Subject:
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Re: SCLTC Sets World Record for Largest US Flag
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.trains.org.scltc
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Date:
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Tue, 19 Jul 2005 22:38:21 GMT
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Viewed:
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5138 times
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In lugnet.trains.org.scltc, Brian Pilati wrote:
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What about the curve?
How did you maintain structural integrity with many people building the moc
(as in the shape of the curve)?
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Club members built the first 6 rows by working on top of a pattern (a mirror
image of a stripe, turned upside down so it would not stick). The shape gets
locked in as soon as there are two rows of bricks in place. We used 6 rows to
increase the structural integrity and make it easier to pick up.
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From my experience with 2x2 bricks and curves they do not have a lot of
clutch power. So your building technique must have made them stronger.
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With 6 rows of bricks, we gingerly picked up the starter course in 4 places and
flipped it on its side (so it was now a sea serpent). That made it much easier
to carry.
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When you lifted the stripes up, were they relatively strong, sturdy and
stable?
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Yes. Two or three people could carry a stripe. We tended toward 3. We lifted it
by first grabbing from the top, but at least 4 rows down or by pushing up on
some of the lower bricks. Once it was off the table, we held it from the bottom
and flipped it into the sea serpent orientation to carry to the flag.
Occasionally we would knock a brick off the top for bottom, but they were easy
enough to replace.
A bigger problem was installing a stripe on the flag and only then noticing a
mistake (typically in copying the pattern) in the stripe below it that we had
failed to catch. Turned out we simply raised the upper stripe and propped it up
with 4 LEGO buckets, did our fixing, and lowered the top stripe back down. An
easier fix would have been to ignore the mistake, but we had some very picky
people on the building team (grin).
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How much do you estimate the flag weighs?
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About 360 pounds (just the LEGO in just the flag).
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So it sounds like the flag is going to state at the fair grounds forever?
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No, just until July 31.
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Does it need to be glued?
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No. In fact, each of the bottom 12 stripes is topped with tiles plus a few
position-locking bricks. The position-locking bricks fit into open spaces in the
the bottom of the stripe above which locks the stripes into positin relative to
each other. To make it easy to align stripes as we lowered them down, we put
slope bricks on top of the position-locking bricks. There are zero stud
connections between stripes! This will make it easy to take the flag apart in
pieces (and made it easy to partially disassemble during construction for
fixes).
David coined our family term for this construcion technique: “fractioning”. We
recently fractioned our 14,000 brick 6-foot high skyscraper (“The SCLTC
Building”) so we no longer need to carry it in a custom crate or use a team of 4
to erect it. Now one person can assemble it (or carry it)!
-Ted
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: SCLTC Sets World Record for Largest US Flag
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| Starts reply by wiping a tear from my eyes ... beautiful. So how much time and planning went into creating the pattern? What about the supporting vertical iron supports? Whose idea was that and did you just do it or engineer it? With the posts in (...) (19 years ago, 20-Jul-05, to lugnet.trains.org.scltc, FTX)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: SCLTC Sets World Record for Largest US Flag
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| (...) What about the curve? How did you maintain structural integrity with many people building the moc (as in the shape of the curve)? From my experience with 2x2 bricks and curves they do not have a lot of clutch power. So your building technique (...) (19 years ago, 19-Jul-05, to lugnet.trains.org.scltc, FTX)
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