City/Town – Page 5 – Bill Ward's Brickpile

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.

2009 Advent Calendars

Like last year, LEGO came up with two advent calendars, only one of which was sold in the U.S. The 7687 City advent calendar was sold everywhere, but the 6299 Pirates calendar was only available in Europe. (If you’re not familiar with advent calendars, they basically consist of 24 different gifts, one to be opened on each day of Advent, the traditional Christian season that precedes Christmas, or in other words December 1-24. These days, it’s secularized – fine by me, since I’m not religious – but the name has stuck.)

Last year, LEGO accidentally shipped a few sets of that year’s specialty calendar, which had a Castle theme, to the U.S. Shop-At-Home warehouse, and since the fans were complaining so loudly about it not being available in this country they were convinced to make them available through a special mail-order setup. But we didn’t have any such luck this year with the Pirates calendar, so unless you had a friend in Europe willing to ship it to you, there was no way to get it.

Well, my friend Holger Matthes in Germany was willing to do this favor for me, and I was hoping to get it in time for December 1st so I could post each day’s set like I did last year (each of those words is a link to a different day’s calendar from last year; days 1-7 and 24 are shown, but I bet you can find the rest). But alas, the package took a long time getting here (not Holger’s fault; he shipped it as soon as I gave him the details – but DHL took its sweet time in delivering it. Next time I’ll pay extra for airmail/express, or just order sooner. Though hopefully LEGO will have learned its lesson and won’t require me to jump through such hoops…)

If you want to see more clever coverage of the Advent calendars than I can provide, check out Chris Doyle’s Reasonably Clever blog where he’s included each day’s calendar prizes into the BRiCK House web comic.

Anyway, I didn’t get the Pirates calendar until December 18th, so I put photos on Flickr of the first 19 days the next day and have updated it today with the rest. You can see the City and Pirates sets for each day in my 2009 Advent Calendars set (or view as a slideshow).

I was surprised to see that both calendars had the days in the same quasi-random order. It made it easy to build them side-by-side; once I found that day’s door in one calendar, the other calendar had the same number in the same position. It did seem to me that all the doors were printed upside-down; the flap of the box was in the way if you tried to open the doors with the printing facing right-side-up. Last year, the direction of the printing was opposite on the two boxes, if I recall correctly.

Little Australian Houses?

One of my pictures has been used by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on their Web site to illustrate a radio story about the relative merits of buying versus renting a home. You can see it on the ABC News homepage as a small thumbnail on the right hand side, and if you click the “Best of abc.net.au” link it takes you to a “best of” page where that story is featured with a larger version of the image at the top of the page. Here’s the photo they used (from their Web server):
Little houses via abc.net.au

My photos are published with a Creative Commons attribution license, so I’m not mad that they used the photo, but they (as far as I can tell) failed to credit the photo which I think is in pretty poor taste. (If you like the models, I have posted the LDraw instructions online.) Here’s the original photo, linked to its page on Flickr:

You can really see the blurriness created when they cropped it and re-saved the JPEG (probably with a high level of compression). Thanks to Stephen Calder, aka aussiechef67 for pointing it out via a comment on Flickr.

Micropolis Buildings

I built some Micropolis buildings according to the TwinLUG standard. I made four modules, which I named for what the residents of Micropolis would use them for: Live, Play, Shop, and Work. Take a look at the pictures on Flickr as a set or as a slideshow.

Desert Road Trip

Flickr user jedimasterwagner has made a great little desert diorama, featuring my Shasta Teardrop travel trailer, a Jeep by Mike Psiaki, and a cactus based on an idea that Flickr user brickpoor brought back from BrickWorld.

Found via Lego Diem. Looks like the diorama was created using LDraw and rendered in 3D. I think it came out quite good – and great work on the mosaic billboard!

Fleetwood Revolution LE 42K Motorhome

This high-end luxury motorhome allows you to travel in class! Features three slide-outs, including one that is almost the entire left side, a powerful diesel engine in back, two bathrooms, plentiful storage underneath, a well-appointed kitchen, and much more.

It is based on the Fleetwood Revolution LE 42K Motorhome but I should admit I took a lot of artistic license, especially with the artwork on the sides.

This is pretty much the diametric opposite from my last RV model, the Shasta Teardrop Travel Trailer that I made a couple of weeks ago. While that one was small and minimalistic (with only the most basic interior, and no removable roof) with classic styling from the 60’s, this one is modern and contains all the amenities you could wish for. However, neither model has 4 wheels, so both are eligible for the All But Four challenge on LUGNuts. It’s also eligible for a new Flickr group I created, LEGO RVing.

Hope you enjoy it, and please post comments here or on Flickr. If you want to see it in person, come to the BayLUG exhibit at MoAH in Palo Alto, CA – I’ll be bringing it there tomorrow and it will be there through January 11, 2009.

Click the photo above for the photoset on Flickr, or view it as a slideshow.

Shasta Teardrop Trailer featured on LAMLradio Podcast

I just wanted to say thanks to Jonathan Bender for selecting my Shasta Teardrop Travel Trailer as his “MOC of the Week” when he was interviewed on LAMLradio Episode 69. (If you just want to hear what they had to say about my trailer, skip to 39:02)

Of course, thanks to The Brothers Brick for featuring the trailer a week ago, as that’s where Jonathan saw it…

If you don’t listen to LAMLradio, I highly recommend it. Hosts James Wadsworth and Aaron Andrews (“DARKspawn”) feature interviews with movers and shakers of the LEGO scene, talk about LEGO news, and discuss a few key “MOCs of the week” in each episode, which come out about once a week.

Lately James has also been putting out video podcasts, called appropriately enough LAMLtv. I’ve done two of those as guest episodes, featuring footage and interviews from BrickCon in Seattle last October, and have plans to do a few more. I’ll post those here too, of course.

(In case you were wondering, “LAML” stands for “LEGO and more LEGO”)

Advent Calendars, Day 24 & Wrapup

Today is Christmas Eve, the final day of Advent. Though I don’t practice religion these days, I appreciate the tradition especially when it involves getting LEGO :-)

Anyway, today’s entry for City is a girl building a snowman; on the Castle side we have the famous Court Jester minifig that people have been so excited about. I put him to work helping with the snowman:

Over the course of the past 24 days, we’ve had a number of extra parts accumulating. LEGO always throws in a few extra items from a few parts which are easily lost. I guess they are worried about reducing the call volume to Customer Service. Anyway, over the span of the advent calendars these pieces have added up to quite a pile:

Finally, remember the Good Twin and Evil Twin? Well, I went through all the models from both calendars and sorted them out into good and evil factions. Here are the good guys first:

And the forces of evil ready to do battle with them:

The snowman, of course, is the king of the evil side, and today’s minifigs are his minions. Mwahahahaha.

Happy Holidays to everyone! Hope Santa brings you plenty of great new LEGO sets!

Advent Calendars, Day 23

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.

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.

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….