Forbidden Lego: Build the Models Your Parents Warned You Against! [Paperback]

Ulrik Pilegaard (Author), Mike Dooley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 15, 2007

It just may be impossible to exhaust the creative potential of LEGO bricks. With an active imagination as your guide, there are endless possibilities-provided you follow the LEGO Company's official (and sensible) rules. This means no cutting or tampering with bricks, creating models that shoot unapproved projectiles, or using non-standard parts with any LEGO product. After all, those little precision-molded ABS bricks can be dangerous in the wrong hands! Well, toss those rules out the window.

Forbidden Lego introduces you to the type of free-style building that LEGO's master builders do for fun in the back room. Using LEGO bricks in combination with common household materials (from rubber bands and glue to plastic spoons and ping-pong balls) along with some very unorthodox building techniques, you'll learn to create working models that LEGO would never endorse. Try your hand at a toy gun that shoots LEGO plates, a candy catapult, a high voltage LEGO vehicle, a continuous-fire ping-pong ball launcher, and other useless but incredibly fun inventions.

Once you get into the spirit, you'll want to try inventing your own rule-breaking models. Forbidden Lego's authors, share tips and tricks that will inspire you and help you turn your visions into reality. Nothing's against the rules in this book!

Editorial Reviews

Review

A surprise Christmas bestseller, dubbed "the Anarchist Cookbook of the nursery", is topping the Santa Claus wish list for naughty children and their parents all over the world. -- The Daily Telegraph

About the Author

Ulrik Pilegaard was a Senior Designer and Studio Manager for LEGO MINDSTORMS in Denmark and San Francisco, where he worked on projects for LEGO Technic in collaboration with the Media Lab at MIT and designed multiple models for LEGO MINDSTORMS (including R2D2). After LEGO, Pilegaard held the position of Manager of Design at Evolution Robotics, where he helped develop state-of-the-art robotics solutions. Since 2004, he has worked for Energy Innovations as a senior product designer

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: No Starch Press; 1 edition (August 15, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1593271379
• ISBN-13: 978-1593271374
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 8.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (43 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #21,969 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

63 of 65 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A good effort but it IS somewhat impractical, December 14, 2007

By 

K. Blumenthal (San Jose, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Forbidden Lego: Build the Models Your Parents Warned You Against! (Paperback)

This book was a good effort. The instructions are pretty good, in full color and it somewhat interesting to find out why these models would be forbidden from the perspective of a former Lego designer.
There are some problems though. My two biggest beefs with the book were

1. The author didn't tell you what sets you could pull pieces from to make the given model. I had to use a Lego set inventory web site ([...]) to determine that which took about an hour per model.
2. The models didn't use the latest pieces and motors in the Technic line. Most of the models in the book were built with pieces and motors from sets that came out in 2000-2003. Thus, unless you're a collector like me, the people who buy this book will have a hard time finding the right pieces to use.

80 of 85 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Could easily get you addicted to LEGO building..., September 1, 2007

By 

Thomas Duff "Duffbert" (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Forbidden Lego: Build the Models Your Parents Warned You Against! (Paperback)

Having a couple of close friends who are LEGO-maniacs, I couldn't pass up the chance to read and review this particular title in order to see what it's all about... Forbidden LEGO: Build the Models Your Parents Warned You Against! by Ulrik Pilegaard and Mike Dooley. I now understand why they find LEGO building so much fun, and it probably wouldn't take much to bring me into the fold...

Contents:
Introduction; How to Build Great Things; Project 1 - Paper Plane Launcher (PPL); Project 2 - Candy Coated Catapult (CCC); Project 3 - Ping-Pong Cannon (PPC); Project 4 - All-Terrain LEGO (ATL); Project 5 - High Velocity Automatic LEGO Plate Dispenser (HVALPD); Tips and Tricks

So what makes these projects "forbidden"? There are certain rules that have to be followed in order for a LEGO model to be allowed to be marketed as a kit. Some of these rules would be:

Never launch a non-approved object into the air.
Never launch a non-approved object into the air with great force.
Never alter any LEGO part.
Never connect two moters to run together.
Never double the approved voltage.

And so on. Generally speaking, a LEGO kit should not be able to injure someone, should be able to be built with standard pieces, and shouldn't use anything that doesn't come directly from LEGO. In varying degrees, these five projects break some (or all) of the official rules. Which is why they are appealing to the LEGO builder's inner-geek. For as complex as these devices look on the surface, the authors do an excellent job in breaking things down into step-by-step instructions. They start with a brief explanation of the project, some of the design hurdles they faced, what rules are broken, and what non-LEGO parts you might need. From there, you find a full parts list (in color, complete with pictures and amounts) followed by a numbered series of steps. The steps show what parts are needed for that specific step, as well as how they fit together with the growing assembly. Surprisingly, they do this without directions... just the pictures. But the assembly is broken down into very small steps, so you don't have to make any major intuitive leaps to get from step 45 to 46. And if you've been building with LEGO before this, I'll guess that you wouldn't have any trouble following along. I could even see myself making any one of these, and I'm definitely *not* an engineering wizard. :) Oh, and another nice touch... the binding is designed to allow the book to lay flat when opened. So you won't be looking for weighted objects to hold the book open while you're building your next contraption.

I don't know that I'd want to give this book to a 10 year old for fear of what he'd do with the items once built. But knowing the person(s) who I'll be giving my copy to after this, I should probably trust the 10 year old a bit more. Great book, wonderful quality, and it should provide a number of hours of fun walking on the "wild side".

41 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very fun to read and build, September 2, 2007

By 

ueberhund "ueberhund" (Salt Lake City, UT United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Forbidden Lego: Build the Models Your Parents Warned You Against! (Paperback)

What an absolutely fun book to read. The authors, Pilegaard and Dooley, both worked at LEGO. Apparently, as a LEGO engineer, there are many rules that need to be followed when creating a new toy. Most of these rules appear to be in place to protect children from getting hurt. The purpose of this book is to allow two amazing LEGO designers to create models that break one or more of the LEGO rules. The results are some really interesting models that are a lot of fun to build--just don't let your 5 year old play with them!

I've read some previous LEGO books where the construction information was printed in black and white, making it difficult to follow. This book has all model instructions printed in full-color, making this book as easy to read as any LEGO-printed construction manual.

It also helps that the models are a lot of fun to build. You'll see instructions for a paper plane launcher, a candy catapult, a ping-pong cannon, an all-terrain vehicle, and "high velocity automatic plate dispenser". Each model starts out with the builder's inspiration for the model, as well as why it is forbidden by LEGO. While some reasons include safety concerns for young builders (any catapulted item must be below a certain velocity for it to be deemed "safe"), others include models that use non-LEGO parts.

All in all, this is a very fun book to read and build along with. If you've got a Technik set and want to try something new--something forbidden--then this is a great book to pick up. Not only are the models easy to follow (thanks in part to the color instructions), but they're fun to build.