Bill – Page 83 – Bill Ward's Brickpile

Lunar Mobile Lounge

My newest Space creation is the Lunar Mobile Lounge which has actually been at several BayLUG meetings, even though I never posted about it here.

The concept is based on the “mobile lounges” at Dulles (Washington, D.C.) International Airport, which ferry passengers from one terminal to another. However in this case, they ferry people to their waiting spacecraft which landed nearby. Since most spacecraft that people build out of LEGO don’t have wheels, it would be hard for them to dock to the moonbase – it would require some very high-precision flying to land right at a moonbase connector! Therefore I felt there was a need to be able to carry people to and from spacecraft.

Since the spacecraft might have doors that vary in height, I used a scissor lift mechanism to allow this vehicle to raise and lower the passenger compartment – something the Dulles lounges also can do – to match whatever height is needed. You might remember I asked back in March about ways to do this – I ended up using a worm gear to drive, through a short geartrain, a spool that would wind up a string that was attached to the moving leg of the scissor lift.

The vehicle is equipped with an airlock which includes the moonbase connector. The airlock has two doors to the outside – the moonbase connector and a door with stairs leading to the ground (when the vehicle is lowered all the way, that is). There is one interior door, a sliding door which connects the passenger area with the airlock. On the roof you can see the plumbing for the airlock mechanism – hoses and compressors and a big tank for air which are used to alternately drain and fill the air in the airlock and passenger areas. On the underside of the roof are the vents for taking air in and out of these areas.

Click the photo above to see more, or click to look on Flickr (slideshow) or on Brickshelf (pending moderation).[tags]lego,space,moonbase[/tags]

San Ladrillo Suburban Train Station

For the past year or so, the train station on the Bay Area LEGO Train Club layouts at train shows and museums has been my San Ladrillo Suburban Train Station.

This is a modern suburban train station, with one platform and two tracks. Passengers boarding trains on the outer track wait on the main platform, and after their train arrives they cross the near track to the yellow boarding platform. Of course, this means no trains can pass through the inner track while this is happening! This is modeled after the way many stations on the Caltrain line are designed (but for safety and scheduling reasons, they are moving to a two-platform design on many of the stations).

The feature which started this model is the tile mosaic floor in the waiting area. I got the idea while riding Caltrain. When we were stopped at the Redwood City station I noticed the pattern in the concrete waiting platform of a grid of squares surrounded by long strips. Theirs wasn’t multicolored, but then theirs wasn’t built from LEGO either. :-) The station building was not based on anything from real life, though. I tried to use an archetypal station design. Note also the ticket vending machines on the station wall – tickets must be purchased before boarding!

Click the photo above to see more, or click to look on Flickr (slideshow) or on Brickshelf (pending moderation).[tags]lego,trains,town,trainstation,sanladrillo[/tags]

BayLUG Meeting, October 8 2006

On Sunday I attended a meeting of the Bay Area LEGO Users’ Group at the Museum of American Heritage in Palo Alto.

The theme of the building contest for this meeting was “Harvest” and I created a vignette featuring the Grim Reaper (with a Halloween tie-in). It came in tied for first place!! I received a small Star Wars microscale Imperial Shuttle set as a prize. I’ll blog about that vignette when we get closer to Halloween…

There was also plenty of shameless commerce going on. I picked up a bunch of useful parts from Uncle Dan’s smorgasbord, and a bunch of minifigs from Mark Benz.

Besides my contest entry, I also displayed my DC-3 and moonbase “mobile lounge” – both of which are also in the “to be blogged about” category – and my Scarlet Mayhem spaceship.

Click the photo above to see more, or click to look on Flickr (slideshow) or on Brickshelf (pending moderation).[tags]lego,baylug,moah[/tags]

Online Pick A Brick At Last!

Ever since LEGO started offering bulk parts online through the Shop-At-Home service, fans have been hoping they would come out with an online Pick-A-Brick where we could specify a quantity and color of brick to order. They’ve finally done it! The new LEGO.com Factory Pick A Brick service allows you to select bricks by type or color and enter the quantity that you want. They have all the same parts that you can use in the LEGO Digital Designer program.

The prices are quite reasonable too, for some things at least. For example dark-red 1×2 bricks are 10 cents each, which is the same as what you would pay on BrickLink. And 9V track is $1.50 for a piece of straight or curved track – comparing that with 8 pieces for $12.99 at the LEGO store or in the conventional LEGO online shop, you save $0.99 by ordering it from Pick A Brick!

The user interface is quite good, apparently using AJAX technology. You can even get close-ups of the parts and rotate them around to view them from different angles.

I don’t know if this is only available in the US (I suspect it may be) or in other countries. So please post a comment and let me know whether it works in your country if you’re outside the US.

Via Jonathan Lopes on LUGNET.[tags]lego,legofactory,shopathome,pickabrick,bricklink,news[/tags]

Micro Moonbase Monorail

At long last, here is the blog entry about my micro moonbase monorail. Last January, I got together with other members of BayLUG to install a “microscale space” display at the Valley Fair Mall LEGO store. I posted pictures and a description of that on my blog back then, but I always meant to post details about my model that was featured in the display. So here they are, eight months later – sorry!

Here we see two buildings connected by a monorail. At the right is a sort of office building which has an opening for the monorail to enter the building, inspired by the way they do at Disneyland (or is it WDW) where the monorail goes into the hotel (or at least, I think it did when I was a kid – does it still?). At the other end is a standalone station with a micro moonbase connection. In both cases, the monorail fits into the building closely enough that you can imagine it is an airtight connection (something that matters a lot on an airless moon…).

For the track I am using the straight 16-stud long track of the type originally produced for the 4.5V and 12V trains from long ago, but which has lately been available at the LEGO store Pick-A-Brick (in New Grey, natch). I designed a monorail car that fits nicely on the track. The only problem with the design is it would never be able to take any turns, so it’s a good thing I only have straight track of that type! :-)

Click the photo above to see more, or click to look on Flickr (slideshow) or on Brickshelf (pending moderation).

Dresdner Frauenkirche by Holger Matthes

Holger “HoMa” Matthes raises the bar yet again.

This is a model of the Dresdner Frauenkirche (or “Church of Our Lady in Dresden” as you might say it in English), a Lutheran church in Dresden which was bombed out during World War II. It was left in ruins for decades and recently rebuilt to match the original. The parts modeled in dark grey represent the ruins that were incorporated into the new building; the tan parts are the new parts that were added to restore the church. The model is 1.45m or 4’9″ tall!

He posted about this on LUGNET two weeks ago so it isn’t exactly news but I’ve been meaning to blog about it for a while and am only now getting around to it.

Apparently, LEGO’s master builders had made a model of the church before, which was on display in a department store as part of a fundraiser to pay for the reconstruction. The one from LEGO was about twice as tall, but I think HoMa’s is at least as good. For pics of that model and more info see this sub-thread from LUGNET.

I have a personal connection here: I visited HoMa and a few of his friends during my trip to Germany in 2001. I was impressed with his talent then, but he’s really excelled in the years since! The detail work on this model is just exquisite.

So if you’ve seen this already, click the pic and take a closer look. It’s impressive enough to deserve a second glance. And if you haven’t, you’re in for a treat.

No NWBrickCon for Me

It’s official, I’m not going to Northwest BrickCon. Having just gone to BrickFest a month ago I really can’t justify another trip right now, and besides BayLUG is having a meeting that weekend.

I was really hoping to go to NWBC to meet some of the folks who weren’t able to come to BF. I met a lot of west coast LEGO folks at BricksWest 2003, but haven’t seen any of them since, except for a few who made it to BF this year. Hopefully next year, NWBC and BF won’t be so close together!

I am still hoping to make it to BrickSouth next spring in Atlanta. I met a few of the Georgia classic space guys at BF and am looking forward to that event. Hopefully I can build some kind of impressive spacecraft to show there.

Brothers Brick: “Have the Internet and Blogging Improved LEGO Creativity?”

Via The Brothers Brick:

“Alan Lopuszynski over at Burbanked linked to Linus’ recent post about robbed’s Terminator head and asks an interesting question I’d like to put in front of TBB readers:

Impressive? Absolutely. Yet it begs the question: were people this creative before the Internet offered an outlet with which to showcase their efforts? Because in our youth, we were lucky to construct a rocket car out of Legos that actually looked like it was capable of rolling down the upstairs hallway. We have to wonder, had we the benefit of the self-affirming effects of a blog and complimentary comments from people all over the world, whether things might have turned out quite differently in life.

So, dear readers, what do you think?”

My response:

I awoke from my last (in the sense of most recent, and hopefully in the sense of ultimate) Dark Age when my brother in law pointed me to Eric Harshbarger’s site, when it was featured on Slashdot for the Lego Desk. I looked at his works and thought “I could do that” and went out and bought a bunch of 3033 tubs (RIP) and built my Pokemon sculptures. I then found LUGNET and my local LUG and haven’t looked back since.

The thing that’s kept me from having another Dark Age is the interaction with other AFOL’s. Whether it be a LUG meeting, train show, or just posting pictures online, the fact that I’m not all on my own has made it possible to maintain momentum. And that wouldn’t happen without the Internet.

As for blogs though, I think the jury’s still out. I don’t think there’s enough of us blogging to really have an effect yet. I think that LUGNET (though not nearly as much as in the past), classic-space.com, classic-castle.com sites, etc. have more impact than blogs at the moment.

So the question I would add is, will LEGO blogs take over from bulletin boards as the venue for the LEGO discussion? I think they already have in a few small areas, such as vignettes, but overall it remains to be seen. What do you think?

BayLTC @ Great Train Expo, San Jose

This past weekend, Bay Area LEGO Train Club (BayLTC) took part in the Great Train Expo in San Jose, CA.

We set up the layout Friday afternoon/evening. I had to teach a Perl class Saturday, but Sunday I was there all day to help man the layout. It’s always a treat to see the looks on kids (of all ages) as they look over the layout. We also met a few people who might become members of the club, which is another plus. At any rate, I handed out more than a few membership application forms and suggested to a number of people that they might want to come to the meeting on October 8 in Palo Alto.

My contributions to this layout were mostly in the downtown area: the Blackburn Hotel, Luigi’s Italian restaurant, an office building, and a few houses. I also supplied a few trucks which could be seen in the downtown area and my RoadRailer Trailers which were parked in the train yard.

View all the pictures on Flickr (slideshow) or on Brickshelf.[tags]lego,bayltc,baylug,trainshow,sanjose,greattrainexpo[/tags]