December 2008 – Bill Ward's Brickpile

Fleetwood Revolution LE 42K Motorhome

This high-end luxury motorhome allows you to travel in class! Features three slide-outs, including one that is almost the entire left side, a powerful diesel engine in back, two bathrooms, plentiful storage underneath, a well-appointed kitchen, and much more.

It is based on the Fleetwood Revolution LE 42K Motorhome but I should admit I took a lot of artistic license, especially with the artwork on the sides.

This is pretty much the diametric opposite from my last RV model, the Shasta Teardrop Travel Trailer that I made a couple of weeks ago. While that one was small and minimalistic (with only the most basic interior, and no removable roof) with classic styling from the 60’s, this one is modern and contains all the amenities you could wish for. However, neither model has 4 wheels, so both are eligible for the All But Four challenge on LUGNuts. It’s also eligible for a new Flickr group I created, LEGO RVing.

Hope you enjoy it, and please post comments here or on Flickr. If you want to see it in person, come to the BayLUG exhibit at MoAH in Palo Alto, CA – I’ll be bringing it there tomorrow and it will be there through January 11, 2009.

Click the photo above for the photoset on Flickr, or view it as a slideshow.

Shasta Teardrop Trailer featured on LAMLradio Podcast

I just wanted to say thanks to Jonathan Bender for selecting my Shasta Teardrop Travel Trailer as his “MOC of the Week” when he was interviewed on LAMLradio Episode 69. (If you just want to hear what they had to say about my trailer, skip to 39:02)

Of course, thanks to The Brothers Brick for featuring the trailer a week ago, as that’s where Jonathan saw it…

If you don’t listen to LAMLradio, I highly recommend it. Hosts James Wadsworth and Aaron Andrews (“DARKspawn”) feature interviews with movers and shakers of the LEGO scene, talk about LEGO news, and discuss a few key “MOCs of the week” in each episode, which come out about once a week.

Lately James has also been putting out video podcasts, called appropriately enough LAMLtv. I’ve done two of those as guest episodes, featuring footage and interviews from BrickCon in Seattle last October, and have plans to do a few more. I’ll post those here too, of course.

(In case you were wondering, “LAML” stands for “LEGO and more LEGO”)

Advent Calendars, Day 24 & Wrapup

Today is Christmas Eve, the final day of Advent. Though I don’t practice religion these days, I appreciate the tradition especially when it involves getting LEGO :-)

Anyway, today’s entry for City is a girl building a snowman; on the Castle side we have the famous Court Jester minifig that people have been so excited about. I put him to work helping with the snowman:

Over the course of the past 24 days, we’ve had a number of extra parts accumulating. LEGO always throws in a few extra items from a few parts which are easily lost. I guess they are worried about reducing the call volume to Customer Service. Anyway, over the span of the advent calendars these pieces have added up to quite a pile:

Finally, remember the Good Twin and Evil Twin? Well, I went through all the models from both calendars and sorted them out into good and evil factions. Here are the good guys first:

And the forces of evil ready to do battle with them:

The snowman, of course, is the king of the evil side, and today’s minifigs are his minions. Mwahahahaha.

Happy Holidays to everyone! Hope Santa brings you plenty of great new LEGO sets!

Amazing Great Ball Contraption video

This is really a work of art – not just for the clever LEGO creations, but maybe even more so for the filmmaking. The modern classical music accompanies the images very well. By taking a series of close-up video shots of various parts of the contraption, each one well composed and from an interesting angle, our interest is maintained throughout. Exceedingly well-done!

Via TechnicBRICKs blog.

Another LEGO Video of the “Numa Numa” song

Properly titled “Dragostea din Tei,” this song became an Internet fad a couple of years ago when Gary Brolsma posted his “Numa Numa Dance” video on YouTube. A couple of years ago, I posted on Brickpile about a LEGO animation based on Gary’s video that I had seen on The Brothers Brick. I was going over some old posts on Brickpile and saw that video was not available any longer, but did a quick search for “numa numa lego” on YouTube and found that the video had been reposted, so updated that old blog post.

But in the process of doing that search I also found this:

It was made with the English translation of the song, which I’d never heard before. Sounds strange to my ears, having heard the Romanian version so many times…

Advent Calendars, Day 23

This is the penultimate day in the advent calendar… after tomorrow (Christmas Eve) there will be no more advent models to blog about. Happy Christmas Eve Eve!

Anyway, the City calendar brings us a snowmobile, I guess. Of course, it lacks any kind of motor or propulsion system, so I’m not sure we can really call it a snowmobile. Maybe it’s a sleigh and there just aren’t any reindeer? On the Castle side we have a treasure chest guarded by a spider, which translates fairly well into WoW, though in the game most treasure chests are guarded by humanoids, and the spiders you see in WoW would be about ten times that size.

Gondola LDraw file now available

I like to make LDraw virtual models of all my MOCs, for a number of reasons: so I can re-create the model if it is ever taken apart, and so I can share the design with others.

However, I’m a little stuck as to what to do with these files. Should I post them online? If so where?

As an experiment I’m posting this one on Flickr. I posted the GIF file rendered by MLCAD for my recent Gondola train car, and as a comment under that GIF I put the entire LDraw .MPD file.

I’ve also uploaded it as an attachment to this post: gondola.mpd

What do you think is the best way to make the LDraw files available?

Advent Calendars, Day 22

Six days ago, we got a bit of a surprise as the wrong minifigure was included in my Day 16 box. I was supposed to get a police photographer but instead got a mountain climber.

In the comments for that entry, we came to the consensus that today, #22, we would probably get the cop at last, as 16 and 22 are adjacent in the grid, and minifigs tend to come 3 days apart. When I opened the box for #22, I found that in fact, the climber is supposed to be in this box. What surprised me was that he actually was there, so now I have two of them, and no photographer.

The Castle set had no such errors; it yielded up a nice little catapult. Nothing terribly remarkable about it, though it is surprising how many pieces they included to make this item, as most Advent days are pretty light in the parts count department.

So anyway, I suppose all hope of getting that police photographer is lost. But really, I don’t mind. The parts included with this hiker are a lot more useful anyway – dark green pants, white backpack, etc. Though I guess I could call Shop At Home and complain, and probably get the missing cop in the mail….

BayLUG MoAH show updated

I spent today at the Museum of American Heritage in Palo Alto helping staff the exhibit there by my local LEGO club, the Bay Area LEGO Users’ Group. I took a few pictures of things that had been added since my last update.

This is the fifth annual LEGO show that we’ve done at the museum. We have a train layout in the center of their “Frank Livermore Learning Center” building, plus various non-train-related displays on the tables around the perimeter. We also have some members (mainly Bruce) selling parts and sets at the show.

The show is open every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, now through January 11, 2009. Hours are 11am-4pm. There’s no charge but a donation to the museum is suggested. If you want to come by and say hi, send me an email first to see what days/times I’ll be there.

I’ve taken photos on a few days during the exhibit. I created a photoset for each day’s photos, plus one that contains all of them:

December 6 (VIP holiday party for the museum)
December 13
December 21 (today)
Everything – or sit back and enjoy the slideshow

Advent Calendars, Day 21

Today, the Castle scene gets a scary orc warrior, while Town gets an innocent-looking pallet with twelve bottles.

Combining this with the past two days, you can see that the orc is attacking the inn, frightening the innkeeper who has to fend him off with her trusty broom. (As you can see her face is reversible; originally from the Spider-Man sets, it has a happy expression printed on one side of the head, and a scared one on the other.)

Meanwhile on the town side, our villain, dressed innocently as a train maintenance worker so he could get into the warehouse, makes off with the bottles of mysterious and important-looking fluid.

(Twelve trans-smoke 1×1 cones! Hooray! You may recall that when I built my sushi bar I didn’t have enough of those, so I had to use black ones for some of the soy sauce bottles…)