Bill Ward’s Brickpile

A local newspaper has a great story on their Web site about the BayLUG/BayLTC exhibit at the Museum of American Heritage in Palo Alto. The article comes with a gallery of photos and videos, and I’m pleased to report that three of the four videos show my models (City Park, Caltrain, and Scrambler). [Aside: I just noticed that the pages for those last two are out of date, and I never blogged about the Caltrain cars I've built... sorry I will update that soon.]

There are only three days left in the show: Fri-Sun, January 13-15. If you haven’t made it out there yet, best do so soon!

This weekend we (the Bay Area LEGO Users’ Group) set up our annual “Living LEGO-cy” show at the Museum of American Heritage in Palo Alto, CA.

The show is open to the public Fri, Sat, and Sun until January 15, 2012 (except holidays). Admission is $2. Come on by!

Click the photo to see all my pictures from the final day of setup and the Museum members’ party…

You can also view the pictures as a slideshow.

Earlier this month I was involved in the LEGO display at the National Model Railroad Association‘s (NMRA) National Train Show held this year in Sacramento, California as a part of their annual convention. Members of the Bay Area LEGO Train Club (BayLTC), Sacramento Brick Builders, and Puget Sound LEGO Train Club joined together to put a large display of LEGO trains and other models.

Click either photo to see my pictures from this event or view them all as a slide show.

My local LEGO club, the Bay Area LEGO Users’ Group, has been displaying at Maker Faire every year since it started in 2005. Maker Faire is an amazing event, full of all kinds of creativity, from knitting to robots to welding to music. A lot of the art cars and artistic displays that Burning Man is famous for can be seen at Maker Faire in a much more pleasant climate. Regardless of your hobby, it’s a hobbyist’s paradise. And if you’re ever looking for a new hobby, it’s the perfect place to find one.

We had just over 20 club members participating to some degree, at various points during the setup and event. We set up the tables and displays Friday afternoon and Saturday morning, and opened to the public at 10am Saturday. I have no idea how many thousands of people came through, but the crowds were nonstop all weekend. The show wrapped up at 6pm last night and we quickly tore down and packed up the display.

We had a 40′ by 50′ space set aside for our club to use, and we divided that up into four distinct areas.

In one corner we had a train/town layout, which is where I spent most of my time. We had a downtown area with buildings, cars, trucks, etc. I had two blocks, one featuring my Blackburn Hotel and other buildings, and the other with my City Park. We also had a suburb full of houses and smaller businesses, and a train yard for storing the trains that weren’t running. Inspired by the Log Cabin set, we had a little campground area featuring two of those cabins and one large one that I made out of three of that set. I also parked my RVs in that area, and we had a lake with an island full of bison/buffalo in the middle for reasons I don’t really understand, but they were cool buffalo. I called them the water buffalo. There was a large open space on the layout which we filled with creations built by kids in our MOC building area (see below).

Besides the town/train layout, we had a row of tables along one side with all sorts of other creations by our club members, including some of my sculpture pieces, Marcello’s Japanese Navy WWII ships, Charles’s spaceships, some Technic creations by Jeremy, and some of my assorted models including the big yacht and some of my 7-wide cars.

The other two corners of our space were devoted to a MOC building area and a Mindstorms demo area. In the MOC building area, we had bulk LEGO parts dumped out on the floor and kids of all ages were invited to build whatever they liked out of the parts. We displayed the parts on the train layout so that the kids could contribute to our display. The Mindstorms area featured live demonstrations of robots of various types run by Eva and Steve, who worked tirelessly all weekend showing the robots off to the public and teaching them about LEGO robots.

To see what it all looked like, click the photo below or click here for a slideshow of all the pictures.

We had our April meeting of the Bay Area LEGO Users’ Group (BayLUG) at the Museum of American Heritage in Palo Alto on April 16, 2011. Lots of people brought models to share and/or stuff to sell, and we had a special activity for the kids where they could build skyscraper towers out of LEGO bricks and then test how they fare on an earthquake simulator table. Click for the pics from the meeting:

Yesterday was the last day of the BayLUG/BayLTC show at the Museum of American Heritage in Palo Alto for another year. We had hundreds of people come through to admire the exhibit including a few friends of mine.

The show is called “Living LEGO-cy” and this was the 7th time we’ve had it. For the first 5 years it was free, but then in 2008-9 the crowds were totally beyond our ability to manage, and it taxed the museum’s and our ability to handle, without any benefit to either institution. So we started charging $2 per person last year, enabling BayLUG to provide a loan to support the startup of Bricks by the Bay’s first convention. This year we kept it the same, though BBTB no longer needs the financial support, and raised a tidy sum for both the museum and the club (who split the income 50/50).

Click the photo above to see all my pictures from the event, or you can view a slide show of the images. See also the opening weekend post I made last month.

As in previous years, we filled the room with LEGO. In the center was a 12′ by 25′ train layout, and all along the sides of the room we had various miscellaneous LEGO exhibits on all types of themes. A few of us had some space to sell LEGO and LEGO-related accessories – I got rid of a bunch of sorting containers I no longer use (tackle boxes and stackable containers) and some bags of parts that I didn’t need; others were selling whole sets and minifigs and other small items. We also used this as an opportunity to solicit for new club members, which we had several of, and to distribute flyers for Bricks by the Bay 2011, and lots of people said they would be there. If you missed out on this exhibit, a similar one will form a centerpiece for the Bricks by the Bay exhibit hall. Hope to see you there!

This past weekend was the opening for the annual “Living LEGO-cy” museum display by BayLUG (Bay Area LEGO Users’ Group) over the holiday season at the Museum of American Heritage in Palo Alto, CA. The show runs through January 9, 2010 and is open Fridays through Sundays except holidays.

Click the picture for all the photos or view them as a slide show.

The Bay Area LEGO Train Club (BayLTC) just got done with a train show. For the past few years we’ve been participating in train shows over Thanksgiving weekend in Pleasanton, at the Alameda County Fairgrounds, but this year the show was held in San Jose instead. We put together a large train layout as usual, but since several key members weren’t able to participate we had a little difficulty filling the space. Still, I think it was pretty successful over all.

Click the picture above or view it as a slideshow.

On October 30, BayLUG had its October 2010 meeting at the Museum of American Heritage. We had a "Halloween" theme contest at the meeting.

Click the image above to see the pictures or view them as a slideshow.

BayLUG had its September 2010 meeting on Saturday, September 18 at Johannes’s church in San Leandro, CA.  The contest theme was “National Parks” and I put together a model for it in just a couple of hours before leaving home for the meeting.  My model is a Glacier National Park tour bus.  I’ll post more about that with better pictures soon, but you can see it in the photos of the meeting.  Click the image to view the pictures or see them as a slideshow.