What made you get out of your LEGO dark age?

[grum64]

Dang Grum! Tip of the hat to you.

You're an inspiration.

Thank you very much. You're very kind.

I'm not too sure about being an inspiration, I'm just really stubborn

What time did you wake up?

[Darth Punk]

For me it was a combination of my oldest daughter discovering Legos and the monster fighters line. I'm a big fan of halloween and the MF line was a perfect way to get back.

[LEGO Guy Bri]

An all-of-the-sudden nostalgic urge to search the internet for LEGO cities and ebay. I had bought plenty of car parts off ebay when it hit me. Maybe I could find some of the sets I wanted, but never received. It started with rerelease of 6597 Century Sky Way, the 10159 City Airport. From there, the snowball effect

[Vorkosigan]

It was actually a clone brand that started the process of getting me out of my dark age. I was traveling in Korea and saw Oxford sets. I thought it was really cool that they had military models. My girlfriend at the time (now wife) encouraged me to get a set. It was really satisfying building again, but it was still a slow build up from there. I got some more Oxford sets, then I got the Technic red sportbike and soon a slew of other Technic sets and a few City. My interested slowed down a bit due to another hobby, but after seeing the Lego Movie I started getting interested again, and when I got all my childhood sets out of storage that really kicked off. Rebuilding one of my old Castles got me really into historic themes.

[diiscool]

I had been thinking about gears and how they work and was reminded of the LEGO Technic sets I had in my childhood. I bought a book that came with about 100 Technic pieces and used that to experiment with gears. I was immediately hooked again! When I was a kid, I loved building planes and other vehicles with LEGOs and I found the LEGO Technic Cargo Plane (42025) that came out just this year so I ordered it. My build is just getting underway as of today and I decided to join this forum as well.

Edited September 14, 2014 by diiscool

[BirdOPrey5]

Do you remember the name of the book you bought that came with the gears?

Welcome!

[diiscool]

Do you remember the name of the book you bought that came with the gears?

Yes, it's called Lego Crazy Action Contraptions and you can find it on Amazon. Many of the "contraptions" are very basic but I've had fun just building MOCs with the parts.

[BirdOPrey5]

Thanks- going to check that out.

[Humdrum]

The Volkswagen mini van did the trick for me. I first saw it last year when my youngest nephew got one for Christmas.

I thought to myself that it would make a nice ornament for my coffee table, to spark conversation when I have visitors.

Although twenty years passed between my last box as a kid and this purchase I was still happy like a kid when it arrived,

and I really enjoyed putting it together.

It turns out I was right, I've gotten loads of positive comments about it and people really do like to talk about Lego.

So that inspired me to buy some more sets. Because I'm a bit of an aviation nut I also got the Sopwith Camel biplane and

the Technic cargo plane. The latter is still waiting to be assembled because I can't decide putting all the stickers on or not.

In the meantime I also started fiddling around with some basic MOC techniques and stop motion filming. And I'm also 'eyeballing'

those beautiful modular buildings.

That's my story (and first post on this forum) in a nutshell, hope to learn a lot from you all :)

[wlderdude]

I'm the oldest of 8 kids, so growing up there was always a baby around. As a kid, toys with small parts like Legos were tightly controlled. After we built something, the pieces had to be broken down and stored in the briefcase-sized box before we could get out any other toys. We might get a polybay or small set at Christmas, but there weren't a lot of pieces to build with. My youngest 4 siblings were Lego fanatics and that's all they wanted for gifts. They amassed an enormous collection, but that was their thing, not at all mine. As nerdy a teen as I was, Lego was not my thing.

After my son was born, I started picking up various size containers of legos when I found them at yard sales. I spell it with a lower case "L" since there were a lot of other brands and other toys mixed in, not just genuine Lego product. They sat in the attic awaiting my son to take an interest.

But before then I found a use for them. I was teaching some highly distractable 4 year olds in Sunday School, and needed to try something new. I'd been telling Bible stories with Thomas the Tank Engine toys. The train characters worked fine for the good Samaritan, and some other parables, but it wasn't a good fit for the Last Supper. In desperation I dug the bucket of legos out and made a MOC of the Last Supper with Minifigures. If the columns don't look familiar, that's 'cause they're Megablocks. It worked extremely well.

On vacation I stumbled into a Wal-Mart clearance with many sets 50% off and I got hooked. It's probably fair to say I'm living out my childhood dreams of building a Lego town, but it's still done under the pretense of props to tell my son Lego stories (both religious and secular).

I've culled out all the off brands and spend way too much on Lego now. My son is just getting to the point where he can build set autonomously. He doesn't generally like toys, but he is really getting into Legos. It's at least as much my thing as it is his, but it's probably the only toy we can do together for more than half an hour. I just can't stand Candyland.

[rodiziorobs]

I came out of my dark age almost four years ago for my son's second Christmas. We were particularly broke and worried about what we could get him. I decided to get my old Lego collection from my parents' house (which was luckily still around) so I could build him a present.

I spent a few nights thinking what I could build for a toddler that would have a fun play feature but be durable enough that he couldn't break it easily. After some test builds (it had been ten years, and I'm not sure how good I was back then anyway), I was able to put together a dump truck with a button on the cab that would activate a lever in order to tip the bed. When you pushed the bed back down, it would reset the button. It used a simple enough mechanism, but fiddling around with it to get it just right got me hooked. I remembered thinking, "man these things are so cool! Why did I ever stop playing with them?" He loved the present, and soon he was hooked and would ask me to build all sorts of cars, planes, and magnet trains for him, which I willingly obliged.

Now he has a decent collection of his own, so while we build together a lot now, I hardly ever give him any of my own Lego anymore! (Nothing personal, just Business...)

My youngest 4 siblings were Lego fanatics and that's all they wanted for gifts.

I'm curious to know if any of them had (or still has) a dark age, and what they think of you picking it up now?

Edited September 18, 2014 by rodiziorobs