Inside the world of adult LEGO hobbyists

by

Isthmus Cover Stories

Andrew Beckett stands at the front of the birthday party room at Bricks & Minifigs, a LEGO resale store in Fitchburg. Eighteen others sit at folding tables, or cross-legged on the carpet. Most are men, wearing loose jeans and supportive sneakers; the median age in the room is around 40 years old.

Nearly everyone has come with their own LEGO creation, which they cradle in their laps or display on tables. Eyeing notes jotted in a journal embossed with a LEGO brick pattern, Beckett briefs the group on its upcoming display at Trainfest, the largest operating model train show in the country. Though the event is more than five weeks away, the group has nearly finalized the details of its communal layout.

“Is there going to be a waterfront?” asks a man holding a three-masted LEGO frigate.

“We’ll have the dock, so there’s room for, like, one ship, or a couple small ones,” Beckett answers. “Okay, cool.”

They call themselves AFOLs: Adult Fans of LEGO, and are members of the Madison chapter of the Wisconsin LEGO Users Group, embroidered on their custom polos as WisLUG. Between Madison and Milwaukee, WisLUG counts some 50 adult LEGO fans in its ranks. Beckett, 38, has served as WisLUG’s president for four years. His two children, both of whom play with LEGO bricks, aren’t here — the group is not for kids.

“I don’t bring them with me because I have other things to focus on, and I want to be able to relax,” Beckett says.

Adults build with LEGOs, not play. Although they use the exact same bricks that children do, adult creations are investments, long-term constructions, display pieces placed on shelves beyond the reach of a child’s clumsy hands.

Beckett has been an adult LEGO hobbyist for 10 years. When standing, his shoulders hunch upward and his head sinks forward, misrepresenting his stature by about two inches. He wears a plain navy polo, cargo shorts and New Balance sneakers. Beckett grew up playing with LEGO bricks, though like many others, his interest in the toy faded during his adolescence. When he bought his first house in 2007, his parents dropped off some boxes of his childhood belongings — among them, a number of old LEGO sets. Beckett began to rebuild the sets, picking up where his younger self left off two decades earlier.

It soon became Beckett’s predominant hobby. He estimates his LEGO collection at around a quarter of a million bricks, a stockpile filling his basement. Formerly a reporter with Wisconsin Radio Network, Beckett now works in public relations. He tends to keep his interest in LEGO outside of his professional life, though not for fear of criticism.

“I stopped caring a long time ago what people think of my hobbies,” says Beckett. “I could be sitting on the couch for seven or eight hours every Sunday watching football and drinking, but how’s that any worse than choosing to spend my evenings going downstairs and coming up with new designs?”

LEGO was founded in Denmark in the early 1930s and began making interlocking plastic bricks in 1947. It is now the second largest toy company in the world (Mattel is number one), reporting $5.3 billion in revenue in 2016.

In the late 1990s, adult LEGO communities began organizing through internet forums, which led to real-world meetups. WisLUG, and some 300 other communities like it worldwide, make up the LEGO Ambassador Network, a program developed by the LEGO Group to coordinate outreach efforts with the toy’s adult users.

Judging from online activity, adult LEGO hobbyists are thriving. The website BrickLink, a marketplace for LEGO sets and bricks, has more than 800,000 registered users.

Although the Madison group is predominantly male, there are some female members. Paula Piccoli, a chemist, got involved by taking her son to the group’s meetups. “He’s not building as much anymore because he’s much more into video games,” she says. “But I’d been bringing him to these meetings because parents need to come with members who are under 18, and so then I got involved. I don’t build quite as prolifically as everybody else, but I have a lot of fun.”

Piccoli has ambitions of building a model of Devil’s Tower, inspired by Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. “I’m trying to organize my life at home so that I can focus on that over the next few months,” she says. “I’d love to have it ready by next summer.” She anticipates having more free time for the hobby when her son leaves for college next year. “I won’t have as many obligations with keeping track of family stuff.”

As president of WisLUG, Beckett oversees monthly meetings, runs the group’s social media pages and organizes public displays for the group — which could range from a small showing at a local library to an exhibition at Trainfest, which draws thousands of attendees.

The group spends much of its October meeting planning for the November Trainfest exhibition. It’s the group’s first time at the exhibition, where it will be the only group of more than 100 to work entirely in LEGO.

Sixteen members are working on the display, a landscape of LEGO locomotives and buildings which Beckett estimates to measure 20 feet by 40 feet. It represents hundreds of thousands of individual LEGO bricks, a communal investment of some tens of thousands of dollars.

The group has yet to determine how best to transport sections of the build to the Trainfest exhibition hall, some 80 miles away in Milwaukee’s Wisconsin State Fair Park. As the conversation drifts to van rentals, some members wander out of the party room to explore the rest of the store.

The default noise of Bricks & Minifigs is the glassy scrape of a child’s hand raking through a bin of LEGO bricks. WisLUG began meeting here a few months after it opened in October 2015, invited by the owner as a way to draw the local LEGO community and more business.

Shelving units cover the walls and fill the floor of the store’s main room, which is about 75 feet long. The shelves carry LEGO sets spanning decades; some new, some used and disassembled, some at great markup. A TIE Interceptor spacecraft released in 2000 through LEGO’s Star Wars franchise, which originally sold for $100, is on sale here for $1,000. Near the register, a selection of sets sits in neat rows inside a glass display countertop. Mark Bumpus, a retired electrical engineer who joined WisLUG three years ago, peers through the glass at the toys. He has a folding knife clipped into the right pocket of his faded black Wranglers, secured at the waist by a beaded leather belt and a large silver buckle engraved with an eagle’s head. At 65, Bumpus never used LEGO bricks until his retirement, when he found himself in need of a hobby.

“It’s cheaper than golf, it’s cheaper than skeetin’ trap,” he says. “I wanted to get into making silver jewelry, but then I needed $2,500 of equipment.”

Bumpus connected with WisLUG when he saw its display at Brickworld Chicago, one of the region’s largest LEGO conventions, and developed an interest in exploring the toy’s capability for mechanical functions. Many of his builds incorporate bricks from the LEGO Technic line, which includes such pieces as pneumatic pistons, axles and motorized components to encourage more advanced technical capabilities. Using Mega Bloks, a competing brand of construction bricks, is heresy.

One of Bumpus’ proudest builds is Dilbert the Duck, a football-sized LEGO duck that he created based off a design he found online. Bumpus scaled up the duck, added eyes and new wings and designed an internal transmission system that brings Dilbert to life. Bumpus’ voice warms as he scrolls through pictures of the duck on his phone.

“He’s wearing a little hat. But when you push him, his wings flap and his head bobs, and his eyes go back and forth, which they didn’t before, and his feet waddle, like the old-fashioned pull toy.”

At Brickworld 2017, Dilbert was one of five nominees in the best mechanical functions category out of hundreds of entrants. That year, WisLUG exhibitors netted eight nominations and four wins in the competition categories — a big win, in Bumpus’ book.

“That’s the world series twice in a row. That’s unreal. Andrew was like a new pig in shit,” Bumpus says of Beckett.

Displays like Brickworld are vital to WisLUG retaining its official connection to LEGO. As part of the LEGO Ambassador Network, the group must meet an annual quota of self-organized public displays, an indirect form of advertising for LEGO. Beckett is responsible for arranging these displays, and the group averages about 10 showings every year. In return for this publicity, WisLUG members enjoy privileges such as custom orders of bulk bricks direct from LEGO, which provides an opportunity to amass large quantities of rare or specialty bricks.

Beckett coordinates this order with the supply center in Denmark. For the 2017 shipment, 40 WisLUG members purchased a combined 200,000 LEGO bricks — Beckett asks the cost not be disclosed. The resultant pallet will be shipped by courier to Beckett’s house, an annual reward incentivizing the club’s public engagement. November’s show at Milwaukee’s Trainfest, then, is about more than just presenting WisLUG’s LEGO creations to the public. It will be the group’s 12th and last show of the year, and one of the largest in the group’s six years of existence.

The interior of the Wisconsin Exposition Center looks like a converted automotive plant at 9:50 a.m. on Trainfest eve, Nov. 10. The hall is a cavernous 200,000 square feet, dimly lit and cold enough to see one’s breath. Tim Kaebisch has just arrived to help set up WisLUG’s display for the weekend. He wears jeans several sizes too large belted tight at the waist and a gray polar fleece zipped all the way up to the neck. Beckett, Kaebisch and a handful of other WisLUG members from both Madison and Milwaukee chapters make up the skeleton crew assembling the group’s layout. Their train display will cover a surface area of 16 folding tables.

Kaebisch’s own work makes up about a quarter of the entire layout. He’s brought an airport scene, complete with functioning monorail and a terminal rigged with electric lighting, and three skyscrapers each pushing 6 feet high, one of which contains a functioning elevator. The 31-year-old Kaebisch graduated from the Milwaukee School of Engineering in 2009, and now designs fire sprinkler systems. He began playing with LEGO bricks as a kid, and never stopped — a steady stream of new sets and the release of LEGO Mindstorm robotics sets kept him hooked.

“I usually don’t bring it up to people my age, to be honest,” Kaebisch says. Introducing the hobby to the uninitiated can elicit teasing. “Once they see the stuff I make, they usually back off, but on first dates and stuff I don’t bring it up.”

His model of Milwaukee’s Miller Park stadium is currently on display at the Louisville Slugger Museum in Kentucky. He constructed the model over 12 years, using an estimated 37,000 bricks — it’s valued around $6,000. It is his magnum opus.

“The nice thing about Miller Park is I’m sure that when a girl does come along, that’ll be one of the first things I point to,” Kaebisch says. “They’ll get it.”

He works with quiet focus on his own section of the layout, which he knows from experience takes around six hours to set up. For some of Kaebisch’s larger creations, he has used MLCad design software to shape a digital mockup for the build before constructing it in real life. For Miller Park, the mockup is Kaebisch’s insurance policy; a guide to rebuild it should the unthinkable happen.

Most WisLUG creations forgo blueprints: members simply start building on a blank base, making adjustments as they go to suit their vision. Their creations come to Trainfest mostly pre-assembled: Members unpack finished homes, locomotives and sections of track from boxes to find their place in the greater construction.

Across the table, Beckett stares with a furrowed brow at a blueprint of the group’s layout. The assembly crew has just realized that the baseplates of their city section are misaligned — a plastic roadway hits a dead end, putting LEGO trucks at risk of crashing onto the tram line below. The mistake prompts all hands of the setup crew to drop their own constructions, convening to rebuild the flawed streets.

“Does anyone have a brick separator tool?” calls a Milwaukee chapter member sorting through prebuilt sections of track.

Beckett’s 8-year-old daughter Daria pauses from decorating the layout and wanders up to her dad as he stands with arms crossed, examining the layout schematics.

“Daddy, can you show me what you made?”

“Huh?”

“Can you show me what you made?”

“Uh, in a bit,” Beckett answers, his eyes glued to the blueprints.

Daria returns to the layout’s Christmas village setup, placing plastic pine trees and parka-clad minifigures throughout the scene. Daria builds LEGO creations with her dad at home, helping assemble the larger components of his projects. The two have their own separate collections of brick, though Daria hasn’t been able to find as much time for LEGO lately.

“I don’t really do it anymore, I just build a little bit,” she says. “I have a lot of stuff that I do after school.”

Twenty minutes of focused collaboration has the city foundation’s faulty baseplates corrected, and the builders return to their separate constructions. Beckett and Daria depart early, driving back to Madison to make it to Daria’s karate practice. Across the folding tables, a LEGO world begins to take shape: rail lines snake around the tables, minifigure citizens populate windows and storefronts, Kaebisch’s skyscrapers rise skyward floor by floor. Darkness falls at 4:30 and the group continues to work into the night, setting final details for Saturday’s opening. By the time Tim Kaebisch heads home at 10 p.m., he has been building with LEGO bricks for 12 hours.

Hundreds of scarf-swaddled train enthusiasts line up outside the doors of the Wisconsin Exposition Center to be the first inside. The hall is now fully lit and heated, with thousands ambling past the miniature worlds that sprouted overnight across hundreds of tabletops. Children in conductor’s caps ride wide-eyed on their parents’ shoulders past exhibitor’s dioramas, watching old men send tiny locomotives whirring through scenes of Wisconsin farmland. Older couples browse tables full of railroad merchandise, sharing trays of concession stand nachos.

The WisLUG display, now protected with a rope cordon, is surrounded on all sides by attendees in reverence of the scene before them. Now set on folding tables, Kaebisch’s three skyscrapers reach 10 feet in the air, visible from all corners of the exhibition hall. A LEGO Hogwarts Express train runs in infinite loops around the perimeter of the setup, its three carriages rolling through the group’s largest collaborative construction ever. Through the train’s tiny windows, minifigures gaze out at the landscape passing by: lush plastic pastures, a tropical beach, a city center packed with civilians, a Minecraft-themed coastal ecosystem.

Adult attendees around the display unclip smartphones from belt holsters, squinting and holding them at arm’s length to snap pictures. Children laugh and nudge their siblings as they notice the hidden details WisLUG members have built into their creations: Batman scaling a skyscraper, a burglar cracking a bank’s roof hatch, a pack of velociraptors facing off against a platoon of 19th-century soldiers. Kaebisch is just within the rope cordon, beaming as he observes the audience reactions.

“You’ve got to create scenes, because kids will find that stuff, and once they see one they’ll try to find more,” Kaebisch says. “That’s why I do it. I just like watching the kids react, knowing there’s a lot of stuff going on in their brains instead of going home and playing video games all night. It inspires them to do some other things.”

The Wisconsin Exhibition Center shut its doors at 5 p.m. Sunday, closing the weekend’s exhibition and signaling the start of an extensive dismantling effort. Beckett, having driven back to Milwaukee to help with the packing process, declares WisLUG’s Trainfest debut a success. Over the course of the weekend, some 16,000 visitors passed through the exhibition hall. Such displays validate the hobby to outsiders, disputing the notion that LEGO is child’s play.

The group’s grand constructions now must be packed away. Members scour the table disassembling buildings into portable sections and stacking sections of train track.

For Beckett, there is no sadness in packing his creations away. He knows his builds will reappear, either on a display shelf at home or at future exhibitions. The coming winter means building season, when AFOLs retreat to basements and hobby rooms to engross themselves in bricks through the frigid months. Seven hours after Trainfest’s doors close, the LEGO world has vanished into cardboard boxes and car trunks.

The Madison chapter of the Wisconsin LEGO Users Group takes January off, but continues to meet thereafter through the winter. As spring arrives, Beckett has a full schedule of displays slated for the group: its work will appear at Monona Terrace for the Madison Maker Faire hobbyist meeting in May and at the BrickUniverse LEGO convention in June and July. BrickUniverse is a chance for WisLUG to preview its builds for Brickworld Chicago 2018, which Beckett expects to draw some 10,000 visitors. Because many WisLUG members work in relative seclusion, the new display season can draw out unexpected creations; the products of diligent hours spent designing, building and rebuilding through the winter. The bricks of last year’s Dilbert the Duck might well find fresh purpose in the new year. Beckett cannot fully say what new creations will highlight WisLUG’s expositions in 2018, but hints at a life-sized LEGO goat.

Editor's note: This article incorrectly stated that Andrew Beckett is a former reporter for Wisconsin Public Radio. He was a reporter for the Wisconsin Radio Network.