Lego My Lego

12/25/16

After John, Kris and Pam humored me in New York by letting me visit the Lego Store to look at the 2,700 piece Technic Porsche 911 GT3RS, I knew I would be seeing it again.  I was right.  Pam tried valiantly to surprise me with it, but she really could not pull it off.  I mean she thought about going out to get one at a store.  But this is 2016, and as Christmas and Hanukkah loomed ever closer, she had no desire to actually go shopping, either for herself or me.  So she apologized for the lack of surprise and asked me if I wanted her to buy it for me on line.  I said, “Yes!”  So she bought it for me on Amazon.  Of course, our Amazon account is linked to my credit card and email, so I saw the transaction immediately and will pay for it when I pay the credit card bill.  None of that mattered, as it was the thought that counted.

My gift arrived a couple of days ago.  It was heavy, heavier than I could have guessed.  I opened the boxes carefully, as the packaging is really nice.  I knew I was going to be in for a lot of work to put this together, but I really had no idea what I was getting myself into.  As I have written about earlier, I am a Lego newbie, and this would be my first project.  I saw nothing wrong with this, even if it was like learning to dive by going up to the 10 meter board instead of just diving off the pool deck.  With the box opened I took out the instruction manual, marveling that it contained 854 steps and was over an inch thick.

The beginning of the instruction manual contained an homage to Porsche, the 911 and to the 911 GT3RS.  Then it went on to describe the painstaking process of creating the Technic Lego kit.  Due to my absolute nerdiness, I truly enjoyed the introduction to the build.  Then I flipped through the instruction pages, all 540 of them, each containing one or more build steps written in a language I deemed “Visual Lego.”  Besides the instruction manual the kit contained four boxes numbered “1” through “4” which corresponded to the order in which I would have to construct the model.

The instructions indicated that box “1” contained the parts to build the guts of the RS, including the drive train, the chassis, the engine and the dual clutch transmission known in Porsche speak as the “Porsche Doppelkuppplung” or PDK.  I have not spent too much time with standard Lego sets, but I had a sense for the basic nature of the blocks.  As I opened the box marked “1”  and started digging out cellophane bag after cellophane bag containing hundreds of tiny plastic objects that in no way resembled any Lego pieces I had ever seen, I reassessed the challenge that constructing this model was going to present.  Pam just looked at the parts and laughed.  I just look at the parts and gulped, as they resembled three dimensional hieroglyphics to me.

On Friday afternoon I decided to start.  Game on.  As I explored the contents of the various bags, I first assumed that there was some build logic embedded in the bags and that the parts were grouped in some meaningful way.  But each bag just seemed to contain a random collection of parts.  I decided that just because I did not see the logic, Lego did.  So I put the parts from each bag into its own zip lock bag.  Then I opened the manual to the first step and began my search for the first part.  I quickly realized that this was going to be as much of a three dimensional jig saw puzzle as anything else.  By the time I had spent about 45 minutes on Friday deciphering the manual and hunting for individual pieces, I had put together a whopping 10 or so parts.  Based on that, I had a really long way to go.

On Saturday I got more serious and hunkered down for a couple of hours.  As the crow flies, I completed up through step 26 out of 854.  Of course, my build did not go as the crow flies.  Instead, I had to backtrack several times as I realized that I had used a wrong part.  So I guess I completed about 45 steps in total by the time I finished for the day, but only 26 counted.  The good news was that by then I had a pretty good understanding about how to read “Visual Lego.”  The fundamental problem I encountered was that I had unintentionally used the wrong part a couple of times.  The manual has lots of detailed pictures of tiny parts.  The problem for me was that pictures have so little detail that it was difficult to distinguish one part from another based on the pictures in the manual.  Then I got smart and googled the instruction manual.  I found several YouTubes that walked through each page of the manual in a video. but they added absolutely no value to me.  Then I found a pdf of the manual.  This find was priceless, as it enabled me to zoom in on the pictures, which gave me a little better sense of what I had to find.

I have also looked at a few blogs about this build and read some postings from other Porsche fanatics on Facebook who are building this same model.  It seems that an accomplished builder can get it done in as little as 15 hours.  I am not one of them.  My current estimate is that it will take me between 50 and 60 hours, depending on my learning curve.  The reality is that I do not care.  Sure I want to get this done, but I want to enjoy the process along the way.