Bill Ward’s Brickpile

Every year LEGO comes out with an Advent calendar (or two) and most years they include some form of Santa Claus and his sleigh. But usually the sleigh is barely big enough to fit a minifig, much less a load of toys and goodies, and the “reindeer” is actually a single minifig-scale dog with no antlers or anything.

Now Vincent Pace saves the day. He’s come up with a great MOC of Santa, his sleigh, and a whole complement of reindeer – including Rudolph with a trans-red 1×1 round plate for a nose. He’s used white droid arms for antlers, and they’re all harnessed together to an excellent red and green sleigh complete with toys.

And best of all, it can be yours! He’s selling it on eBay with a starting price of about $60 (which is about what it costs to get the parts on Bricklink). There is a link to the auction on his site – use the above link or click the photo.

Some LEGO creators have been posting images recently in honor of Obama’s victory:

Thanks to the Brothers Brick for finding these.

Sorry about the political content, since this isn’t a political blog, but I feel this is a historic moment in American history that deserves to be commemorated, whatever your political views may be.

A coworker sent me this link:

What Google Engineers do for Fun: Computerized LEGO Art Project

LEGO mosaics are cool and impressive, but this seems to me more of a software feat than a LEGO one.  I do like the way it looks on the guy’s wall though.

Seen at BrickFair 2008, this LEGO “suitcase” shows just about all the colors you’ll ever see in LEGO. Model by Todd Webb, BrickFair’s organizer.

In Ted Ward’s pictures from Northwest BrickCon 2006 I came across a picture a while ago of a garden gnome, created by Bill Volbrecht, former LEGO Master Builder.

As far as I know, Ted Ward is no relation to me, and neither is Bill Volbrecht.

As to why this is interesting, I built my own garden gnome in 2006 as well – while I was in Fairfax VA for the Brickfest convention (it wasn’t at the convention; I built it from parts I bought there, in my hotel room afterward). I posted it here shortly after I built it in September 2006. Here’s mine for comparison:

.

As for comparing the two, well I think that he did a better job on the mouth and eyes, but then I was limiting myself (as I’ve done for almost all of my sculptures) to only basic bricks, not plates or slopes or round parts. However if I may be so bold, I like my hat better: it is asymmetrical. I also think the details on the belt are better on mine. But the clincher is that his is functional: I believe that the hands are designed to hold business cards. Mine are hidden behind his back because hands are too hard to model :)

Thomas Johnson has done it again. The creator of the LEGO knitting machine has a new masterpiece, a braiding machine built using LEGO Technic pieces which creates a three-stranded braid. You can see photos and a really cool video (nice music, too) of the machine in action.

I’d show you a thumbnail, but the Web site doesn’t seem to make that possible. Anyway, watch the video. It’s mesmerizing.

Technorati Tags: lego, braider, braiding, machine, technic

Another amazing creation from “Big Daddy” Nelson Yrizarry. He’s taken the 5×7 LEGO foliage pieces in white, and turned them into snowflake patterns! Happy holidays!

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while… I’ve been either sick or busy almost constantly since early September. I have some big stuff to post soon though!

One of the more impressive LEGO robots I’ve seen lately is Daniel Rojas’s Cable Car. He came to one of the BayLUG meetings recently and met some of us, and told us about the project, and when he finally posted his finished product he was kind enough to email us about it.

It’s a great model of a cable car, and a very clever robot too. Like the real deal, it has a grab-arm which goes below the track to hold on to a cable which pulls it. And it’s controlled by an RCX (Mindstorms). It even has a working emergency brake! Daniel even made a great YouTube video so we can see it in action:

If you liked that, check the rest of the pics on Daniel’s site.

I know it was posted a while ago but I wanted to blog about this mainly so I could find it easily to copy some of these ideas shamelessly… Last August Janey “Red Brick” blogged about these amazing minifig-scaled furniture ideas which is really just a bunch of Brickshelf links to some amazing stuff.

Speaking of furniture, that’s part of the problem why I haven’t built anything in a while. The room where my LEGO collection is kept is unusable because it’s been co-opted as storage for all the clutter around the house. I need to do a purge and/or run to the storage locker so I can dig my LEGO out and get building again….

Technorati Tags: lego, blog, janey, redbrick, furniture, brickshelf

Bruce, aka “Bricktales,” writer of one of my favorite LEGO blogs, VignetteBricks, has a new blog. It’s called MicroBricks and features all the latest and greatest microscale LEGO creations being made today. Here are some examples of the models featured there:

Check it out today!

(via Brothers Brick).

Technorati Tags: lego, blogs, blogging, microscale