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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Wed, 20 Jul 2005 15:27:28 GMT
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Viewed:
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5406 times
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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 place is the flag held tight
or does it have some play or sway?
The reason, I asked about the interior design was because I thought it looked
like 2 x 4 bricks (and the recently posted picture confirms that 2x4 bricks were
used to maintain structural strength) but the flag was made entirely of 2x2
bricks? So how did you count the bricks in the flag? Does it include the 2x4s
inside or just the 2x2s on the outside?
How did the crowd participation work out? Did a lot of people stop and help you
build or did you find that the LUG did most of the work? What was the most
people you had helping at one time?
In lugnet.trains.org.scltc, Ted Michon wrote:
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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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Nice.
Question: It seems the pattern alternates (for structural strength) between
rows (that is what gives the flag a rough, (almost punctured) feel instead of
being smooth)? Was the alternating pattern hard to maintain with a lot of
people building at once?
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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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I saw a picture representing a “fix”. Good thinking.
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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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Did I see that you had 6 stripes, so about 60lbs per stripe?
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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).
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Wow, that is genius. I thought I saw tiles in a few pictures but then I forgot
to ask about it. Thanks for clearing that up.
Are you planning on permanately displaying indoors or what are you going to do
with the flag now?
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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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Since the flag is so long are you planning on “fractioning” the stripes so they
are in pieces too? Or are the fractionalized stripes as far as you are going to
take it?
Brian
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: SCLTC Sets World Record for Largest US Flag
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| (...) David, Thomas, and I built some sample stripes using some 14 gauge Romex wire as a flexible contour guide. We locked the wire down in place using bricks on 10 48x48 stud baseplates and built the sample stripe next to it. When we got something (...) (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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| (...) 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 (...) (19 years ago, 19-Jul-05, to lugnet.trains.org.scltc, FTX)
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