By John Francis, Bruce Peninsula Press
When Danish craftsman Ole Kirk Anderson founded the Lego company in 1932, his objective was to make high-quality wooden construction toys. “Only the best is good enough” was the company motto.
Anderson experimented with plastic after WWII and released a line of plastic building bricks in 1949. Lego made many adjustments to materials and design in the early years before settling on a standard in the 1960s. The iconic mini-figures did not appear until 1978.
Themed sets (Lego City, Batman, Star Wars etc) were aimed at older children and came to dominate the market. These became gradually more complex over the decades. In 2007 for example, Lego introduced a 5,195-piece scale model of the Millennium Falcon; subsequent kits have grown even larger.
But many people have carried their passion into adulthood. You can build some absolutely amazing things out of Lego. The website rebrickable.com sells plans for all manner of projects, but the purists work from scratch and make their own designs.
Over the decades, Lego has manufactured somewhere over 400 billion pieces. Several million of those pieces live at Ken Reid’s home in Owen Sound.
It all began in 2016 when he and his wife, Ola von Richter saw a TV show about Lego creations. It inspired them to dig out the bins of Lego that lived in their basement, then to acquire some more…
Since Ola’s death from cancer in 2020, Reid has devoted himself — and most of the space in his house — almost full time to his Lego projects.
He has built literally dozens of things out of Lego, getting steadily more ambitious as he went. There was a model of Notre Dame cathedral, then a 220,000-piece model of Minas Tirith (the capital of Gondor in Lord of the Rings). That one was only half made from Rebrickable plans; the other half was pure Ken Reid.
Throughout all of this, he continued to buy more Lego — job lots, yard sales, estate sales. He would buy a tub or two, occasionally more. “One time I bought 400 pounds. It took me three weeks to clean and sort it.” He has one spare bedroom devoted to storing hundreds of plastic tubs and drawers of different Lego pieces; another bedroom holds larger tubs of bulk Lego waiting to be cleaned and sorted.
Reid’s passions have been history, science fiction and video games, but last fall he decided to build something that celebrated Grey-Bruce. After looking around for a suitable subject, he settled on building a scale model of the Chi-Cheemaun. This project would have to be designed entirely from scratch — it’s never been done so there are no plans available.
The first step was to calculate the size the model would need to be in order to accommodate Lego figures at scale (he settled on nine and a half feet). Then he had to get the shape of the bow right. That took four tries and consumed three weeks of his life. Then he contacted Owen Sound Transportation Company (OSTC — the owner/operator of the Chi-Cheemaun) and was delighted when he was given a comprehensive tour of the vessel by a Captain and a Chief Steward.
That gave him the details he needed to construct the various decks, hallways and rooms. (Oh, yes. The model is not just a shell — the interior of all the decks is accurately reproduced, including furniture and people.)
Three months later, he was finished.
The result is a 92,000-piece scale model of the Chi-Cheemaun, complete with cars, trucks and RVs in the car decks, furniture and furnishings on all decks and 620 figures (the Chi-Cheemaun’s capacity is 630 people). He tried to represent the diversity of folk you would normally see on the vessel. (“It’s just a fraction of the figures I’ve got — I could have outfitted the whole thing in stormtroopers if I’d wanted.”)
When he was finished, he posted photos online to a couple of Lego enthusiast groups and was amazed at the response. Four different media representatives (so far) have visited him and several organizations have expressed interest in displaying the model. Reid is conflicted about where to send it. It’s fragile enough that he wouldn’t want it subjected to constant motion and vibration on the Chi-Cheemaun. Science North would like to use it as part of a Lego display this summer but Reid would rather its first showing was in Grey-Bruce. The Tom Thomson Gallery, the Owen Sound Marine and Rail Museum and OSTC are all interested.
Stay tuned. You will get a chance to see it.
