James May: New Lego & Meccano Engineering Series

In about TEN minutes from now. :)
So everybody in the UK, Ireland, Belgium, Nth. France & other, put down Final Gear and go watch.

At what time codes do you and are other esteemed members appear? (From the DVD.)

Errm dunno. HeidiL flits in & out (look for the Blonde wearing Black, mostly). And then both of us when the truck with the extra blocks arrive. Me you can't miss! :rolleyes:


Sorry about the SAD, have you tried the light box thing? :comfort:

It's not that bad, I'm just a sensitive little soul who'll cry if people make fun of her ;) :p

Edit: bugger eight minutes. :lol:[/QUOTE]
 
Errm dunno. HeidiL flits in & out (look for the Blonde wearing Black, mostly). And then both of us when the truck with the extra blocks arrive. Me you can't miss! :rolleyes:

It's not that bad, I'm just a sensitive little soul who'll cry if people make fun of her ;) :p

Just finished watched the Lego episode and enjoyed it a lot. James was great and Oz's appearance had me laughing non stop. I really think James had come up with a piece of art that was really amazing and for once wouldn't look out of place at a art exhibition. Well done to all those who took part in the project.
Ozgirl, i honestly reckon it takes a lot of courage and confidence to be able to go in front of a camera, knowing that your going out on national tv. Neither you nor HeidiL have got anything to worry about. There's far worse people who have appeared on tv. The pair of you have appeared on tv doing something you enjoy. i don't see how anyone can make fun of any of you. If more people appeared on tv for doing something they enjoyed rather than just for the sake of being on tv, then primetime tv would improve dramatically.
Whatever way, you get to say that you helped James May make history. No one can take that away.
Maximum Kudos to all who have taken part and helped James May in his projects.
 
That is unless you are in Scotland, since those good folk at BBC Scotland put it on at 6 not 7, so I've seen it and it was good.

I want a lego house!
Yes, that?s because you?re in a different time-zone and nobody from down south has bothered to tell you. We call it Scottish National Time or the 1950?s, usually. :p

Errm dunno. HeidiL flits in & out (look for the Blonde wearing Black, mostly). And then both of us when the truck with the extra blocks arrive. Me you can't miss! :rolleyes:

* snips tidy tidy *



I spotted Heidi and you, but I thought there were one or two others who posted as well. :cool:

May I say that the Lego House looked fantastic and congratulations to all of you guys who made it happen.
(Looked way, way better than the spoiler pics.)
The best of the Toys stories in the series, I reckon. :)
 
Absolutely brilliant. I noticed a woman with highlights and an unusual accent bubbling on about the surprise Lego shipment, I wonder who that would be :p.
 
Just finished watching the Lego show!

Fantastic! No other word for it. Absolutely loved it, the sheer enthusiasm from everyone involved, and the magnificent result it produced.

Very good job to anyone in here who participated!

There were a lot of good moments in this programme, and I was smiling almost the entire time. It's not often you can say that about a television show.. But James is just able to do that with his shows. It's certainly been true for pretty much this entire series. And there's still a show to go :D


Someone needs to tell James that Lego is kind of an abbreviation, and not an actual word, though.. :p It's "Leg Godt" in Danish, which does indeed mean play well :D But that's nitpicking to an extreme degree :D
 
Why not just make the bricks solid?
Yes it woulda taken about 10 million bricks, but it woulda been bulletproof.
 
Why not just make the bricks solid?
Yes it woulda taken about 10 million bricks, but it woulda been bulletproof.

It's ten to two in the morning and this is quite a long way outside my area of engineering, so I could be way off the mark here...

First of all, it probably wouldn't have done anything for the load bearing capabilities of the structure: a cellular structure is generally stronger than a solid one, but I don't know how the specific properties of Lego would affect that. Another thing that comes to mind is that by making the bricks solid, it would have massively increased the weight of the walls, which might have a negative effect on their stability. And it would have been a swine to incorporate buttresses into the house to support the increased mass! Depending on the proportions of the building, as an alternative to buttressing, it might have made it necessary to make the walls thicker at the base than the top, too, which would have been architecturally awkward.

There are probably other constraints such as budget, time (solid bricks would have taken longer to build) and numerous engineering concerns that I haven't thought of because I'm not a structural engineer...
 
If someone wants to throw a few hundred bricks and plates my way, I have some ideas for better beams...
 
HeidiL would be a good one to explain it too, but I think (from what I've seen & understood) that Wyvern's on the mark. The "breeze block" bricks were relatively weighty themselves, and when we made solid structures it took 2 people to lift one chair, so imagine the weight of 2 floors of solid bricks...
 
HeidiL would be a good one to explain it too, but I think (from what I've seen & understood) that Wyvern's on the mark. The "breeze block" bricks were relatively weighty themselves, and when we made solid structures it took 2 people to lift one chair, so imagine the weight of 2 floors of solid bricks...

Well downwards compression strength was never an issue, and beams joining the tops of the walls would have dealt with a lot of the wobbliness of the walls, which were basically free-standing structures. The crack around the door was caused by the fact that the base wasn't completely flat, something which was exacerbated by the ply warping when it rained. I believe the height discrepancy on the two sides of the door was already there when the lintel was put in place, which would have meant that there was a lifting stress on the piece as soon as it went in. If it had happened when it already had a load of bricks on top of it, then it might well not have managed to lift it - at least not immediately.
Then there was the fact that the wooden beams inside moved around in the wind before the walls were all the way up, and so bashed into the insides of the walls, which caused more shifting and a few more cracks. We'll gloss over Vic chucking things down from the roof which bounced and smashed holes in the bottom of the walls... though that would have been the main argument for thickening the sides of the bricks - preventing people from kicking holes in the walls. However, they would have been a lot fiddlier to construct, which would have made the project far longer - enough people were building malformed bricks as it was, never mind the additional time to build something more complicated - and it would also have been much more difficult for us to dismantle it once we were done.
That said, I do think that given a completely flat, secure base, time to develop better beams - something I wish I had the money to throw at experimenting with - the right constructors and a different H&S-calming support structure (I also have ideas about that, partly based on the suggestions of a brickhead who turned up, spent a day criticizing everything and not doing much building) that a structurally-sound two-storey lego house is entirely possible. Even with a roof. Wind and waterproofing would require some more traditional materials, but those shouldn't be too hard to incorporate...
One thing that I think needs to be said though, is that if any of us deserved to be at that house-warming, it was John, Julia and Brandon, who built some really amazing things, most of which got little, if any, screen time.
Oh and the cracking of the divan when James sat on it? It didn't do that with a number of us sat on it eating pizza... (do not get me started on trying to explain to the pizza delivery boy where he was going) but that might have weakened it a bit. :)
 
Yes, that?s because you?re in a different time-zone and nobody from down south has bothered to tell you. We call it Scottish National Time or the 1950?s, usually. :p

Hahahaha, yeah, tae hang with your daylight saving clock moving 1 hour, we move our clocks back 5 decades :D. Is that why we are also able to keep calm and carry on normally whenever a small flurry of snow appears, or is that something different? Sorry that was a cheap shot. :lol::p

I'm sure us FinalGear folk could club together all of our bricks and try and make a lifesize lego something. James made the house, so we could make... say a car. Lego engineering, how hard can it be?
 
I told you HeidiL would explain it :clap:
And she's right about the Lego House 3 (LH3), they worked solidly for weeks, John designed and built some amazing stuff, and they deserved a special mention.
 
Loved the programme - there was such joy positively exuding from every moment.

However, I was very surprised to read an article in today's Daily Fail (yes, I know I shouldn't) with the headline "Web stores cash in on Lego boom", that explained how firms were putting up their prices "as the popularity of the old favourite has soared". Apparently Lego has been such an outstanding success this year that there is an industry-wide shortage.

So what is this down to, according to the chairman of the Toy Retailers Association?

"Lego's reliability and quality".

So that's nothing to do with a certain J. May and the vast amount of free publicity that's been given to Lego throughout the year, then?
 
Absolutely brilliant. I noticed a woman with highlights and an unusual accent bubbling on about the surprise Lego shipment, I wonder who that would be :p.
I had her pegged the moment I saw her. :)

OzGirl, HeidiL -- great job, guys! You came off as totally committed brickheads. I thought the designer was a bit flaky though (kinda reminded me of Jane (Mad) Freud), although I did like some of her designs. And Vic seemed a bit of an unknown quantity.

Loved the design of the house, loved watching the community brick build and found myself totally caught up in James' infectious enthusiasm. My only nitpick (a minor one) would be not seeing more of the finished house and perhaps James' impressions the day after. Would've been nice to have seen some of the Lego volunteers at the housewarming too.

All in all, a very enjoyable episode. Really looking forward to the Hornby train set episode.
 
Right, for all Brits (sorry my esteemed overseas friends!) the Lego ep of Toy Stories is on tonight at 7pm.
Now, I do have a speaking part in it, so I'm sorry about that bit being ruined for you ;)

"Awesome!" ;)

Excellent ep.
 
This whole series has been fantastic, but this Lego episode really kept me entertained the whole time through.

I think the best part had to be Oz coming back to James in his house in the middle of the vineyard. Seeing him go from vine to vine tasting grapes was just hilarious. I really love when two completely different shows link each other like that. Every time James kept breaking something as he sat on it was also equally hilarious.

This series really shows how great of a presenter James is on his own.
 
My only nitpick (a minor one) would be not seeing more of the finished house and perhaps James' impressions the day after. Would've been nice to have seen some of the Lego volunteers at the housewarming too..


I totally agree!

Loved this one. :)
 
... And Vic seemed a bit of an unknown quantity.

Would've been nice to have seen some of the Lego volunteers at the housewarming too.

head over to the lego house website for photographic evidence of both. We builders did have a house-warming party, but not with the celebs.

By the way HeidiL, I thought it was the bed we didn't break with our pizzas, not the divan? (which broke by itself on camera, but they only showed the mark 2 repaired version on telly!)
 
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