Bricksngears: How can we find you online?
Ralph Savelsberg: I’m known as Mad Physicist on flickr and use the name Ralph_S on a few other sites, such as Eurobricks. I’m mostly active on flickr though.
BG: And how about real life? Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Where did you grow up, where do you live, what do you do? Do you have kids, family?
RS: I grew up in the South of the Netherlands and lived in the UK for a bit more than three years. I have a PhD in physics (hence the physicist part of my nickname) and I worked as a researcher at a university. I’m currently back in the Netherlands and work for the Netherlands Defence Academy, where I teach several courses to officer candidates and do research. I’m single.
BG: Do your friends and colleagues know that you are a well-known Lego builder?
RS: I suppose I am well-known LEGO builder, but I am not sure my friends know about that part of it. They do know that I build with LEGO. It would be hard to miss for anybody who has ever visited my apartment! Most of my colleagues don’t know about it. It’s not a big secret (type my name into a search engine, and the LEGO pops up ahead of my research papers!), but it isn’t something that I advertise. I haven’t had this job for very long yet and they are bound to find out about it eventually.
BG: Did you have a lot of Lego as a kid? Any favorites you remember? Did you have a favorite theme?
RS: I’ve been collecting LEGO for as long as I can remember and little else, so I did have quite a lot of LEGO as a child. If you look at what I do nowadays, it might be a surprise, but I had a lot space sets (Futuron, Blacktron I, space Police I). One of my favourite sets was the Stardefender 200 (set #6932). What won’t surprise people who know the sort of thing I build is that my all time favourite set was the Model Team Highway Rig. It’s one of the few sets of which I can actually remember the set number (5580). I remember seeing it in the catalogue in early 1986 and having to wait a few months until the set actually came out.
BG: What did you build as a kid? Did you tweak the sets you had, or did you try completely new things?
RS: Most sets would stay together for less than a week or two, before they’d be turned into something else. I used to build all kinds of things, including a lot of cars and planes, but also things I saw on TV. I used to have a lot of Transformers, for instance. Just about the one thing I didn’t build was minifig scale town.
BG: How did things change as you grew up? Did you stop building at some point to restart later?
RS: I know there are a lot of people who go through a dark age. I didn’t. I never stopped building. When I was in university I didn’t have much time or money, so I didn’t buy LEGO for several years, but even then I’d build now and then in weekends or during vacations.
BG: How did your Lego building style change over time? When did you start building cars and aircraft?
RS: I sometimes get told that my building is ‘old school’. My models trend to have studs showing and I tend to create shapes by using combinations of plates and half studs offsets rather than using fancy curved bits. In that sense my models now aren’t radically different from what I used to do many years ago. I do think I have refined things over the years. Many of my models do have things mounted on their sides or upside-down, for instance, but it’s usually not particularly obvious. I’ve been building cars for as long as I can remember. I started building planes not long after I first saw Top Gun as a teenager.
BG: Do you have a favorite style to build cars? What is your favorite stud width?
RS: I have built a lot of classic American cars, but I try to do something different now and then and lately I’ve been building more European vehicles. I don’t particularly care where a car comes from, as long as I like the shape. I don’t have a favourite width. I like my cars to have approximately the same scale. I settled on 1/22 years ago, set by the size of the wheels I had at the time. So, obviously, small cars can be as narrow as 9 studs. Big American cars often end up 11 wide. With hindsight it’s a bit awkward, because I rarely end up building something that isn’t an odd number of studs wide. For my minifig scale town models the width can be anything from 5 to 7 studs.
BG: You have built many models of army land vehicles and aircraft. Was this a conscious decision to shift towards the military theme, or did it just happen?
RS: This is a funny question in a way. If you would have asked me what sort of stuff I was really into about ten years ago or even five years ago, I would probably have answered that I am mainly a military builder. For a long time cars used to be the sort of thing I built using the colours that were left over from the military building. Obviously many of them were red, blue or yellow. It’s only in the last few years that the cars have become more prominent, in part because there are only so many planes you can build without wanting something different and in part because LEGO has made so many nice colours that are suitable for classic cars. I’ve got a pink Cadillac, for instance, and while this is not a car that I’d ever like to own in real life, I just love having one in LEGO. What also is a factor is that I joined LUGNuts (a LEGO car group on flickr). We’ve got monthly car-building build challenges, which means that I’ve been building at least a car a month since joining more than two years ago. I didn’t build any minifig scale stuff at all until a few years ago. I got back into it through Brickish, the LEGO users group I joined whilst in the UK. Their members do a lot of really neat town stuff and I got involved in that and enjoyed it a great deal.
BG: Where do your inspirations come from? How do you get ideas for new models?
RS: Inspiration comes from all over the place. Many of my minifig scale models were inspired by things I’d see around me when I lived in the UK; the type of vehicles, the style of the buildings. For most of the cars I build I get my inspiration from photo books. I have several on classic (American) cars and fire engines, for instance. I also have lots of books about military subjects. I don’t really know why I decide to build a particular model at any given time, but it is rare for me to build something that I didn’t already find interesting for a while.
BG: On a typical day how much time do you spend building?
RS: I haven’t been building much in the last few months because of work. Most of my building is done in weekends. If I do have the time, I build pretty much all day long.
BG: How does the typical building process look like? Do you plan everything on paper? Or do you prefer trying it out with real bricks?
RS: I plan things, often months in advance. Whenever I start thinking about a new project I try to work out what parts will be difficult and then I try to figure out how to build them. Usually I do this in my imagination, but sometimes on paper as well. I normally also make a drawing of the general arrangement and overall shape or I find a three-view drawing on-line and work out the size of various bits from that. .
To be continued next week. From the next part you will learn why Ralph has no drivers license, has he ever built from Mega Bloks and whether he uses a separator.
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