Read time: 6 min.

Way back in October, I posted about some of Delaware County’s tornado sirens I’d recreated in LEGO. No one latched on when it went live, but the internet likes to pin a tail on blog posts. A couple weeks ago, a guy from California reached out to ask if I was the same Ted who designed the Lego warning sirens. Turns out I was!

Nearly every town in Indiana has a siren or two that alert people to inclement weather or a Soviet attack. In Delaware County, Indiana, we test ours every Friday at noon. The terrifying sentinels used to interrupt the tranquil rhythm of my week when I was a kid! Fortunately, I learned more about them as an adult. When it came time to design an enormous LEGO Muncie during the COVID lockdown, I wanted to include them.

The sirens in my first draft were roughly to scale with my Muncie model, which measured two feet tall and eleven feet wide. The model was huge, but the sirens weren’t. I had to paint with a broad brush to make them the right size, and the tiny designs made me forgo key details that hurt their likenesses. I scrapped the designs and started from scratch. My next effort turned up something much better in a vacuum, but they were too big to fit inside LEGO Muncie.

I hadn’t thought about LEGO sirens in six months before I received the message on Facebook. After I admitted responsibility for their creation, Alfred told me that his son had found them online and loved them. “His two favorite things in the world right now are LEGOs and warning sirens,” he wrote. “I was wondering if you wrote down an assembly manual for those sirens and part numbers for the pieces as well. I would appreciate any info you could give.”

My first inclination was to message Alfred with a hearty “HECK YES, YOUNG PRINCE!” I really wanted to help him and his son. Alfred’s long-shot request felt like one my own dad would have made about one of my own esoteric obsessions! The problem was that I hadn’t written anything down about the building process or even saved the files. I didn’t even have the same computer anymore. I made the siren models in 2020 on an eight-year-old iMac that bricked itself shortly afterwards. My work was lost.

I didn’t want to respond with something banal like, “nope, sorry.” After all, it’s not every day that a compelling message to help a kid with a niche interest comes in! Instead of replying with some disheartening message, I got to work. I discovered that LEGO discontinued the software I used to design the sirens, so I found another program and learned it. After half an hour, I replicated my original design of a passable ACA Banshee. Most looked like the yellow hat from Curious George. Including Muncie’s, only six exist in Indiana! In fact, four of them live in Kendallville.

The next siren I attacked was a Federal Signal Model 2, but it could just as well represent a Model 5 or a Model 7. Federal Signal was founded in 1901, and the Model 2 debuted twenty-eight years later. In the Model 2, a two-horsepower motor drove a single-tone, 5-port chopper that could reach intensities of 102 dB from a hundred feet away. Models 2, 5, and 7 sirens were inexpensive and are often found at old fire stations in rural communities like Daleville or Yorktown. They really scream! 

I wasn’t looking forward to redesigning my model of a Federal Signal Thunderbolt. Muncie’s home to three of the iconic sirens, and my LEGO versions involved some SNOT (studs not on top) construction to create a reasonable caricature. Even though I’d forgotten how I integrated its diagonal supports in the original design, I was pleased with how the replica turned out. I could have improved the hinge, but there’s no way a siren aficionado could mistake this LEGO model for any other.

The final siren I recreated was the Federal Signal SRN-2001. The model was introduced in 1988 as the replacement for the aging Thunderbolt. Some early 2001-SRN models featured an arced rear housing, and that’s the design I chose to model in LEGO. A 2001-SRN can produce 126 dB from a hundred feet. I live about five times that distance from one, but it’s still extraordinarily loud. It aims itself at my house just about every other week.

It took a couple hours to get comfortable with the new software and remember the part numbers as I worked, but I eventually wound up with four workable LEGO outdoor warning sirens and a parts list, to boot. LEGO has been the preeminent modeling kit for kids for years now, and there aren’t many examples of sirens built with them. My goal was to make these new models more identifiable to a kid than the ones I first created.

After I finished the model, I generated a parts list that included the name, description, ideal color, and number of each piece. I could have made instructions too, but I ran out of time. Nevertheless, I sent Alfred the PDF. His response was enough to make my day. “Wow,” he replied. “Thank you so much. I’m currently building the Mars rover with my son right now but we will start searching for parts for the sirens next week. I appreciate everything.”

As a former kid with weird interests, I’m glad Alfred got in touch to help satisfy his son’s. I hope I helped. Good luck on the Mars rover, Alfred, and happy building!