This was actually first mentioned in an earlier blog entry about the October 2006 BayLUG meeting. I entered it into the club building contest which had a theme of “harvest.” Get it? Harvest of souls? I know, it’s macabre and tasteless. Sorry, but my mind just works that way sometimes.
Anyway, it features two kids innocently trick-or-treating. There’s a girl dressed as a doctor and a boy dressed as a policeman. But no medical skills or law enforcement training can stop the Grim Reaper!!
View all the pics by clicking the above image, or click to view the photos on Flickr (slideshow) or on Brickshelf.
[tags]lego,vignette,halloween,death,grimreaper,trickortreat,house[/tags]
Apparently the LEGO company is thinking about making a new set which would be a model of a car. Not just any car though – one chosen by the LEGO fan community!! That’s right, we get to nominate any year/make/model of car that we might want to see rendered in the brick. What would you pick? Comment here or post in the original thread. (If you comment here I’ll forward your choices on…) The LEGO Ambassadors will collate the “votes” and LEGO will hopefully release a set of the most popular choice.
The rules? he car must be from the past 30 years, and well known in the US and the UK.
What’s my choice? I have to go with the VW Bug. Or maybe a Hummer. Maybe a VW microbus? A Corvette? 1965 Ford Mustang! No wait, too old.
This may take some thought. For now, I’ll stick with the Bug (they were still making them in the late ’70’s so it barely squeaks in).
And of course, whatever they don’t pick would still be good fodder for us to try to make, just for the challenge…
When my father left the Navy and joined United Air Lines in the late 1950’s, he flew this plane, the DC-3.
Like my Lunar Mobile Lounge, this has been at several BayLUG meetings, and now I am finally posting about it here.
Also like that model, it is motorized. There are two motors, located in the fuselage: one which powers the propellers and the other which makes the landing gear go up and down. There is a battery box in the fuselage that powers the propellers, and a wire coming out of the entry door leading to a battery box that controls the landing gear. In both cases, a Technic axle passes through the fuselage and the base of each wing. For the props, there are bevel gears in each engine which drive the propshafts. For the landing gear, the axle is mounted directly to the mechanism. A roof panel is removable to view the mechanism inside. Here’s a video I made to illustrate how it works (it’s also available as a QuickTime movie on Brickshelf):
There are other parts that move as well: the ailerons, elevators, and rudder are all freely hinged. Oh, and the wheels rotate :-) The wings and vertical tail can be removed easily for storage and transportation.
The fuselage is designed using half-stud offsets to achieve the desired shape. This means the walls are very fragile as they cannot be properly interconnected.
On the leading edge of each wing are “de-icing boots” which are made of rubber in the real plane. These are modeled using a curved brick that I got at LEGOLAND California in their “build it and buy it” area in 2003. I don’t know if they were ever part of an official LEGO set, but I never saw them anywhere else. It’s the same shape as the trans-light-blue spotlights in the Soccer sets. These “boots” are attached at an angle using plate hinges and plates, and have half-stud offsets to follow the desired wing angle.
Overall this was an interesting experiment in half-stud offsets and integrating a Technic mechanism into a realistic looking model. I learned a lot making this and hope you enjoy it.
My newest Space creation is the Lunar Mobile Lounge which has actually been at several BayLUG meetings, even though I never posted about it here.
The concept is based on the “mobile lounges” at Dulles (Washington, D.C.) International Airport, which ferry passengers from one terminal to another. However in this case, they ferry people to their waiting spacecraft which landed nearby. Since most spacecraft that people build out of LEGO don’t have wheels, it would be hard for them to dock to the moonbase – it would require some very high-precision flying to land right at a moonbase connector! Therefore I felt there was a need to be able to carry people to and from spacecraft.
Since the spacecraft might have doors that vary in height, I used a scissor lift mechanism to allow this vehicle to raise and lower the passenger compartment – something the Dulles lounges also can do – to match whatever height is needed. You might remember I asked back in March about ways to do this – I ended up using a worm gear to drive, through a short geartrain, a spool that would wind up a string that was attached to the moving leg of the scissor lift.
The vehicle is equipped with an airlock which includes the moonbase connector. The airlock has two doors to the outside – the moonbase connector and a door with stairs leading to the ground (when the vehicle is lowered all the way, that is). There is one interior door, a sliding door which connects the passenger area with the airlock. On the roof you can see the plumbing for the airlock mechanism – hoses and compressors and a big tank for air which are used to alternately drain and fill the air in the airlock and passenger areas. On the underside of the roof are the vents for taking air in and out of these areas.
Click the photo above to see more, or click to look on Flickr (slideshow) or on Brickshelf (pending moderation).[tags]lego,space,moonbase[/tags]
I’ve signed up this blog for Feedblitz, as an experiment. If you don’t use a feed reader (such as Bloglines, My Yahoo, etc.) to subscribe, you might want to try reading my blog by email using Feedblitz. To get started, enter your email address in the box on the left side of the page.
Please let me know if you have any questions or problems or whatever…
This is a modern suburban train station, with one platform and two tracks. Passengers boarding trains on the outer track wait on the main platform, and after their train arrives they cross the near track to the yellow boarding platform. Of course, this means no trains can pass through the inner track while this is happening! This is modeled after the way many stations on the Caltrain line are designed (but for safety and scheduling reasons, they are moving to a two-platform design on many of the stations).
The feature which started this model is the tile mosaic floor in the waiting area. I got the idea while riding Caltrain. When we were stopped at the Redwood City station I noticed the pattern in the concrete waiting platform of a grid of squares surrounded by long strips. Theirs wasn’t multicolored, but then theirs wasn’t built from LEGO either. :-) The station building was not based on anything from real life, though. I tried to use an archetypal station design. Note also the ticket vending machines on the station wall – tickets must be purchased before boarding!
Click the photo above to see more, or click to look on Flickr (slideshow) or on Brickshelf (pending moderation).[tags]lego,trains,town,trainstation,sanladrillo[/tags]
The theme of the building contest for this meeting was “Harvest” and I created a vignette featuring the Grim Reaper (with a Halloween tie-in). It came in tied for first place!! I received a small Star Wars microscale Imperial Shuttle set as a prize. I’ll blog about that vignette when we get closer to Halloween…
There was also plenty of shameless commerce going on. I picked up a bunch of useful parts from Uncle Dan’s smorgasbord, and a bunch of minifigs from Mark Benz.
Besides my contest entry, I also displayed my DC-3 and moonbase “mobile lounge” – both of which are also in the “to be blogged about” category – and my Scarlet Mayhem spaceship.
Click the photo above to see more, or click to look on Flickr (slideshow) or on Brickshelf (pending moderation).[tags]lego,baylug,moah[/tags]
Ever since LEGO started offering bulk parts online through the Shop-At-Home service, fans have been hoping they would come out with an online Pick-A-Brick where we could specify a quantity and color of brick to order. They’ve finally done it! The new LEGO.com Factory Pick A Brick service allows you to select bricks by type or color and enter the quantity that you want. They have all the same parts that you can use in the LEGO Digital Designer program.
The prices are quite reasonable too, for some things at least. For example dark-red 1×2 bricks are 10 cents each, which is the same as what you would pay on BrickLink. And 9V track is $1.50 for a piece of straight or curved track – comparing that with 8 pieces for $12.99 at the LEGO store or in the conventional LEGO online shop, you save $0.99 by ordering it from Pick A Brick!
The user interface is quite good, apparently using AJAX technology. You can even get close-ups of the parts and rotate them around to view them from different angles.
I don’t know if this is only available in the US (I suspect it may be) or in other countries. So please post a comment and let me know whether it works in your country if you’re outside the US.
At long last, here is the blog entry about my micro moonbase monorail. Last January, I got together with other members of BayLUG to install a “microscale space” display at the Valley Fair Mall LEGO store. I posted pictures and a description of that on my blog back then, but I always meant to post details about my model that was featured in the display. So here they are, eight months later – sorry!
Here we see two buildings connected by a monorail. At the right is a sort of office building which has an opening for the monorail to enter the building, inspired by the way they do at Disneyland (or is it WDW) where the monorail goes into the hotel (or at least, I think it did when I was a kid – does it still?). At the other end is a standalone station with a micro moonbase connection. In both cases, the monorail fits into the building closely enough that you can imagine it is an airtight connection (something that matters a lot on an airless moon…).
For the track I am using the straight 16-stud long track of the type originally produced for the 4.5V and 12V trains from long ago, but which has lately been available at the LEGO store Pick-A-Brick (in New Grey, natch). I designed a monorail car that fits nicely on the track. The only problem with the design is it would never be able to take any turns, so it’s a good thing I only have straight track of that type! :-)
