We chucked our old ‘everyone has a small office’ layout when we started Robot. We wanted something more open and team-centric vs. everyone closeted off in a separate office. Now, everyone sits in a common area with 10 other folks. It’s been working pretty well. We’re definitely communicating more, which means the crazy things we’re doing with our games are going much faster. Of course, I now know more about my fellow Robots than I ever cared to. Everything has a price. :)

Anyhow, the pods are a shared space. Shared spaces can tend to be bland. We planned some cool themes to give each pod a strong identity. Grandiose designs for dinosaur jungles and comic book havens were hatched. One of the pods was even going to have a Lego theme. How cool would that have been?

Why the past tense? Unfortunately, real life intervened. Starting a company is hard. And long. And expensive. Things just got in the way. We tabled the full-on themes for a while. Well, except for our German Biergarten cafe. Some things just refuse to be ignored.

I still wanted to find a way to do something with Legos given how many Legomaniacs we’ve got on staff.  Ever since I saw this awesome Google sign, I had really wanted to make one for Robot.  Thankfully, the topic of cool stuff to put on the walls came up.  I told Patrick Hudson, one of our VPs, of my willingness to slaughter innocent babies for the chance to build one.

Sans any actual baby-cide, I started planning out the Robot Lego sign.  Here’s the gridded-out Robot logo.  We need something pretty thin, so most of the sign is going to be made out of plates rather than bricks.

The wall we are putting it on is big and empty, so we’ve decided to make a massive sign.  We originally picked 4 by 8 feet due to convenience, but that’s a really odd Lego dimension.  45” by 90” is much more ‘Lego friendly’.

In terms of color, the official Robot logo is on a black background.  We seem to have a lot of those already, though.  We have this cool sign on the building.  We have another one in our lobby.  And one day, this door mat showed up.  At this rate, 19 more black Robot logos will show up next week.  We needed some other color, so we went with the white version.

The final bit of the plan was to glue 18 of the big 15” by 15” grey Lego base plates on some backer boards and then glue the pieces on top of those.  Simple enough.  With that decided, I spent a bit of time counting up the Legos we’d need.  Eventually, counting gave way to educated guessing since I know we’ll change a few things anyway.

All told, it’s roughly ~7600 pieces.  The Lego website definitely is not optimized for such a large order, but the nice woman on the phone said that was the best way to do it.  Oh well.  Apart from the base plates and the white plates to cover those up, there really wasn’t anything too outrageously expensive.  Well, at least not outrageous in the context of 7600 pieces anyway.

The Legos took a while to show up.  I was pretty excited by the time they arrived.  I’m reminded of that old Tim Allen joke about him being so excited for a package to arrive that he humps the UPS guy’s leg while the dog takes the box...  Good thing they arrived whilst I was at work.

Here’s what 7500 Legos look like.  There was that inevitable “Holy Crap” moment when I saw that they didn’t sort them by color.  I’m still sorting out all those tiny pieces. :)  But at least there are plenty of vivid, easily discernible colors.  My oldest boy got the latest Lego Death Star from Santa this past holiday.  That thing is bad ass.  But, let me tell you, it takes a *long* time to sort through approximately one billion bags of grey Legos.

On to the assembly…

You know what?  It’s pretty darn hard to glue Legos to wood.  Looking around on the Internet, there really isn’t a lot of easy “Just go buy XYZ, it works great” advice, either.  It took three different glues, but I finally found one that works really well.  Unfortunately, it’s a variant of contact cement, so once the base plates touch the wood, they’re stuck there forever.  And lining up 18 base plates is finicky business.  Suck.

Change in plans.  Each base plate is now getting mounted on its own backer board.  That way, I can individually square those up and then glue those on a second backer board.  That will actually help since I can’t really make the sign out of one piece anyway since I have to truck it into work without it falling apart.  I’ll make the sign in two pieces.  A fine plan.

It wasn’t too bad squaring up the base plates.  Each needed a couple of custom cuts, but that was done in a couple of hours.

I’ve always been stupid about making things overly strong.  I build a decent amount of furniture, too.  I’ve always had the rule that my stuff needs to withstand me jumping on it when it’s done.  As the years have worn on, my belly’s gotten bigger and the furniture’s gotten a smidge more refined.  I’ve had to modify my rule at times.  This desk I made for my wife got only a quick ‘butt swipe sitting’ rather than a full-on gorilla jump.

I don’t think I’ll jump on our sign when it’s done.  I don’t want it to fall off the wall, though.  So, I’ve got splines in between all of the individual base plate boards.  And the backers interleave.  As does the outside frame.  And the white Lego plates are going to be aligned to cover all the gaps.  That oughtta do it. :)

Those splines made the last big glue-up harder than it should have been.  98 degree, Texas heat makes wood glue dry *awfully* fast...  A few choice words might have been issued in the name of “fun” while I was getting those things to fit.  I’m pretty sure my wife regrets offering to help me glue those up, but thankfully, she’s pretty understanding. :)

And, here we are.  We have two ‘epic’ base plates that will form the back of the sign.  Seems like they should be purple, though…