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Making LEGO instructions for my son

Posted: Tue Jan 03, 2012 7:05 am
by melonkernel
Hi, there again, i have been away from the LEGO scene for a while (again). All of my LEGO that were organized individually by piece are now in two large bins, one for castle and one for "general" lego (ie pieces, you would not usualy build castle with) and my kids play with them every day (the way it should be i guess, they stayed untouched as "daddys LEGO" for some time, so it is much better this way, (although one can find dwarf helmets or other "rare" pieces in different places around the house, but i love it.
Anyway, my soon to be 5 year old son is very much into LEGO castle, and we bought him a 7946 King’s Castle for christmas sometime in the fall when they sold it very cheap somewhere. And without knowing that we had already bought it for him he came one day and said, after having read through an entire toy catalogue that there is only one thing he would like for christmas and it was that very castle.
Anyway, he was thrilled when he opened it on christmas (pure joy) and built it all almost by himself (of course i was there a lot and enjoyed it with him, but he built it) and for being the first real instructions he followed it went very well.

So that was the background to this post. :)

I discovered, as the castle was being built, that the walls of the castle were built in modules with technic bricks holding them together, so after the castle was finished and we were playing in his room, i started to look through the "castle bin" to see if i found pieces for similar wall modules so he could extend the castle.

As the Kings castle has this new wall pieces, and we ahve many of the older traditional wall pieces
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I started to build a module that would use pieces that we had quite many of and would make a module that would "fit" with the castle and it's colors etc.

After finishing some modules and extending the castle i made an example module that i knew we had pieces for him to make several more of and said that he could just copy that one and make several new ones and thus make the castle larger. but he preferred to use the instructions that made it easy to build. Since we don't have any more of the wall segments in that instructions i started thinking of a way to make your own lego instructions and i discovered that LDraw (Bricksmith) together with LPub works very well for that. I had tried LDraw sometime earlier and got a bit intimidated, but after trying it out a bit i got the hang of it. So i figured i would make a small blogpost about making your own lego instructions... thus i have "exteneded" my blog from being just a tech blog to be a LEGO & tech blog :tasty:
I plan on posting more lego stuff there as well. Oh, and if i forgot something in there, or the english is bad, just let me know (also i don't have windows, so i couldn't test if it works the same way on windows machines, but i assumed it would)

And... now i've got the Lego bug again :)

[edit:]
Oh, and here is a picture of the two modules i made instructions for, they are also downloadable as ldraw files or PDF so you can modify them for your own needs.
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Re: Making LEGO instructions for my son

Posted: Wed Feb 01, 2012 10:15 pm
by AK_Brickster
Very cool. I don't use instructions, myself, but this could be a neat thing to use to give my nieces something to build, as they are just getting into Lego (and I'm more than happy to encourage them!)
Thanks for taking the time to put this together and share it with us :)

Re: Making LEGO instructions for my son

Posted: Sun Feb 05, 2012 7:07 pm
by Medieval Guy
Making your own instuctions is pretty cool. Publishing them is even cooler!

Re: Making LEGO instructions for my son

Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2012 9:25 pm
by Knight Man
Neat, I might have to try to make some instructions sometime. ~KnightMan~