My Models – Page 19 – Bill Ward's Brickpile

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]

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).

Damaged in Transit

As you may recall, while we were back east for BrickFest I bought a bunch of LEGO and built two new models, the Scarlet Mayhem spaceship and Garden Gnome sculpture.Well it turns out I bought a lot of LEGO. Way too much in fact. So much that I had to buy a 5-piece luggage set (3 suitcases, a handbag, and a toiletries bag) and all 3 suitcases were basically packed full of LEGO.

The current air travel rules allow each person to have up to four bags: two pieces of checked luggage, a carryon, and a “personal item.” With the new bags full of LEGO, Holly and I were right at that limit. And all the bags were packed quite full.

As a result there really wasn’t any way to give my MOC’s adequate padding to keep them from being destroyed. I was able to put them in plastic bags so that the damaged bits would at least stay together. The photos you see here are the result. Although it looks really bad (and in fact, the gnome was even worse – I snapped the picture about halfway through putting him back together), it actually wasn’t very hard to rebuild them by consulting the photos I had taken, so I was able to rebuild both models in fairly short order. I plan to bring them both to the next BayLUG meeting (assuming I don’t go to Northwest BrickCon instead, which is still a possibility).[tags]lego[/tags]

Garden Gnome Sculpture

My first sculpture in over two years is the Garden Gnome. This enigmatic figure watches over your garden and makes sure everything is in order. Along with Scarlet Mayhem, this was built from my “east coast collection” during my trip for BrickFest. Detailed photos are available on Flickr, or check out the slide show.

I built the gnome using parts from 3 sets of the LEGO Special Edition tub 6092 which I bought at BrickFest. I bought those sets largely for the red tubs, which use the same lids and are exactly 2/3 the height of the blue tubs from the set that got me into LEGO sculpture, 3033, from a few years ago. Ah, I miss that set…

For more of my sculpture work, check the section of this site and the Sculpture collection on Flickr.

This sculpture, like all the ones I did before (except Maneki Neko) is done entirely with regular LEGO bricks. No SNOT, no unusual shapes, not even any plates. (Maneki Neko has plates in the Japanese coin and SNOT in the claws.) Should I go for more detail by using such parts or stick with basic bricks? Let me know (by posting a comment) what you think.

Update: Photos are now also on Brickshelf, and I posted about this on lugnet.build.sculpture.
[tags]lego,sculpture,garden,gnome,gardengnome[/tags]

Scarlet Mayhem

Studless, smooth, and sleek, this racer, known as “Scarlet Mayhem,” was the winner of the first annual Earth to Mars race, which tests a ship’s performance in atmosphere, interplanetary, and reentry situations. The two-man crew take turns flying the craft, similar to the Le Mans car race. Detailed photos are available on Flickr.

The scoops on the tops of the wings provide air for the engines when running inside the atmosphere in scramjet mode. It has a lot of SNOT details – the bottom of the fuselage is mounted studs-down, and covered in tiles and slopes so that no studs or undersides of bricks are showing. The wings are studs-out, made of bricks, and the only conventional part of the ship is the wingtips which do show their undersides. Because of the studs-down bottom, there are no studs inside on the floor for the minifigs to sit on (to add a studs-up floor would require the roof to be higher, ruining the lines, or removing too much interior space for the minifigs). As a result, the minifigs are sitting on 2×4 plate “sleds” which slide into the ship and sit loosely. The cockpit canopy is hinged on the sides.

This model was built mainly using parts from the Enzo Ferrari 1:17 set, borrowing parts from Prehistoric Power and Speedboat sets. Why such a limited source of parts? I’m on vacation in the east coast away from my LEGO collection, but I bought the above sets at the LEGO store during BrickFest 2006.

It’s a little strange to be building LEGO away from home, and with an unfamiliar and reduced palette. Still, I got a lot of great new parts which I look forward to combining with my collection at home when I return.

Update: I have also posted pictures of this model on Brickshelf.
Update: I also posted about this on Lugnet and Classic-Space.com.[tags]lego,space,snot[/tags]

Poetry Vignettes

My latest models were unveiled at BrickFest yesterday: vignettes illustrating poetry by Robert Frost and A. E. Housman.

These poetry vignettes are not just my work, however. For the first time I have collaborated with my wife Holly to create LEGO models. While I did almost all of the actual assembly, she had the basic idea, did most of the minifig work, and helped a lot with the design, especially with the “Yonder See the Morning Blink” model. I really enjoyed sharing my hobby with her and hope that we can do more projects like these together.

Click the photo or title to see a bigger picture of each vignette, and a link to the text of each poem:

“The Road Not Taken”
by Robert Frost

“Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”
by Robert Frost

“Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now”
by A. E. Housman

“Mending Wall”
by Robert Frost

“Good Creatures, Do You Love Your Lives”
by A. E. Housman

“To an Athlete Dying Young”
by A. E. Housman

“Yonder See the Morning Blink”
by A. E. Housman

Or, view all the photos in my photoset on flickr. New! Also available on Brickshelf.[tags]lego,poetry,vignette,vignettes,housman,frost,aehousman,robertfrost[/tags]

BayLUG Space Meeting June 18, 2006

On June 18, the Space contingent of the Bay Area LEGO Users Group had its first Space-only meeting.

We met on a Sunday evening at the Round Table Pizza parlor in Mountain View. They have a nice back room that you can reserve for free if you call ahead, which we’ve used for various members-only events in the past. Besides bringing our latest Space models to show off, we also had a contest and a parts draft.

My winning “top greeble” contest entry

The contest was for “best greeble” and there were two categories: top greeble and bottom greeble. But what is a greeble? When they were building the models for use in the Star Wars movies, the modelers used the term “greeble” for the little bits of detail used to break up the otherwise smooth skin of the spacecraft. Read more about it on Wikipedia. Members brought examples of greebles on both the top and the bottom of their models (or looking another way, studs-up vs. studs-down). I won in the “top greeble” category!

Parts laid out for drafting

The parts draft was an opportunity for us to leverage our buying power to get large numbers of interesting parts. A parts draft is where each person brings a particular LEGO set and then we sort the contents of the boxes into piles, and take turns drawing from the piles. We used Set 4881 “Robo Platoon” since it could be obtained for $5 at the local LEGO store (it sold out before the meeting was held though, so some members couldn’t get a copy), and had a lot of great parts. We limited it to 2 copies of the set per person, to keep things fair. We sorted the parts out into baggies and literally drew straws – Pizza Hut drinking straws cut to various lengths – to determine the order for selecting. Even though everyone got at least one unwanted bag (toward the end the choices were pretty limited), I think everyone was happy with what they got for their $5 (or $10 for those who brought two boxes).

The meeting date for our next Space meeting hasn’t been set yet, but it will probably be later in the summer. We did select a contest theme though – build a spaceship without using any grey (light grey or dark, old or new).[tags]lego,space,baylug,meeting,partsdraft,greeble,greebles,contest[/tags]

Lombard Street, San Francisco

Along with the TransAmerica Pyramid , this was built for the display that my LEGO club, the Bay Area LEGO Users’ Group, had at the LEGO store in Pleasanton, CA. In January 2006 we used “mini-scale San Francisco” as the theme for our display.

More pictures of the model can be found on Flickr and on Brickshelf (once moderated).[tags]lego,lombardstreet,sanfrancisco,mymodels,microscale[/tags]

Fish

These two fish were built as part of a display that my LEGO club, the Bay Area LEGO Users’ Group, maintains at the Stoneridge Mall LEGO store in Pleasanton, CA. On February 20, 2006 we installed an “aquarium” theme there, which lasted for about a month. Read more about the installation and see more pics.

More pictures of the model can be found on Flickr.

TransAmerica Pyramid

The TransAmerica Pyramid is one of the most distinctive structures in the city of San Francisco. In January 2006 my LEGO club, the Bay Area LEGO Users’ Group chose “mini-scale San Francisco” as the theme for our display at the LEGO store in Pleasanton, CA. I built this model, along with a scene of Lombard Street, for that display.

More pictures of the model can be found on Flickr and on Brickshelf (once moderated).[tags]lego,pyramid,sanfrancisco,mymodels,microscale,transamerica[/tags]