Bill Ward’s Brickpile

You have two weekends left to enjoy the display! The exhibit is open Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays from 11am to 4pm. Hope to see you there! If you plan to stop by, let me know in advance and I’ll see if I can meet you there. I’m scheduled to help staff the layout on Saturday January 5, but may make other random appearances as my schedule and whim suit me.

My models on this layout include all the buildings in the city block containing the “Blackburn Hotel” and the coast guard base on the “water” table.

Click the big picture to go to the set page on Flickr, or click on an individual photo. Or, you can view a slideshow of the photos.

On Sunday we had our ninth anniversary meeting of the Bay Area LEGO Users’ Group. Here are the pictures I took during the meeting. I used my cell phone camera, so sorry about the quality. I used it because I forgot to bring my digital camera. The ironic thing is I discovered I had my digital camera in my bag after all, but not until after several people had gone home… See the individual photo pages on Flickr for captions and more information.

Click the big picture to go to the set page on Flickr, or click on an individual photo. Or, you can view a slideshow of the photos.

The meeting was primarily supposed to be about LEGO Space, and most of the members brought space-related models to show. Charles and Adrienne stole the show with a huge arrangement of microscale spaceships and a dramatic centerpiece: a giant red and white Bellville/space/castle mashup, which converted at the touch of a hand from a dramatic castle to a viciously armed spaceship! Other models featured were Jim’s version of the pneum-ADD-ic machine (design by Kevin Clague) from the book LEGO Mindstorms Masterpieces, Jeremy’s Mindstorms and Technic models, Kevin’s Star Wars base (on the ice planet Hoth, from The Empire Strikes Back), John’s medieval half-church, a desert train diorama by CJ, and a miniature downtown by yours truly.

We have talked about having more meetings there, perhaps with a bit more promotion, either later this year or early next year. Stay tuned!

Click the big picture to go to the set page on Flickr, or click on an individual photo. Or, you can view a slideshow of the photos.

Members of BayLUG spent most of the weekend of July 20 and 21 helping out with this project. A Master Builder from LEGO, Stephen Gerling, was on hand to construct the giant LEGO sculpture of Yoda from Star Wars. It was based on a smaller model built almost entirely out of 2×4 bricks in brown, tan, and sand green colors.

To build the giant sculpture, kids were invited to come and construct giant LEGO bricks. Each brick was 8×16x4, or exactly 4x in each dimension the size of a standard 2×4 brick. Lots of 2×4 and 2×8 bricks in each of the three colors were on hand, and laminated instruction cards were set out for the kids to follow. We ended up with many many bins full of the giant bricks, which were used to construct the Yoda sculpture. In fact we had plenty of bricks left over, so at the end we took the instructions away and just let the kids build whatever they wanted.

The event was a lot of fun. We didn’t get paid, but we got some very special deals on bricks from the store to compensate for our time :-)

Click the big picture to go to the set page on Flickr, or click on an individual photo. Or, you can view a slideshow of the photos.