RV FEATURE
It’s said that memories of childhood are the
dreams that stay with you after you wake. For me,
my childhood dreams were of blocks of plastic,
each with eight little nobly bits on one side and a
crosshatch alternative side, allowing them to push
together. Easy, simple, and brilliantly colourful.
But Lego was a dream, my childhood was
Meccano, complex, almost monochrome and full
of nasty little nuts and bolts. And so it was with
some trepidation that I met a man called Ben
Craig. Ben has kept his Lego dream not in his
mind but in reality.
And now, he has brought his plastic childhood
into my structured Meccano world, as if to show
me, once again, how much fun his plastic block
world was and still remains.
Ben and I first met about mid-year when he led
a team of crack Lego builders at a caravan show
in Brisbane. They raced the clock to finish a life-
sized replica of a vintage caravan made entirely
out of Lego bricks. Their only goal: to take a
Guinness World Record.
Lego enthusiast Ben Craig.
IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED…
Somehow Ben’s childhood of endlessly and
easily linking little plastic Lego blocks, in their
multicoloured glory, has continued even as
an adult. He has taken that single, wonderful
childhood memory and somehow blown it into a
bubble in which he can live his dream ad infinitum.
Despite working 20 hours a day to meet the end-
of-show deadline, manufacturing the roof of the
van was far more difficult than they anticipated.
These tiny bricks are great for stacking but they’re
not made to span a gap of more than 2m. So the
days turned into weeks and the weeks into around
five months until Ben and his team had mastered
the problem and finished the build.
The trouble was the van, at 2.2m high and 5m
long needed to knock out of the record book
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