After my son’s birthday, we left the Lego Batman and Robin mosaic in the living room. Arriving home one night, we found it in two pieces on the floor. Apparently, there was an incident with a toy, and the babysitter moving it, etc, etc…

Not to worry, as it was a clean break. I decided to use the opportunity to write a post showing the fixes. I get a lot of questions about how I build the mosaics, and how I attach them to things. The pics below give a good indication of how things are put together.

I tend to use 48 x 48 baseplates, though occasionally I need to use smaller ones to make the size work. This one is 2 bps high by 2 wide, with a row of 32 “peg” baseplates across the top. When I built most of the mosaic, I’ll lay the plates together, and connect them using larger bricks, whatever the color pattern will allow. So when things collapse, usually under their own weight, they tend to buckle at the seams, as the Lego in the middle is stuck on by, well, its own Lego-ness. So repairing is mostly a task of figuring out where the pieces fell out, and replacing them. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle.

So as I said, this was a clean break, as compared to say…..

That picture shows the baseplates in their glory. To be clear, this picture is from a mosaic I made back in 2007. It was a lot more work to put back together, and I still have no idea where the train goes. (That was a joke.)

Ok, so back to Batman and Robin.

You can see here that the seam is clean, and there are a lot of pieces to be replaced. The trickiest part is that some of the pieces hanging over the seam are on one side of it, and some are on the other. When I put the plates together, it’s easier if all the hanging pieces are on one side, otherwise you have to dovetail it, which never goes well. Usually, I’ll transfer the hanging pieces all to the same side, to make the join clean.

This one didn’t take long to fix, and Finny and I did it together. We even found !!!!SHOCK!!! that a Mega Block had made it in there somehow. I made the mistake early on of buying a bunch of bulk Mega Block brick, thinking it would be a cheap way of getting a lot of bricks. I was right, they were very cheap, in every possible way. They were poor in quality, in color, and they don’t connect very well.

So we fixed that, and found a single 1×1 that was missing, and filled it in.

The finished product is shown below.

So Lego Batman and Robin is all better, and awaiting possible dismantling, as it’s too big for the room. I’ll make some single baseplate faces for Finny to hang on his walls.