Tag: lego

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.

Photographer FAIL

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.

Advent 22

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.

BayLUG at MoAH

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:

Advent Calendars, Day 21

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

Advent 21

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.)

Castle 21

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.

City 21

(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…)

Advent Calendars, Day 20

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

Advent 20

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?

Advent Calendars, Day 19

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

Advent 19

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.

LEGO Cruise Ship Contest

There are LEGO building contests organized by LEGO hobbyists all the time, but this may be the first time a company (other than LEGO itself) is soliciting entries in a contest. STX Europe, a shipyard that builds some of the world’s largest cruise ships, is sponsoring a building contest using LEGO Digital Designer.

Oasis

The winner of the highly challenging Innovative series will fly to Miami, and supervise his/her model being constructed in the Miami Seatrade Cruise Shipping event March 16-19, 2009. The winner of the Oasis series will be rewarded with an Oasis of the Seas engraved Apple iPod music player, as well as three models of his/her own Oasis LEGO design in a gift pack. The winner model of the Oasis series will be used as a corporate gift by STX Europe.

I am sure there will be some very impressive entries, even though personally I’m not a fan of the LDD software.

Via BrickJournal blog.

RoadRailer Trailer

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.

Train car Road trailer

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.

Advent Calendars, Day 18

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?

Advent 18

Shasta Teardrop Travel Trailer

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.

Shasta travel trailer

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:

Daisy Tin can tourist Shasta Bay