Grand Designs – Lego

My little man, The Pok, likes spending time with his Dad (me 🙂 ) scheming and building grand constructions. Well he does have an equally playful “child” friend in me for his indulgence in grand designs. A couple of weekends ago, he dragged me from my lazy Sunday on the couch to insist that we make a grand construction – a bridge for his trains.  We live quite close to Sydney Harbour’s other great bridge – the ANZAC Bridge, so this was going to be the inspiration for our creativity.

Material of Choice – Lego Duplo

Th Pok is enjoying getting stuck into building stuff more and more (he also enjoys destroying stuff – but that is another conversation), and the material of choice for this construction would be Lego Duplo. The blocks were laid out with meticulous planning. The Pok had great fun arranging all of them before construction began. In that respect my little boy is displaying tendencies to compulsiveness about how all things should be done. I also think that he is a bit bossy – which he doesn’t get from me.

The first part to construct would be the deck and we wanted to build big and to scale. We started in the middle working our way out. I would do one side and I would ask the Pok to match the bricks that I had connected. It was a symmetrical bridge after all.

The deck of the bridge was quickly consuming bricks.

We soon realised that this was going to be a big bridge, and were quickly running out of blocks.

The I reinforced the bridge deck near the tower foundations. It was starting to get heavy and like any real-world bridge would have to primarily support its own weight.

The Pok tested the width of the carriageway for trafficability. It was wide enough for a single lane.

The towers were to be constructed next and were proving difficult to source a sufficient bricks in quantities of four. But after a few variations we were able to come up with something that we would be able to duplicate on the other side while still looking vaguely similar to the ANZAC bridge.

Of course The Pok wanted to check for water clearance in the best way he knew how.

Meanwhile, the Mother of Pok fabricated a road deck to overcome the grade of the bridge deck. Cardboard and scissors were put to good use to achieve the result. Testing of the road deck was required.

At over a metre long, The Pok was sufficiently happy with the Grand Design. It didn’t have the cable stays, and in truth The Pok would have done his best impersonation of Godzilla if I had installed them.

Mini-Thomas the Tank Engine was happy too.

The next Lego creation will have to be The Eiffel Tower made out of Lego Duplo to celebrate the Tour de France.