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Subject: 
Re: LEGO Millyard model to cover 2,000 square feet, Sponsored by NELUG
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.build.ancient, lugnet.build.arch, lugnet.town, lugnet.trains
Date: 
Mon, 18 Oct 2004 22:45:07 GMT
Viewed: 
397 times
  
In lugnet.build.ancient, Darrell Urbien wrote:
   I see the buildings are arranged on large gridded paper, and each team has several reference photographs.

Yep-- and one of the biggest problems was the fact that the paper, although made by Lego, didn’t QUITE line up with the studs at the lengths we were dealing with, because supposedly it gets stretched in the printing process. Made for quite a few errors here and there that needed correction :)

   How much “freedom” was each builder allowed? Did the Master builders have everything planned and laid out, or was there a lot of improvisation? For example, the door and window designs, the curved walls.. I’m assuming since there were so many buildings that had to have similar looks everything was completely standardized.. Were there instructions of some kind provided, or were you expected to build to the photographs?

Because the buildings are *mostly* similar, the Master Builders came up with a generic system for building walls that we could use for expanses of windowed-walls. For the most part, that was pretty easy, and was well specified.

Other non-standard areas required a bit more freedom. Doors, off-sized windows, strange corners, etc. needed a bit more creativity, but for the most part were straightforward given the pieces we had.

   Can you give me a better idea of how the teams were built? For example, were there team captains/Master builders, etc. How were various jobs assigned? How many people were on each building? For example, if I wanted to create one structure of about the size of one of your mill buildings, how many people would be required? Can you have too many?

A lot of that was pioneered this weekend. It worked pretty well this time, although there were a few issues, and hopefully those will get ironed out next time. The general jist was:

There were 2 real areas of building: sub-assemblies and building construction.

For the sub-assemblies, we had teams of kids, parents, and AFOL’s building some of the prefab sections of the buildings. Thins like the pillars in between windows, the windows, several sizes of doors, cross-brace connectors, lampposts, window arch-tops, and probably other stuff I’m not thinking of. Although I didn’t actually do the pre-fab work myself, I believe each mini-team of sub-assemblers had at least one adult on it to make sure that things went right, although I don’t think there was a designated leader.

The building construction was a bit unorganized, but began to take a bit more shape as we continued (we also discussed afterwards what we could do to improve the system). It was tricky to do, not knowing how many people would show up, how experienced people would be, how comfortable they’d be being creative, and how likely they were to make and fix mistakes. But hopefully fun was had by all :)

For each building, one of the Master Builders sort of went over the general notes for it initially (in some cases walking through the reference book pointing out various oddities to watch out for).

From there on in, people tried to follow as necessary. As the day went on, certain people (generally AFOL’s where I was building) took on more leadership roles, and tried to co-ordinate building with kids, and people who either weren’t there to hear the overview, or who didn’t have as much building experience. But there wasn’t an actual ‘official foreman’, short of the Master Builders, who kept being dragged in various directions to answer questions and review sections. We decided for next time, it might make things a bit smoother to have ‘official’ leaders for each building.

As for population, each building had a collection of roughly 3-8 adult builders (mostly AFOLs) and 0-5 kids, some of whom floated from area to area. Overcrowding was a bit of an issue, and we figured it might have been a bit easier with slightly fewer people around each table, giving the ‘specialized’ areas to the more experienced builders, and leaving as much as possible to the less-experienced builders. As it turned out, people sort of built “where they were standing”, which meant that for the more standard expanses of walls, there was a bit too much waiting-time for some people, where builders didn’t have much to do, while they waited for slower builders to catch up, or for specialized sections to get completed.

The smallest building was finished in about 10 hours, and... I’m not really sure about the largest. The big “H” building was completed in maybe... 15 hours? And the UNH building was done in maybe about another 10 hours roughly.

Anyway, all in all it was lots of fun, and hopefully it’ll be even more fun for our next building session. And I’m sure we’ll learn even more then :)

DaveE



Message is in Reply To:
  Re: LEGO Millyard model to cover 2,000 square feet, Sponsored by NELUG
 
Hi all, As someone who has never participated in a large group build I'm very curious as to how this works.. Could you answer a few questions? I see the buildings are arranged on large gridded paper, and each team has several reference photographs. (...) (20 years ago, 18-Oct-04, to lugnet.build.ancient, lugnet.build.arch, lugnet.town, lugnet.trains, FTX)

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