Iron Builder: A Saga

Saturday, August 10. 10:00 AM. I’m sitting in an expo hall, behind a table draped in black cloth and decorated with some of my recent LEGO creations. But they’re not what’s capturing my attention. Instead, I’m staring at a box awkwardly wrapped in fading purple construction paper and wondering what it conceals–and knowing that whatever it conceals will haunt my days and dreams for the next two weeks.

I was invited to participate in Iron Builder–the toughest LEGO competition out there, 1v1, 100 copies of the same part, and fifteen days to go wild with them or be driven wild by them–over a year ago, but although I jumped at the chance, my schedule didn’t line up until this August. Even at that, I forgot that I’d be out of town that first Saturday, and worse yet, displaying a half a year’s worth of MOCs that I’d not have time to sort afterwards. But live and learn to check your calendar.

Of course when I first got the box, a week or so earlier, I shook it. No actually, first I gasped. I had hinted that I would like a big piece and I had evidently been taken seriously.

But back to 10 AM on Day 1. Off came the purple paper and I saw red. Literally, a giant pile of red cauldrons. I laughed out loud.

There were a couple things I immediately disliked about the piece, of course. No studs, no anti-studs, so that was lovely. Bright red, good for cartoony builds but that played more to my competitor’s strengths than my own. But it WAS the big piece I’d asked for. Thing about a big piece is it can shine even in a large build and in large quantity, where small parts feel like they’re just being spammed and pretty much any part would have done just as well. Plus, for bang for your buck, I hate microscale (and was mildly shocked to be called maven of microscale the other day), which takes a ton of time and doesn’t have the wow factor that a bigger build has. And another thing; a big piece has a well defined shape that needs to be used cleverly and can’t just be used however for anything. (I may be somewhat critical of some IB rounds with small pieces.)

But it’s about time that we get to what this was all about: the builds. As a matter of fact, it took me quite a while to get my first build out. I got a few tablescraps (and a BrickLink order) going Saturday night, but I never build on Sundays, so on Monday I was confronted by a pretty impressive first build from my competitor that demanded something aggressive for my first move. And what more aggressive than a dragon?

Dragon was already on my list of must-builds, though I had planned to slot it later in the competition as I knew it would be a tough one. And it was. I slaved over that dragon until 4 AM Tuesday morning. There were so many technical difficulties with this beast, mostly associated with gravity. But she finally did stay together long enough for a few less than perfect photos.

By this point, I was desperate to get my first build out and decided not to rebuild and reshoot. In retrospect, I strongly regret that decision. Had I spent another day on the dragon, I felt it could have been one of the highlight builds of the competition as it was one of the builds that used most copies of the cauldron and in a technically impressive way. Instead, the poor presentation means that it potentially even hurt my showing.

That said, one thing the dragon did do for me was make me mad. So Day 5 I was ready with this–perfect for the “catch up” pun value and three solid uses of the seed part.

My next build was a quick one; I just wanted to strike quickly and demonstrate some versatility in style. While I think the build turned out fairly well, it didn’t feel like a splendid use of the part. I almost built an entire 2D comic-book cover around this, but I felt like it would have been window dressing on a window that was probably not worthy.

Build four, on the other hand, turned out to be one of my personal favorites of the round. It’s one of the few builds that was something I’d already wanted to build, and I felt like it took advantage of the cartoony potential of the cauldron at the same time. I actually had a bunch of little cartoonish guys built with the same two-cauldron design. They were super cute, but I couldn’t find a great way to use them aside from this over the back shot.

That brought us to week two–which was also RebelLUG’s Vignweek; a prompt a day for a whole week. I had been eyeing the approach of the competition with the idea that it would push me to be more productive and more creative with the seed part. And the first prompt, Olympic, lined up with a tablescrap I already had lying around, a pair of dumbbells (I had planned to have a donut weightlifting, and some snarky comment about my opponent, but I discovered I was running low on appropriate donut-colors). There’s also a small reference to the IB round (which probably no one noticed) with the background behind the Olympic rings looking a bit like a cauldron: I wanted to make it red, but didn’t have the required tiles.

The next day was “A Splash of Color” which I took literally. Once again, Vignweek aligned with a concept I already had planned, a buoy. When I found that I could make use of a new connection technique with those lever bases I went for it. This was a pretty quick build, since I spent a lot of the day rummaging through bins at my local second hand LEGO shop in order to find…

…a fifth tire. In fact, I didn’t find an exact match, but it’s close enough.

This jeep was definitely one of my better builds this round, presentation turned out great (though I had to edit out a pesky ant) and it’s even a pullback! That said, I almost didn’t build it since the cauldrons do not make ideal wheels. I mean, a typical LEGO wheel would have looked more accurate. Still I realized that the fact that it spins is pretty impressive considering the cauldron has no attachment points inside, so I went for it.

And I did manage to squeeze in a couple more cauldrons on that electric pole in the background, which had an encore in my Vignweek build for that day. Amusingly enough, I spent about an hour total on this vignweek entry, compared to 4+ hours on most of the other ones, and it’s the only one that placed. That said, I did spend a couple hours trying to build something else that wouldn’t reuse the electric pole.

I spent Thursday taking pictures of my checkers board. Seriously, it took me quite a long time–first to find the right spot in the house, then to decide on a good composition.

As a checkers lover I was annoyed that from the nature of the case this isn’t a playable board, but I did tear it up and rebuild it to get one mid-game shot. (I had bigger ambitions, with some idea of photographing through a whole fictional game, which of course I would win, but I realized I didn’t have enough nougat bricks to fill in the squares left empty.)

Sometime around midnight I buckled down to the day’s vignweek prompt, which was “microscale LEGO set.” I thought of trying to scale down the Destiny’s Bounty but it didn’t seem like a brilliant use of the part. A glance through my list of IB ideas reminded me of the Red Baron. No way that was ever a LEGO set, I thought. But hey, why not ask google? And greatly to my surprise, I found that in fact there once was a LEGO set version of the Red Baron, not very impressive by today’s standards, but very much a real set and very much a red set, which was just what I needed.

That said, my favorite part of this build is the clouds.

On Friday the vignweek prompt was mystery. I built a half a dozen funny-looking dudes with yellow eyes (with the same two-cauldron body that my astronaut had, but this time from the front) and then suddenly I realized two things: first, my back was killing me after building on the floor for two weeks (I ran out of desk space very early on) and secondly, Calvin wears a red shirt! I’m surprised it took me until the second to last day (or maybe even the last day–it was probably pretty late at night) to realize that here was another build I’d “always” wanted to build begging for my attention. And yes, claiming that it fit the “mystery” prompt was a stretch, but so what.

The landscape took me way longer than it should have. It’s hard to decide what color is best at 3 AM. But hey, I got her done, snatched a couple hours of sleep, and went to scrub walls all Saturday morning.

The last few days I was also trying to make progress on my ambitious finale build: a giant raspberry painting. Not to keep you in suspense, I didn’t manage to finish it. I just couldn’t find a satisfactory background design with the parts I had. I have to wonder what I might have done if I hadn’t been scrubbing walls all Saturday morning (probably I would have slept…). I officially gave up on it around three o’clock and forced myself to do something with a trio of cannons I had been saving, hoping for a vignweek prompt that would be up their alley. And, if anyone’s counting, that made for 11 builds in 12 days, since I rested both Sundays and didn’t get a chance to build the first Saturday.

I actually had loads of leftover ideas (some better than others) at the end of the competition. As far as that went, I could have gone for another two weeks: I had tablescraps for a caterpillar, a trophy, little jawa-like creatures, and some pillars–I wish I had realized earlier how much potential those had–and a list of twenty or so concepts. I especially wanted to build a kids train, but I knew my competitor was building a train–though it turned out he used the cauldron on the locomotive instead of as the wheels, as I had been planning. That’s to say, I finished the round quite pleased with the seed part and all the potential it still has. Who knows, maybe I’ll build with it again someday. Once I’ve finished sorting…

When the dust settled and the final builds were posted I think I was feeling pretty confident, but going over the round Monday or Tuesday I decided it was anybody’s game. What I really did not expect was to find out that Saturday that I’d lost 2-7. In case you were wondering how it feels to lose an IB round: it stinks, and kind of feels like you just wasted the toughest two weeks of your life. At that point, if you really want to know, I was just glad that my brother had lost his IB round 2-7 too.

But then the next day was Sunday, and it honestly didn’t matter any more. I had a blast building, created some MOCs that I will be keeping for a long time (and let me tell you, that is a special MOC, most of them go right back into the parts bin), and between us Eann and I put together a great show. Speaking of, be sure to check out the whole Iron Builder round for the puns, judges’ verdicts, and all Eann’s epic builds!

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