Bill Ward’s Brickpile

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.

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….

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…)

We’re getting down to the wire here folks. Today we get more accessories, but tenuous connection if any to previous entries…

For Castle, we get a really nice table and chair with gold metallic bowl and goblet (plus extra goblet and brown cylinders). So I guess our maiden from a few days ago is an innkeeper after all. Though of course the innkeeper in Stormwind is a blonde.

On the City side, we get a really nice pallet jack. Our train worker from yesterday is supposed to use it, I guess, so I guess he uses it to load cargo onto boxcars?

Today we get a bearded railway maintenance worker for the City calendar, and a bowl of produce for Castle.

Neither is particularly remarkable, though the scale on the fruit & veggies is a bit out of whack with minifigs. No surprise, as they were originally made for Belville. But on the City side we get new minifigures two days in a row! That’s unusual for an advent calendar; usually they’re about every third day.

As for fitting these into any kind of coherent story, I could say that the produce is for sale by a food vendor, so clearly yesterday’s minifig was selling food in Stormwind, but the only kind of apples I’ve ever seen in WoW are red and I’ve never seen a carrot there, so that is tenuous at best.

This cargo trailer is both a railcar and a trailer for a truck. The rail wheelsets are removable, and the road wheels are then available to be towed down the road. I built this many years ago and it’s been on numerous BayLTC train layouts, but I never put pictures online until now.

I first learned about these interesting hybrid vehicles on the PBS television show Tracks Ahead. They are a real thing made by Wabash National. Each trailer has permanently-attached road wheels, and can have railroad wheelsets attached for use in a train. The trailers are hitched to each other, with the wheelset mounted on the rear of the trailer, and a special wheelset is attached to the front one.

See the Flickr photoset for detailed pictures from various angles, or click for a slideshow.

By the way, when I posted my Gondola car, I said that was my first train car MOC. Technically I guess the RoadRailers are, but the Gondola is more of a “train car” in the traditional sense, whereas the RoadRailers are more road trailers that can be carried as a part of a train in my mind.

Today both calendars bring new minifigs. In the Castle calendar, we have a female NPC (non-player character), probably an enchanting vendor, with broom and a rat. I wish it had been a cat instead of a rat, so I could say it was the Crazy Cat Lady from Elwynn Forest. On the City side, we have a suspect for the interrogation chair of yesterday. Will tomorrow bring a waterboard?

My latest vehicle MOC is a camping trailer, based on the 1960′s Shasta travel trailer. Click the image to view the set on Flickr, or check out the slideshow.

I built it for the campground scene that Loren built for BayLUG’s exhibit at the Museum of American History in Palo Alto. The display will be open to the public through January 11, 2009, on Fridays through Sundays. If you’re in the local area, come on and check it out one of these weekends.

I had made two RV’s before this, a Class C motorhome and a “toy hauler” fifth wheel trailer. But since I didn’t think Loren’s campground would work with just two campsites filled, I got inspired to make another. I built it to be compatible with the “Range Rover” from the new 7635 Horse Trailer set, partly because I didn’t want to also have to build a tow vehicle, and partly because I really like the look of that car.

As for the trailer design, I wanted to build something iconic, and thought about doing an Airstream but the curves were too complex. I thought of the “teardrop” trailers, since they have flat straight sides. I did some image searches online and found a few images of the Shasta trailer, and decided to build that:

Today the Castle calendar yielded up a Scrying Orb, while the City calendar provided some sort of interrogation chair for the missing camera-wielding policeman from yesterday’s set:

I guess yesterday’s model represented the Alchemy profession rather than Cooking, since today’s model appears to represent an alchemy supplies shop:

On the City calendar, we are supposed to get a photographer minifig, but I got a mountain climber:

Dark green legs FTW!

Alert readers will recall that I had a mistake in the Day 2 City calendar as well. I wonder if anyone else is finding these errors?