, perhaps starting off with the most ambitious: 8094 Control Center. It was here that I found the limitation of the LabVIEW like NXT-G software, mainly with math required to draw circles and a feature from the original set: being able to store and replay chains of commands. I discovered that there were other ways to program NXTs using text-based software that would be much simpler. After hours and hours of learning and programming, I was able to create programs for both of those tasks among the builds of that set.

Control Center

While that was my most ambitious NXT program, my most ambitious build was 8479 with over 1200 parts. After a couple of weeks, I was able to build the main model and then the alternate models came quickly. The programming was fairly easy. The original set was based around the older 9V system with smaller motors. To incorporate my larger NXT motors, I had to remove some of the aesthetics of the models, but the spirit of the model remained. 

Barcode Multi-Set

With 8479 coming close before the release of the original Mindstorms RCX sets, it shares many of the same parts, so I have been able to build many of the builds from those sets without having to sort more parts. 

RCX Grabber Arm

I asked for and received Lego 42128 Heavy Duty Tow Truck for Christmas, which is notable for a couple of reasons. It is over 2x the size of any set that I had when I was younger, and it contains pneumatics and many interesting functions. Parts that will be useful in other parts bin builds.

Heavy Duty Tow Truck