‘I’m like a kid in a candy shop’ – Ryan ‘The Brickman’ McNaught on what it’s like to be a professional Lego builder

As Lego Masters Australia judge Ryan McNaught brings his Bricktionary exhibition to Dublin, he says that playing with the bricks can be ‘stealth education’ for your children

The LEGO® interactive 'Brictionary' experience will be open in Dublin this March

Saoirse Hanley

It’s hard to comprehend just how many bricks a certified professional Lego builder needs for a project. It’s harder still to gauge how many hours are spent on each model. Here’s a prehistoric example for scale. When Ryan ‘The Brickman’ McNaught set out to make a life-size Tyrannosaurus Rex, he and his team spent 1,500 hours piecing it together. That works out as 62.5 days — if they didn’t stop to sleep. Allowing for both sleep and eight-hour shifts, that’s 187-and-a-half days.

“I think she was about 400,000 Lego bricks,” McNaught sheepishly admits, talking to me from his native Melbourne, Australia. “I think our record — and I’d have to check with the team on this — was like four shipping containers full of Lego. That was [the] biggest order we ever did,” he says.