Tech Know: The dreams that bricks are made of
Look at a Lego brick and what do you see? A studded, brightly coloured
block. Perhaps you remember them from your childhood. Perhaps that brick
was part of a fire engine, a race car or a bulldozer.
Some people look at Lego bricks and see great potential buried within
them. In their hands Lego rises above its childhood origins and gets a
chance to aspire, to be part of something great.
In Warren Elsmore’s hands 11,000 Lego bricks have been fashioned into a
scale model of the Forth Railway Bridge.
The real thing is a marvel in all its riveted splendour and its tiny
cousin, which stretches 6.5 metres, is too. Its spans have the same
breath-taking arcs as the original and the similarities do not end with
its looks.
“The parts they had problems building on the real bridge were a problem
for me too,” said Mr Elsmore. In particular, he said, the point where
the pylons and bridge supports meet on the base were very tricky to
render in Lego.
Just as in the real bridge, some parts of the Lego model are in
compression and some in tension. The structure even flexes when under
load. The bridge is regularly shown off at Lego shows and some bits of
it have to be replaced when Lego trains have been running across it for
a few days.
“They turned to dust,” said Mr Elsmore who is also chairman of the
Brickish Association, the UK’s club for adult fans of Lego.
The model took 18 months to put together and, so far, is the biggest
model Mr Elsmore has built.
Unlike the designers of the original, Mr Elsmore could turn to computers
to help him draw up his plans. He used a program called LDraw which is
effectively a computer-aided design package for Lego bricks.
LDraw is written and maintained by adult fans of Lego. It is kept
updated so the new pieces that Lego releases are turned into virtual
versions so people can use them in their models.
“Lego is no longer about a 2×4 brick with studs on the top,” said Chris
Dee, one of the many Lego fans who helps to maintain LDraw. “There are a
lot of specialised elements created for individual sets.”
“You need to understand what physical parts exist in order to use it,”
he said.
“LDraw is a system of tools for virtual modelling,” he said. “It
includes a library of parts and a set of tools and utilities to make use
of that library.”
“Lego has produced a CAD tool that’s freely available but the level of
sophistication does not match LDraw and the parts library is smaller,”
Mr Dee told BBC News. “They have the advantage of having the design
drawings for the bricks. We are effectively reverse engineering the
parts, sometimes that is easier than at others.”
Adult fans of Lego use LDraw in different ways, said Mr Dee. Some use it
as a design tool so they can work out how to build a particular model.
One utility divides a building task into a series of steps just like in
Lego instruction books.
“Some prefer to doodle with the physical bricks then they will use LDraw
to keep what they have done and then rip it apart and try to improve
it,” he said.
“There are also people that use it as a documentation tool after they
have created a model,” he said.
But, said Mr Dee, using LDraw does not remove all the skill involved in
making a Lego model.
“LDraw can show you how to represent a physical entity in the parts but
it cannot tell you whether it will hold together,” he said. “Sometimes
there is just not enough connectivity.”