My Models – Page 11 – Bill Ward's Brickpile

Jumping the Shark

A couple of years ago I created this scene depicting the famous “Jumping the Shark” scene from the TV show “Happy Days.” Here, Richie Cunningham drives the boat pulling the Fonz on water skis as he leaps over a shark to prove his bravery. This is the origin of the phrase often used to describe the point where a TV series becomes lame.

This has been featured in a few of the Bay Area LEGO Train Club displays over the past couple of years, and I have included some of those photos in the photo set on Flickr for this model. To see the pictures, click the image or view a slideshow of the pictures.

Here’s the original video:

City Park

At train shows, we (the Bay Area LEGO Train Club) have developed a standard city block system, where our downtown area is divided up into blocks that are 2 by 3 32 x 32 baseplates in size (i.e., 96 x 64 studs). For some time now I’ve shown my Blackburn Hotel and its accompanying city block (but I have never done a proper photo shoot of those buildings either, I just realized) at various shows and conventions and you have probably seen that featured here a few times.

For Bricks by the Bay and the upcoming National Train Show in Sacramento, I’ve built a second city block. But instead of tall buildings, it just features a city park. Each of the six baseplates has its own feature:

Tree and picnic/grassy area
Playground with swingset, slide, merry-go-round, and carousel
Life size (for minifigs) chess set
Flower garden
Basketball court
Tennis court

In addition, there is a fountain in the center and various tile mosaics and other decorative aspects. The whole thing is surrounded by a wrought-iron fence with gates on each of the four sides.

I haven’t done a proper photo shoot of the park yet, but I did take detailed pictures of it at the most recent BayLUG meeting. I hope to take better pictures soon, but for now, take a look at these (click the image to view the set, or click here to view a slideshow)

Bulkhead Flatcar

This Railroad flatcar with bulkheads was inspired by the NMRA 2011 official HO gauge car for this July’s convention in Sacramento.

Here’s a picture of the prototype I based it on:

NMRA HO gauge bulkhead flat car

A bunch of us are planning to put together a large LEGO layout at the NMRA convention in Sacramento this July. If you want to join the effort, check out the planning wiki and sign up to participate.

Pink Fractal Tree

This is my first abstract LEGO sculpture. I was inspired by someone (sorry I don’t remember who it is right now) who brought several abstract art pieces to Bricks by the Bay last year made out of the dark pink 1×2 slopes, which were available at the LEGO store Pick-A-Brick wall. I always wanted to do the same and finally I got around to it, producing a series of small fractal models and eventually coming up with this monster.

I built this out of about two Pick-A-Brick cups’ worth of the slopes. It is what I call “lower-case F fractal” in that I don’t know if there’s any math behind it, but it does have self-similarity as I understand it. The basic element is 3 bricks stacked together with one going off to the side, and torqued as far as the slack in the parts will allow. Using that same angle (determined by the slack in the parts) I then built up 5, 10, 20, brick heights following the curve until it meets its neighbor.

This picture was taken on the final day of BayLUG‘s exhibit at the Museum of American Heritage in Palo Alto, CA (January 9, 2011) and is a part of a set of photos taken on the last day and during teardown.

Building instructions and buying my models

A while back I posted that I was considering how best to share building instructions for my creations. There were several comments on that post and also a few email exchanges I had with people over this topic, and I’ve also had a chance to discuss it in person with a few people at BrickCon in Seattle this past October. And what I’ve decided on is this:

I won’t give it away for free. Sorry if that’s disappointing, but although I am a big fan of open source software, the reason that works well is because the users can contribute back to the development of the software by adding features and fixing bugs, and submitting patches to the author. LEGO creations are fundamentally different from that, in that once I’ve created a design I’m really not interested in collaborating with other builders to change it. I might take some feedback and revise it based on that, but I’m not going to accept patches for my models. So the open source model doesn’t really suit my LEGO creations.
Similarly I am a fan of Creative Commons, but again the main benefit of that is the ability for people to incorporate my work (such as my photos, which are licensed with Creative Commons) into other works without having to jump through a lot of hoops to get approval. Some of my photos have been used by Web sites and even mainstream news sources because of this. But I don’t think that would translate into LEGO model designs.
I won’t use LEGO Digital Designer (LDD) because you give up too many of your rights when uploading the designs to LEGO’s site. It would be convenient to use Design By Me to create kits from my models, but then it would be LEGO profiting from it instead of me. Is that too selfish? I think if I’m going to go through the effort of creating instructions for a model, as opposed to just photographing it or even creating an LDraw file of it, I’d like to receive something for my efforts. (LDraw is the easy part, it’s making the instructions that’s harder – even though LPub does a lot of the work, there’s still a great deal of manual adjustment of the layout to get it to where I want it).
Selling kits of my models is something I’ve thought about a lot, and I may do it for one or two models, but the problem is obtaining the parts. It’s rare to find one BrickLink store that has all the parts for a model, so I’d have to order them from several stores – or deplete the parts in my collection, which again means going to BrickLink to replace them.
What I know I can do is sell PDF or printed copies of the instructions. To that end, I’m planning on setting up a store on Etsy.com and listing the instructions there in both ebook and printed format, and some kits for small and popular models I’ve designed.

So, watch this space for an announcement when I get my Etsy store up, and in the meantime let me know if there are any particular models of mine you’d like to get the instructions for. Prices for smaller models will be around $20. I’m not generally interested in doing custom work, but if the idea grabs my interest I may do it. But in general I would refer you to someone who does that for a living.

Big Yellow Taxi

I’ve built an iconic New York City yellow Checker taxi cab.

Throughout building this, the Joni Mitchell song has been running through my head…

Late last night I heard the screen door slam
And a big yellow taxi carried off my old man
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot

As usual, click the image above to see all the pictures, or view them as a slideshow.

Glacier National Park Bus

Glacier National Park is famous for its iconic old-fashioned tour buses with ten doors and an open roof. I’ve never been to the park, but I built the bus for BayLUG’s "National Parks" theme building contest at the September 2010 meeting, and displayed it at BrickCon 2010 in Seattle. I’ve made a few minor adjustments since then, but the original build was done in only two hours.

The Glacier Park Inc. Web site has the following to say about these famous red buses:

The White Motor Company between 1936 and 1938 built glacierâ€™s red-with-black trim vehicles. This fleet of Red Buses is considered the oldest intact fleet of passenger carrying vehicles anywhere. These 17 passenger convertible touring sedans are more than a mere means of transportation for locals and visitors – they are cherished, elegant icons of Glacier National Park.

Here’s a picture from their site of the real thing in action:

As always, click on my model to see the rest of the photos in Flickr or view them as a slideshow.

How best to share building instructions for my creations?

Every once in a while I get a request to share building instructions for my models. I am willing to do so, but haven’t quite figured out the best way. I was wondering if people might want to comment and make some suggestions?

Some possibilities for formats are are:

LDraw files
PDF of instructions generated using LDraw and LDpub
Printed instructions in black & white or color

The ugly side of the equation comes when I contemplate compensation.Â Do I sell them or just give them away?Â I think it depends on how much work I have to put into them.Â I won’t go through the trouble of creating printed instructions for free, but I might be willing to share the LDraw files for free (Creative Commons licensed).Â The question is, how much would people be willing to pay, and is that enough to justify the work it would take me to prepare nice looking instructions?

LEGO Nutcracker

My latest LEGO model, just in time for Christmas, is the Nutcracker, a classic Christmas icon. In fact, it was built on Christmas Eve!

Inspired by the ballet by Alexandre Dumas pÃ¨re (an adaptation of the story “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” by E. T. A. Hoffmann), set to music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and staged by Marius Petipa. My wife and I saw the San Francisco Ballet version of this last week, and I’ve been wanting to make a LEGO nutcracker ever since. I was going to make a big one, about two feet tall, but haven’t got around to it yet… in the meantime I really like the way this little guy came out.

The mechanism functions pretty well; by lifting his coattails his mouth opens, just like real wooden nutcrackers. Of course, being the size that he is, you can’t crack much of a nut with it, which is probably just as well since it would most likely fall apart in your hands if you tried – LEGO studs’ clutch power is no match for your average nut.

Click on any of the images for a bigger view, or go to the Flickr photo set (slideshow)

Merry Christmas!

Scrambler

This amusement park ride is known in various parts of the world as the Scrambler, Twist, Twister, Cyclone, Sizzler, Merry Mixer, Grasscutter, or Cha Cha. In my part of the world (California) I’ve always seen it called the Scrambler. Wikipedia has more information about this ride under its various guises.

I built this model for the 2009 Bay Area Maker Faire where it was a part of BayLUG‘s largest ever public exhibit.

The operating mechanism is similar to the real thing – a central axle drives the whole mechanism, and rubber tires attached to each arm’s driveshaft transfer that motion to the ends of each of the three main arms, where a 90 degree gear causes the 4 cars to spin around.

See all the photos and a video on flickr (slide show).