The pictures of the finished Lego sign are really the star of this episode.  As such, I’ll do my best not to bore you with too many words.  Conveniently, as any of my fellow Robots can attest, I’m well known for my brevity:)

Anyhow, after two cautious drives into work, both halves of the sign made it to the office without issue.  They spent a couple of days on the table in the Biergarten.  They look somehow ominous in this picture.

The next task was to affix the French cleats to the wall.  I went to Lowe’s to buy some anchors.  My five year old son Tommy tagged along.

As we were walking into the store, he asked, “Daddy, what are you getting?”

“Some anchors for the Lego sign.”, I replied.  Anticipating the inevitable follow-up, I quickly said “Anchors are the metal pieces that will hold the sign onto the wall.”

Tommy heaved a dramatic sigh of relief, “Oh.  That’s good.  Otherwise the bad guys might steal it.”  Tommy’s in that perfect phase of innocence where everything is about good guys and bad guys.  It’s awesome.

I tried explaining...  “Well, I doubt the bad guys will break in to steal the Lego sign.  We have a lot of things that are more valuable in the office.”

In that way that kids do, Tommy completely ignored what I said and continued in his own world, “You should make sure it’s on the wall good so the bad guys don’t get it.”

The only available reply at this point was: “Yup, I’ll do that.  I definitely don’t want the bad guys to steal the sign.”

On we went in search of the perfect wall anchor.  To lend support in his own manner, Tommy dropped into the vaunted 'Spartan Defense' mode (complete with sound effects) somewhere in aisle 14.  He’s played way, way too much Halo Wars.

I guess I’ve lost the concise angle already.  Oh well.

Armed with the Anti-Evil Bad Guy Anchors, I went into work on the weekend to get the cleats attached to the wall.  Marcin, one of our programmers, came in to help.  The fam tagged along, too.  The boys had a blast playing Halo Wars together.  Here are some pics of the glorious French Cleats.  C’est magnifique!

At this point, the only thing left was to fully assemble the sign and finish filling in the letters.  Putting the sign together was quick.  And surprisingly painless.

Here are some pics of the group build we did to fill out the letters.  That was a lot of fun.  Much like my test runs of the ‘t’ and ‘o’ fill, we didn’t get enough density during the group build.  There were too many empty spaces for the look I wanted.  Harter Ryan (one of our executive producers) and I compacted things quite a bit during the final glue up.  A key thing was adding a lot of little pieces for visual interest.

By the time we finished gluing the sign, I think the total time I had put into the sign was roughly 85 hours.  At least 45 of those were gluing.  I’ll be happy to avoid super glue for a while.

Here are some pictures of the “big move” from table to wall.  The good luck continued; the move went without a hitch.  That’s Vijay and Nate (one of our concept artists) helping to carry the sign.  Crow is apparently supervising or something.

TA-EFFING-DA!  Here’s the final deal on the wall.

Here are some close-ups of the letters.  The minifig themes are:
• Star Wars for the ‘r’
• Indy for the first ‘o’
• Medieval for the ‘b’ (hey, we did do Age2 after all!)
• Pirates for the second ‘o’
• Batman for the ‘t’

And, here’s one final gratuitous shot of me and my boys, Andy and Tommy, standing in front of the sign.  Happy demeanors carefully hide our ruthless cage-fighting abilities.  Bad guys beware.

Woot.  The sign was a lot of work, but I think the end result was worth it.  The sign is pretty cool and was a blast to put together.  Well, save for the blisters.

dave