heinzfaust: Big Lego fan remeniscing about good times with lego.

heinzfaust

Hi there,

I'm a 27 years old guy from Holland. I've been a big fan of Lego all my life. I dug up my old Legos this week. Don't know what got me started exactly, but I couldn't stop building for the last few days. Started working on a large spaceship (I always wanted to have a big spaceship but I never had the patience to build one).

My first lego set ever was a Duplo set. I must have been around one year old. I probably must have said something like "this is stupid, I want REAL Lego!!" because that's the only duplo set I ever had. Next was a Basic set (510). That one still had me confused because the inner space of the house was like only 1 brick wide, so how is anyone supposed to live in that house, right? I also remember being confused about the fact that the box showed multiple models, while you obviously can only build one (and a half) at a time. I guess this problem still confuses young ones today. After that I quickly went to proper lego, like some castle sets and lots of legoland stuff. Some of the highlights of my lego carreer probably are: 6061 Siege Tower, 6386 Police Command Base, 6077 Forestmen's River Fortress (castle between trees, one of my favorites), 5550 Custom Rally Van, and ultimately the 8094 Control Centre (which actually wasn't that much fun in the long run).

The biggest moc I ever created was a huge ferris-wheel, compsed of 2 complete round railway tracks (from a used 726 western Train which I received for free from relatives who didn't use their legos anymore). The two tracks were lined up and connected with almost any brick I could find.

The craziest thing I ever build was a crash-test site on some road plates, where I had build several small cars and connected them to a thick lego wall using a rubber band, pulled throuhg a technic brick. I had to build a roof and extra walls around it because the cars slammed into the wall quite strongly.

At the end I had a 3-drawer wooden cabinet completely filled with lego's, and some seperate boxes for the minifigs and techinc stuff. I lost interest around the age of 13, whith my last set being the 6350 Pizza To Go. I was quite sad actually that I no longer liked playing with Lego because it had always been such a pleasent experience. Lego really was my safe world during my childhood.

I decided to buy a brand new nice little set a few days ago, sort of as a hommage to the good old times. It became the 6743 Creator Street Speeder. I took this one because it mostly uses bricks that were also around at "my time" and also because green bricks were quite rare back then. I think the Creator sets are pretty awesome because the use many useful bricks instead of some strange large parts that are used in modern sets often. No bionicle or new space-police for me, sorry. I like what they're doing with the Star-Wars stuff though. I actually feel a little sorry for all the grown-ups out there who where fans of star wars when the first Space legos came out. Now they have to buy all those amazing (and expensive) sets. Fortunately for my wallet I never was a Star-Wars fan, but if there ever will be Lord of the Rings lego than I'm going to be in trouble as well....

Thanks for reading!

Cheers.

Town

Back from the dark age then. Welcome.

vynsane

I always get a pang of regret when I hear someone return from their Dark Age and their entire collection is there waiting for them. I foolishly got rid of my (and my brother's) collection when I was in college. We had a LOT of stuff, too.

Welcome back to the fold!

aplbomr79

I was fortunate enough to be the youngest of three brothers - and over our younger years my parents purchased LEGO for us - my dad early on saw the quality of LEGO both in monetary value and in building (he is a contractor by trade - many winter nights spent with him showing us how to build houses out of LEGO). From the early '70's to the early '90's, my parents bought us a lot of sets...

I came into a lot of sets from buddies that were eager to sell their collections. I remember a neighbor up the block looking to purchase his first car came over and offered to sell off his entire collection - 3 large (rubbermaid 20 gallon?) tubs. My dad finally obliged when the price reached $150 for all of them. In this acquisition came almost all of the Original Space sets from 1978-1985, and a few castle sets including the Yellow Castle and the Black Falcon's Fortress.
I didn't let go of my LEGO passion until we moved after my 9th Grade year. During the middle school years, I spent some my paper route money on new LEGO (mostly Pirate and some Castle) and buying up sets from my buddies who were quick to earn a buck (I got Forbidden Island 6270 for $15). Of the Pirate LEGO sets released in 1989 and 1991, there were only three that I did not end up with - the big ones (RIR 6273, BSB 6285, and Eldorado Fortress 6276); I am still hunting those down...

I have not yet included my childhood sets in my Inventory as my parents are slowly allowing us boys to take them home as the Grandkids are still playing with them.

However, my darkages lasted from 1993-2009 - longer than most from what I have seen. But my boys are now reaping the benefits of my renewed interest. The best times I have with my boys is getting into their world as we play LEGO.

kari

Hello,

I'm a 29 years old boy from a small town in Hungary. I've been enthusiast of LEGO ever since I can remember. I loved to build LEGO sets with my elder brother during all my childhood and our best creations included steam locomotive with tender, supercar, helicopter hauler and overland bus. The biggest one was an aircraft carrier with control tower and an elevator for the fighter planes. We used almost all bricks available for the carrier, it was at least 120 studs long and it had engine section, hangar, armory and even working missels on it. I spent holidays, sick-leaves with planning and constructing vehicles and machines from the films I had seen before. Once I tried to make a ski-lift applying my basic motor but it didn't work as I hoped.

I was lucky enough to come into my brother's large source of bricks (from sets like 722, 733, 744 Basic, 6080 King Castle, 6365 Summer Cottage) and after I complemented it with my early sets it became a nice collection regarded to the possibilites that time. My father always thought LEGO the best thing to play with and to improve creativity and I can't be thankful him enough doing so. I got some very nice Model Team sets as a Christmas present in the 90s (5580 Higway Rig, 5550 Custom Rally Van) but my passion reached pinnacle in 1994 with the 8868 Air Tech Claw Rig, which is still my favourite set of all time.

My dark ages began in 1995 due to material reasons and lasted 9 long years. In 2005 set 8455 Backhoe pulled me back from resignation and since than I've managed to collect my favorite Technic, Model Team and train sets although I'm still dreaming about getting my hands on 6399 Airport Shuttle and 7740 Inter City Passenger Train - two extraordinary pieces of LEGO art.

Istokg

One Portuguese collector... his mother stored away his LEGO sets for over 40 years. And when his parents passed away a few years ago, he found that she had stored away carefully al of his old LEGO. That was what brought him out of his dark ages, after 4 decades.

Crackseed

While I'm recently returned from the Dark Ages [within the past year] I have to admit it was a combination of SPIII, Star Wars and finding all my old sets in storage at my parent's place that did it. Regrettably, it also means I had to make sad faces when I realized I missed the sexy UCS Star Destroyer, TIE Interceptor and the entirety of the Mars Mission line haha. Oh well - eBay hunting has been alot of fun, though I don't think I'll have the cash to drop on a second hand UCS ISD/TIE Int anywhere in the near future.

heinzfaust

Thanks for the replies.
Interesting stories.

I uploaded a picture i made of my collection.
http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=470179

Is brickshelf the biggest Lego picture-posting site, or are there better sites out there to show pictures and to discuss them as well (maybe a bit you-tube like)?

Bluefox1966

When I was a child my parents didn't have a lot of money and all we had a was Quality street tin with secondhand Lego in it. As there were very few pieces in the tin my sister and I would constantly fight over the wheels.

I remember when I was 13 years old I got the Technic car set 853 new and my sister had some of the space series. Then that was it, I lost interest for 20 years.

meyerc13

^^In addition to brickshelf, mocpages is another LEGO picture-posting site but focused more on creations. Plenty of people also post to general photo-sharing sites such as flickr. Welcome back to the LEGO hobby!

Matthew

I just use http://www.postimage.org/ for hosting my images, it's far less hassle.