Before we dive into today’s scintillating and titillating discourse on the finer points of haphazard Lego sign construction, let’s look at a few more Robot logos that have popped up at, er, Robot.  You might recall that I foretold of 19 more logos back in the first blog.  Alas, only two more so far…

One on the drink machine.

And one more on the super secret back entrance to our office space.  Though, now that I look at this fine image, I realize that you’ll have to take my word for it on where it is.  Trust me.  It’s super secret and cool.  Mostly.

Enough bad jokes.  Back to the sign.

It was time to do some layout.  The big letters were scary, so I started laying out the ‘entertainment’ part of the logo.  That went quickly.  I made a few tweaks from the original layout, but nothing of note.

And then I noticed that I had more space in front of the letters than the back.  Turns out that I started the letters one stud to the right of where I should have.  Crap.  Well, at least I made that mistake now and won’t make it again (hah).  Using the ever-handy official Lego brick separator, it didn’t take more than 10 minutes to move everything over a stud.

Once that was done, I stepped back to marvel at my work.  How could I not?  I’d just placed at least 100 pieces.  Out of like 8000.  If that doesn’t scream ‘marvel break’, I don’t know what does.

Alas, a possible issue arose during said marvel break.  When I placed the letters, I was economical and used the fewest plates possible to cover the necessary studs.  But, that meant I had horizontal plates mixed with vertical plates and all kinds of plate sizes in action.  In some places, it looked a bit messy.  I was pretty sure I would want to fix it, but I left it alone hoping I would get over it.

Time for a big boy, the ‘r’.  This wasn’t as easy as I was hoping it would be.  I should have made a bigger printout of each letter.  I kept getting lost going back and forth between the Legos and the printout.  After several checks and re-checks, I got the black and blue parts of the ‘r’ done.

I did the other black and blue parts of the big letters over the next few days.  Here’s what those looked like.

Once the big outlines were done, I could finally do what I’d been waiting for; the full version of the ‘r’.  I hastily slapped together the white and red parts just to see how it would look.

You know, it looked pretty damn good.

I took a few days off.  An extended marvel break, if you will.  When I got back to it, I realized that I’d made a ton of layout gaffes on the letters.  Some were easily fixed, others weren’t.  Much time passed trying to fix them all.  I ended up fattening the vertical black sections of the big letters.  Not a big deal, but it looked better.  Plus, it helped hide a few errors.

Next, I did the sides.  That was the quickest segment on the whole sign.  No mistakes, either.  Woot.  Here’s a shot of the sides.  The missing plates at the bottom are where the two halves join up.  All of the plates along that intersection won’t be glued so that I can easily transport the sign to the office.

As I got ready to glue, I realized that I needed more plates.  I was short on bigger blue plates and had used too many tiny plates to cover big areas.  Yuck.

I was also stratospherically off on the number of white tiles I ordered.  I can’t even figure out how I screwed up the order that badly.  Plus, based on some comments from Vijay (one of our lead programmers), I decided that I did have to fix those initial letters, which meant that I needed different plates than I had.  I scavenged what I could from my kids, but it wasn’t enough.

Hello Pick a Brick Order #3.  Hopefully it’s the last one.  I threw in a few mountain pieces for my boys since I’d already pillaged their collections quite a bit.  And, I was pretty sure there would be more pillaging in the future...

While I waited for that order to show up, I started gluing what I could.  I started with the ‘entertainment’ letters again.  I finished pretty quickly, but something was off.  It took me a while to find it, but somehow the ‘r’ had grown a stud in width during the gluing process.  I must have pulled off too many pieces at one time and just gotten befuddled putting them back on.

Luckily, I didn’t glue the white plates.  They are really hard to pull off once the sides are on, so I wasn’t worried about them coming off or getting taken off.  Plus, not gluing them let me fix mistakes like the ‘r’ by pulling off a few white plates and doing that area over.  So, while I was an idiot for screwing up the ‘r’, at least I planned for it.

Insert 15 to 20 hours of gluing.  Here’s the sign as I’m crossing the halfway point on the red and white gluing.

Another 5 hours pass.  And I’m still gluing.

Here’s a collection of the mistakes I made during glue-up.  You can see the overly fat 'r' I mentioned earlier.  Hideous.

After some more gluing, here’s how the final ‘ot’ looked.  Brad (one of our lead artists) had a really cool idea to do the white letters raised up one level with the tiles on top.  I think that really makes things pop and sets up well for the final final phase...

It was pretty awesome when I affixed the final red plate to the interior of the ‘r’.  Woot.

Not done yet, though.  The final, final phase awaited.  The plan was to do a random fill of cool Lego pieces on top of the red plates to give the sign some character.

I quickly did that to the ‘t’ before I went to bed.  Here’s what that looked like.  It's not quite full enough; there are too many empty spaces.  But, you get the idea.

I was going to be super strict about not putting anything but red pieces in the fill.  Then I had the idea to theme each letter around a different collection of minifigs.  That’s much cooler, so screw the red restriction.  I bartered with my boys to get some of their dupe minifigs in exchange for a new Lego set.  Here’s the ‘t’ redone with a Batman theme.

With that, it was finally ready to go to the office.  The plan is to have everyone chip in and do the red fill pieces together.  Followed by more gluing, of course.

With the sign out of the Dining/Craft room, we took advantage and played a board game in there.  Tikal.  Great game; both my boys (5.5 and 8 years old) love it.

So, one more blog to go and then the creation shall be complete!

dave