Snowcraft – Building a Lego Snowfort from giant Lego snow-bricks

https://www.verandavikings.com/blog/building-lego-iglos

by mikerg87 • 3 years ago

186 47 3 years ago

I did something similar a few years back with a cardboard box I found in the park! It held up surprisingly well while I tried to build a mighty fort - but before I could start building a roof, we got too cold and I had to bring the kiddo inside.

I miss big snowfalls.

ghayes• 3 years ago

I’m really surprised the snow bricks hold together so well. I wonder what the optimal conditions are for forming snow balls/bricks/men.

Too• 3 years ago

Once you are done forming them you can spray them with a very thin layer of water. This will give them a nice hard icy surface that protects the sticky, crumbly snow on the inside.

mindslight2• 3 years ago

Reading this gave me a related idea for a 3D FDM printer that lays down water. Maybe just a floating head suspended by ropes from three different trees. Perhaps three base stations on the ground for more accurate positioning. It would only work when it was really cold out. But it would be pretty neat to play with printing some kind of crazy human-scale structure/sculpture, and not have to worry about what you're going to do with it when you're done.

JKCalhoun2• 3 years ago

Need to figure out how to keep the source of the water from freezing.

fiddlerwoaroof• 3 years ago

I think if you keep it moving, you should be able to be ok.

mindslight2• 3 years ago

I was thinking the deposition rate would be high enough that the flow of tap water would suffice. The more important goal would seem to be getting the water to a steady colder temperature so that it freezes consistently soon after it comes out. It would be nice to be able to augment the feed with snow too. Maybe an open tank, a circulation loop to the printing head, variable valve for the tap water inlet, and then perhaps a waterfall-based heat sink and/or a boiler loop depending if the whole setup still needs to lose or gain heat.

I've also got to wonder if dribbling water would be the best type of print head, as opposed to say a pressurized nozzle that would make more of a fanned out spray.

klyrs3• 3 years ago

Set your hothead to 1°?

swader999• 3 years ago

Icebox igloo tool helps build a geodesic shaped igloo much like a 3d printer with all types of snow. https://grandshelters.com/icebox-igloo-tools/

mensetmanusman3• 3 years ago

Please build this, I have been hoping for someone to for decades since living in freezing Madison :)

JKCalhoun2• 3 years ago

Hmmm... 2 x 2 bricks? (Guess the Lego storage bin imposes that style brick.)

I want to see them try 2 x 4 bricks though. Much overlap.

andai• 3 years ago

In the last photo, there's what appears to be a red 2x4 brick mold

neilv4• 3 years ago

These can be awesome fun to build and to play in. Just a safety note...

If you build snow&ice structures, keep in mind that some can be dangerous for young kids who later come across this very compelling structure.

Especially igloo/cave/house, or other structure that can otherwise collapse atop small ones.

Even if structurally sound when built, it can change rapidly over time, due to melting, snowfall, and play.

If you can't check it frequently, to make sure that it's not in a state that can collapse and result in tragedy in a matter of minutes, then you probably want to disassemble it (and spread it out).

izend• 3 years ago

I believe this is why my grade 2 class in Montreal was shown this famous Quebec movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dog_Who_Stopped_the_War where the movie ends with a child dying in the collapsed snow fort.

neilv4• 3 years ago

US schoolchildren were shown Disney's film "Follow Me, Boys", which seems to be about a wholesome youth group, who build a dangerously unsound clubhouse... then arm themselves, to fight off government aggression.

(This formative message could explain a lot. I prefer Quebec's snow safety message.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4dHmLu07HY

Aeolun• 3 years ago

The synopsis on wikipedia seems to say the dog dies?

Which given the name “The Dog Who Stopped the War” seems likely?

fifilura2• 3 years ago

I have mixed opinions about that.

It is true that there is proof of kids dying when snow caves cave in.

At the same time it is also a part of this ages overprotection of kids. Along with children not allowed to bike alone or play near a lake.

idiotsecant• 3 years ago

Yes, next we will be removing lead from the air and drinking water! Where does it stop?!? Life should never improve or change in any way, I say!

soperj• 3 years ago

We do this with our recycling bins, it doesn't look like lego, but you can stack it a lot nicer than what they've got in their pictures.

jader2012• 3 years ago

Sort of related, we bought for our kids when they were young a set of Brik-a-Bloks. [1]

They’re basically plastic 2x2 tiles that can be assembled into almost any structure you can think of (limited by the number of tiles you have).

They (we!) loved making forts and tunnels with them.

Just last week, one of my sons and his friends broke them out when playing nerf guns. He’s 16.

It’s such a shame they stopped making them (maybe they were too expensive). They were even hard to find when I got them several years ago. Someone should really make something like these again.

[1] https://gofatherhood.com/2010/02/review_fun_huge_building_bl...

bcraven• 3 years ago

This looks close to Quadro:

https://quadroworld.com/en

jader2012• 3 years ago

Yeah, sort of, except Brik-a-Bloks allow you to build enclosed structures, so it feels more like a fort.

But Quadro would still allow you to use sheets, etc. to complete the fort look.

fercircularbuf• 3 years ago

You have a wonderful blog!

dathinab• 3 years ago

be careful you have referred to non-Lego produced bricks as Lego, Lego might now sue you /s

jokes aside they won't as it's good PR, they are very peculiar about how they selectively enforce their trademark in media articles

jacquesm2• 3 years ago

Technically speaking they provided the mold, so it's a derived product at worst, and the evidence will melt away before the lawsuit gets underway.

m-p-3• 3 years ago

This seems very unstable and unsafe. Collapsed snow forts can kill..

mensetmanusman3• 3 years ago

It turns out children are attracted to risk, because safety is boring and evolutionarily disadvantageous when safety culture goes off the rails:

https://monstrum.dk/en/article/extinction-risky-play#:~:text....

epiccoleman• 3 years ago

One of my best college memories:

I went to school at Ohio University, which is in Athens, OH - the Southern part of the state. Snowfall was pretty rare down there, we p probably only got one good one a year.

I was also in a fraternity - a source of lots of good times and also some bad ones. But most importantly for this story, it meant that I knew about 50 different guys on campus.

In my senior year we got a pretty awesome fall of packing snow, and the house where I was living had a big parking lot as basically its backyard, which served as parking for 12-15 cars for nearby houses. Classes were cancelled.

So, that morning me and the other couple guys who lived in my house put on our best approximation of snow appropriate clothes, and went outside to the parking lot to build a fort. We starting making bricks with our recycling container, which was about the size of a 44qt storage tub. Our goal was to make an igloo big enough for a circle of about 15 of us to sit, so our first layer needed something like 30 blocks.

Time went on, and various other bros starting showing up. By the end of the day, we had 20 young dudes shoveling snow into those recycling totes. Even with that amount of workers, it was slow progress. The fort was humongous! But after working for a few hours, we had a circle about 10-12 feet in diameter with walls 4 feet high.

At that point our resolve to build an actual igloo had crumbled, and we were running out of easily accessed parking lot snow, so we compromised, and threw a big white tarp over the whole thing. Just like that, we had our giant fort, roofed over (and hey, safer too).

It was an all day job to get that far, and the rewards were worth it - we sat out in the fort with frozen asses, drinking very cold beer and filling it up with pot smoke, laughing and singing and telling stories. It was a genuinely magical few days, it felt like building that thing together had broken down some cliques and brought our group of dudes together. Almost every brother stopped by at least once.

It didn't occur to me until later that that was probably the last time in my life all the conditions would line up to build something that large out of snow. How often do you find a huge parking lot, covered in packing snow, and 20 strapping young lads with nothing better to do than listen to some nerd telling them where to put it?

Good times.

deadbabe• 3 years ago

This sounds like a nice way to close out a chapter of life that will never be relived.

mgaunard• 3 years ago

That's not how you're supposed to use lego. You're supposed to stack them up using the bumpy bits to maintain good alignment -- I wouldn't expect the fit on hand-made snow bricks to be sufficiently tight and the material to be sufficiently elastic to enable them to stick to each other (though you could get them to stick by getting some ice to form).

But it looks like the bricks themselves aren't hollow like they're supposed to be, and that they can't even be stacked to build a structure that's even remotely level or structurally sound.

Clearly this is "lego" in name only.

chrisjh• 3 years ago

The word Snowcraft just brought me back to my childhood. I loved playing the Snowcraft Shockwave game circa 2001 (?)

I found a version of it on Archive.org [1] and a mirror on Github [2] that shockingly run perfectly!

[1] https://archive.org/details/snowcraft_game [2] https://github.com/seanpm2001/Snowcraft

smeej• 3 years ago

Is it just me or wouldn't this actually work better with a flat box than a Lego-shaped one?

Unless you're somehow driving corresponding holes into the bottoms of your bricks, what advantage do the pips on top provide? If anything, they seem like they'd make it less stable.

forgotusername6• 3 years ago

Not just you. Was disappointed to see the use of the 2x2 rather than a 2x3 and also no indents in the base. The structures made look precarious at best.

doug_durham• 3 years ago

Great idea, but the writing style of the blog grates on my like nails on a chalkboard.

BrickTamblan• 3 years ago

Snowcraft – Building a Lego Snowfort from giant Lego snow-bricks

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