interview

[I began talking with Jef on Wednesday. Click here to read part one!]

CD : I see that you’ve have an affection for the Technic sets along with the basic LEGO. What’s your excuse? Is there a preference, or are they all awesome?

jeffwith1f : It’s all part of the same system. That’s perhaps the most remarkable thing about LEGO. A piece of LEGO from the 60’s will click onto a piece of LEGO made today, which will even snap onto a DUPLO block, or can be integrated with Technic, or MindStorms, or Bionicle or even the weird, vaguely Connex-like Znap stuff from a couple years back. It’s all part of an integrated system of elements, all of which work together interchangeably. It is truly an awesome feat of engeneering that standards set with basic bricks back in the late 40’s have been able to be held both constant, yet continually expanded to the play system we have available today with LEGO.

CD : Have you used the LEGO Digital Designer?

jeffwith1f : Never used any of the digital designer stuff, I had no real interest in MindStorms, I am even wary of the kits that have electric motors and battery boxes (although I do have many). I am a purist for the hands on, all plastic experience, and despise toys that require batteries to be enjoyed, so I avoid them where possible. I think the best LEGO can be enjoyed by any child, without access to a computer, and will keep running on imagination power, long after a battery powered toy would be waiting for a refill.

CD : The ‘no battery’ thing is a great philosophy, and one that’s being adapted by a lot of small, new companies all around – but I have to say that the Digital Designer is a great way to play if you’re low on bricks! Seeing as how these ARE expensive items, what’s the most you’ve spent on a set?

jeffwith1f : Recently I picked up the Millennium Falcon Ultimate Collectors Set, it ran me something like $750 after taxes. Ouch. It also took 6 months from order to arrival time. It took me 38 hours to put together (I did time lapse photography) and it currently sits on my desk at work, where I get a lot ot strange looks from people, but it’s great geek bait.

CD : Are you a completist, or do you just pursue the things you like?

jeffwith1f : A bit of both. I obviously can’t purchase everything that LEGO makes, but I do try to keep complete collections within my interests. I try to get most, if not all, of the Technic line available at any given time, and until 2 years ago, I had complete Star Wars lines, as well as the first three sets of Harry Potter Lego. I also tend to buy anything that is aviation related that LEGO makes, as model airplanes are another hobby and I appreciate the cross-over.

CD : Do you have a ‘holy grail’ set that you’d like to find? What’s been your greatest find while hunting for LEGO?

jeffwith1f : I’d really really like to find the Technic Seaplane # 8855. I see them from time to time, but for some reason I never feel like I have the [money] to get it at the time.

CD : Has your collection of LEGO brought you anywhere interesting? Met anyone?

jeffwith1f : It’s pretty much been a labour of love in isolation as an adult, although I do bring some of the things I make to work and decorate my office space with them, which usually elicits some conversation. I did get to be on Television though. I answered a Craigslist ad looking for collectors of LEGO that my wife forwarded to me. As it turns out, a locally produced television show called “Collectors Showdown” on the Treasure HD channel, available on Bell ExpressVu, was looking for a pair of LEGO fans to pit against each other in a test of skills and knowledge. I seemed to fit the bill. I ended up going head to head against a mother of two who was, believe it or not, a larger fan of LEGO than me, and while I held my own, she handily beat me at both the test of skills and the test of knowledge. She was awesome, and it was nice to be able to talk LEGO to someone that didn’t glaze over as I started to ramble on about kits from the catalogue a decade ago. Even the staff at the LEGO store were not really able to keep up with me on that front – they know current items, not so much items offered in the mid 90’s. It was a good day out, I had no problem losing to my worthy opponent fair and square. As an added bonus, the television show is on a channel that no one I know sees, so I’m fairly certain I dodged a bullet there.

CD : Are you a member of the Brickmaster Club? I found it to be very rewarding.

jeffwith1f : Nope. LEGO fan in a vaccum. I seem to recall signing up for some LEGO community site shortly after the show because my opponent belonged, but honestly I never go.

CD : LEGO aren’t your only collection. What else do you collect?

jeffwith1f : My other primary collections are Guitars – I have 23 at the moment – and Diecast airplanes… almost too many to count.

I seem to go through phases that last about 3-4 months where one particular one is grabbing my attention most, and I take some of my discretionary income (of which I am fortunate to have some…I am not rich though) and pick up some items in my current sphere of interest. I have been on a guitar kick for the last while though. I recently came into a very rare Gibson Moderne, that I had been looking for for at least 14 years (I nearly fell over when I saw one in the store, it was the first one I had seen that wasn’t a picture), I had to sell a couple of other instruments in order to afford it as it was quite dear, and I currently have a very odd Gibson Reverse Explorer on order arriving in the fall, which should give me time to save up for it.

CD : With your love of LEGO, planes, and Lego planes, is there any interest in constructing a LEGO guitar? I’ve seen some interesting mods!

jeffwith1f : I did start to build a LEGO flying V, but found that I did not have enough wing elements to make up the body and get the angles quite right. I did not want to butcher too many kits to do it, so that’s a project that’s on hold for the time being, but it has crossed my mind that If I have crossed my love of LEGO and aircraft, why not LEGO and guitars? One day….

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After talking to Jef, it confirmed my suspicions that some of us, if trapped on an isolated island in the middle of the sea and limited to three items (real or imagined), would want to bring along food, or water, or a boat. LEGO Maniacs, provided with an infinite supply of LEGO, would have a great time building shelter, devising Technic fishing rods to catch fish autonomously, and organizing a vast water collection system, all out of LEGO.

I’ve already started the sketches, just in case.

It was through online social networking that I encountered Jef, a 34 year old software quality assurance manager from Toronto. Though I hadn’t been slumming around the Lego networks for too long before feeling like a total amateur. They were all using shorthand for brick assembly techniques, like the wholly unappealing acronym SNOT – which is grossly inappropriate when talking about how to stick two things together anyhow. I was out of the loop. What I DID understand were pictures of stuff, and I was drawn to a picture of Jef, standing in front of an array of amazing Legos. ‘Piles of things’ is a language that appeals to me.

So, we had a conversation. I was curious about the motivations of other Leogmaniacs, and if they were so diffrent from my own. I was recently asked what three things I’d bring with me to a deserted island. Was I so unusual to say ‘an infinite supply of Legos’?

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CD : First off, I came across your profile on Facebook in a LEGO group, because I’ve been disproportionately in love with Legos lately. I saw an image of you with shelves upon shelves of Legos, and I was
impressed. In short, what’s up with that?

jeffwith1f : Well…I was big into LEGO as a child, and spent many an hour building spaceships, robots, vehicles, towers and other contraptions, and then tossing them down the stairs. Of course, as I hit my early teenage years, LEGO took a back seat to other things (read: mostly girls & carousing with friends), but then, one Christmas in my early twenties my late grandmother gave me a small kit of LEGO as a stocking stuffer, remembering how much I enjoyed it.

I didn’t think much about it until a couple of days later when at home enjoying the winter break, I cracked out the kit and put it together (it was a small airplane). At this point in my life I had spent a couple of years building scale model airplanes, and I marvelled at the quality of the plastic moulding and how everything went together. Simply remarkable. It was intensely enjoyable, and took me right back to all the aspects that I enjoyed about it as a child. First I built the model from the kit, enjoyed it, and a day or so later I took it apart and built my own customized creation from the same pieces (a different plane). Part of me thought, “this is great, I wish I had more, but LEGO is so expensive” (it always seemed out of reach of my ability to save my allowance money a a child), but it then dawned on me that now I was an adult, and had a job (and no real expenses at the time besides some cheap rent), and that I lived just down the street from a Toys R Us – so I wandered up the street, picked out a Technic Motorcycle (the super street sensation kit I believe), and I once again became a confirmed LEGOManiac. From then on I started to look for and pick up kits that interested me. As well as periodically work on my own projects.

CD : I notice you’re saying ‘LEGO’ instead of ‘Legos’. Am I using the plural completely incorrectly?

jeffwith1f: For starters, I believe LEGO should always appear in all caps (it’s the brandname after all). It is somewhat less clear whether LEGO alone implies plurality, as I have seen both used. Personally, I’ve always referred to a pile of LEGO simply as LEGO, much as a bowl of cereal is “Cereal” not cereals, or a bucket of popcorn is “popcorn”, not popcorns. For all I know there are camps of embittered people that debate this like Trekkies and Trekkers.

CD : Now, when you ‘collect’ LEGO, do you leave them in their boxes, or build them, or buy two copies of each? What’s your strategy towards play vs. pay?

jeffwith1f : I pretty much play with all of them. I only have one kit that I would not open, and that’s a set of basic red bricks from 1973 that I found while in Spain a couple of years ago. There’s no real point to open it, and I’m chuffed to have a kit from the year I was born, that’s still unopened. Inevitably over the years people have gifted me kits that I already have, and unless I need the parts, I will also leave them sealed, but 95% of my kits have been opened, built, played with, but when done, I return the pieces of the kit to the box, and close it back up and store it. Every now and then I embark on a creation of my own that requires me to borrow pieces from kits, and if it’s just one or two, I will leave a note in the box so I can find the pieces later if I need to, and when a larger amount of pillaging is done, the kit kind of gets sacrificed for the project. When possible building my own creations I attempt to use my loose bin of LEGO from when I was younger so that I can leave the kits I have bought as an adult intact…

I do realized as a collector that not being able to offer the kit as “Sealed Mint in Box” does affect it’s current resale value, but I have no plans on parting with any of this for many decades, and I am hoping that when I am 60 and wanting to retire and/or cull off the collection that being able to offer up most of these kits simply as “intact and in original packaging” will be uncommon enough to retain a good chunk of the value. I think toys that aren’t played with are kind of sad anyways, so it would be wrong not to enjoy the toy for what it is. I do work hard to ensure they remain intact though.

CD : The ‘leaving a note’ system is probably a lot wiser than my own ‘I’ll figure it out later with the instruction manual and throw everything into a giant tub’ methods.

So, what’s one of your favorite home-made creations?

jeffwith1f : My favourite own creation (or MOC as they seem to be called) is “the Hand”. I was watching a show on robotics and they were discussing how difficult it has been to simulate muscles. I was thinking that the Technic pneumatic pistons would emulate a muscle in LEGO form, and in my hubris, I thought that if I could design a working human-like hand, then surely I could build anything. I spent a month of weekends working out the design, but ended up with something that seems to impress pretty much everyone that sees it. They are even more impressed when they find out that it moves as well. It’s got a pretty good grip actually.

CD : What’s your favorite LEGO-made creation?

jeffwith1f : I think my favourite LEGO kit so far is probably the Technic Front End Loader kit # 8459 (which was also re-released a couple of years later under a different number I believe, certainly different packaging), it is a challenging build and an awesome model in a decent scale. That’s a tough call though as most LEGO kits are well designed and contain excellent design elements that you appreciate even more than you think once you get it together.

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Come back on Saturday for the rest of my talk with Jef, fellow LEGOmaniac, and proof that I’m not alone in this LEGOmadness.