You might want to call me a kid – but then, what’s wrong in being a big kid if it brings some fun and does not hurt anyone? This post is actually inspired by a friend and her three-year old daughter visiting: the kid needs something to play and one of the things I easily grabbed at the local supermarket was a box of LEGO. No particular theme – just a box of bricks but it reminded me of the days when I loved to play of LEGO for hours and hours – stuff that is not available on the market today (unless you have some luck on eBay)… so I started digging a bit.

Finding the old stuff

The first thing that I was interested in is if the “old stuff” can still be found somewhere in electronic format – mainly the images of the boxes as well as the instructions to build the items.

To no surprise, there seem to be a few more “luna”tics our there  (like myself) and the one set I had a great amount of boxes from was what is now referred to as “Classic Space” theme.

The above shows the original logo of what is now “classic space” stylized in a mosaic of LEGO flowers.

In my search for the original LEGO Sets, one of the best sites I came across is a LEGO Wiki – here, you can browse the different LEGO styles and boxes including the set number. I remember, for example, having owned the Beta-1 Command Base, the Alpha-1 Rocket Base and two of the major spaceships – the Galaxy Explorer and the Starfleet Voyager.

So the first part of my question has been answered: there is more than enough information out there on the original (classic) LEGO Themes including instructions (mainly on peeron.com, here the link to the Classic Space Theme) and in may cases an inventory list (which will be quite useful a bit later).

Building it…

Of course, everyone who ever has played with LEGO wants to just “build” the set. So if you are after the rare old ones, you got two choices: you see if eBay has a physical model on sale or you fall back on virtual reality and model the set on the computer.

The LEGO Company itself is providing the LEGO Digital Designer – for free! Although the idea of this program is to allow people to plan, model and then order their very own sets, it is also possible to use it to just to through any instructions and create the model “virtually”. If have done so with the Glider of Beta-1 Command Base to show you an example.

As we will see later, you may have to cut some compromises in the process but once you got used to the LEGO Digital Designer (or LDD as they call it), you can build almost any model out there… almost.

So for now, this is it – it can be done. Next time, I will walk you through actually doing it!