Bricks by the Bay

LEGO bricks have been around since 1932 and as with any item that catches someone’s attention, there are different levels of devotion. Some only see one side of any item, and when they tire of it, they move on to other hobbies. But for others, the LEGO is something completely different.

“It’s a way to relax for me,” said Marcello DeCicco of Sunnyvale. “It’s not something I do every night, but I might work for a few hours at night when everyone else has gone to sleep.” DeCicco said he used blueprints for his recreations of the USS Yorktown, Yukikaze Japanese Destroyer and Yamoto Japanese Battleship, and worked from there. “One inch to nine feet is the scale I used. If something didn’t fit right, I just redid it. That’s the beauty of working with LEGO bricks – they’re not glued together, so it’s easy to take apart and fix. The Yorktown probably has 26,000 bricks in it and weighs 26 pounds. It probably cost around $1,000 and it took me two and a half years to make, or about 400 man-hours. The Yamato Japanese Battleship weights about 50 pounds and is made up of more than 25,000 bricks. It took me about three years to build it, but once again, that’s not working every day and night on it, but in my spare time.”

The Bricks by the Bay Convention is what brought people to the Santa Clara Convention Center starting on Aug. 6. On Sunday, the doors were open for the public to see what LEGOs are all about. The theme for this year’s convention was Monsters and there were quite a few on display. Besides monsters, there were battleships; Star Wars fighters; the Death Star; a working Star Trek Transporter room, replete with sound and special effects; castles; buildings; a lighthouse; hats; robots that painted and solved a Rubik’s cube; helicopters; tanks and more.