Building a brighter tomorrow with LEGO® bricks
The next Bay Area LEGO Users’ Group meeting will be April 15, 2007 at Museum of American Heritage. Please come by and see what people have to display, as well as buy/sell/trade.
Don’t know yet what I’ll be displaying, but I’m hoping to build some stuff before then. I’ll probably have stuff for sale too. At the moment, however, I’m on vacation in South Carolina (if you’re in the area and want to meet, let me know!), so I won’t be posting much LEGO stuff for the next week or so at least.
I keep building stuff and using it in BayLTC displays but not posting them online!
Here’s another example. This locomotive was built a few years ago, not long after I first got the Super Chief, which sadly has long been discontinued. Like the Super Chief, the top lifts off and it has a control cab with prime mover motor modeled inside. I also added a head-end unit.
Key features I’m particularly proud of are the cockpit windows (mounted on plate hinges) and cooling fans (made from 4×4 turntables, taken apart – the base is mounted on the top of the roof, and the top of the turntable is placed underneath to represent intakes). The nose is also mounted at a difficult angle; this is achieved by a combination of hinge elements.
The color scheme is based on the Caltrain commuter trains which run between San Francisco and San Jose, CA. The exterior detailing is minimal, and not terribly accurate (for one thing, the real thing has red and white stripes on the nose, not yellow and black), but at most of our train shows people have immediately recognized it as a Caltrain so I consider it a success.
This weekend, BayLTC is exhibiting at the Train Collectors’ Association Cal-Stewart Spring Meet at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara. 
We have a 25’x25′ train layout with four loops of trains and a monorail. The exhibit is open to the public today from 10am to 2pm.
I took some pictures of the layout this morning which you can view on Flickr (or view as a slideshow)[tags]bayltc,lego,tca[/tags]
I forgot my camera, but Bruce took pictures which you can see on his Brickshelf Gallery.
We used a theme of “winter sports” for this one, based on a snowscape built by club member Anne, with some skiers and snowboarders and trees contributed by various members. Since it was fairly low to the ground, we added a couple of snowboarders hanging in mid-air above the slope (suspended on string).
The display will be up for about six weeks at the LEGO store in Valley Fair Mall, Santa Clara, CA.[tags]lego,baylug[/tags]
It would appear that LEGO is working on a massively multiplayer online game! At least, according to this blog entry from kotaku.com, LEGO is working with NetDevil to produce a new online game where kids can interact using virtual LEGO bricks. And if you don’t believe the blogs, try checking out the official press release from NetDevil or LEGO official Web sites…[tag]lego,game,netdevil[/tag]
I know it was posted a while ago but I wanted to blog about this mainly so I could find it easily to copy some of these ideas shamelessly… Last August Janey “Red Brick” blogged about these amazing minifig-scaled furniture ideas which is really just a bunch of Brickshelf links to some amazing stuff.
Speaking of furniture, that’s part of the problem why I haven’t built anything in a while. The room where my LEGO collection is kept is unusable because it’s been co-opted as storage for all the clutter around the house. I need to do a purge and/or run to the storage locker so I can dig my LEGO out and get building again….[tags]lego,blog,janey,redbrick,furniture,brickshelf[/tags]
Didier Enjary of FreeLUG (French LEGO users group) has compiled a great guide to advanced LEGO construction techniques. It explains in great detail the geometry of LEGO bricks, and how to fit them together to achieve some great effects. The focus is mainly on SNOT (Studs Not On Top) construction, and how to achieve various offsets of fractional brick widths. There are some very inspiring ideas which can improve anyone’s LEGO skills.
You can access the document (it’s a PDF file to be downloaded) on the FreeLUG site and/or read the thread on LUGNET.[tags]lego,snot,lugnet,freelug[/tags]
Lately I’ve been getting into board games, card games, etc. And it got me thinking. LEGO would be a great medium for games.
I’m not talking about regular games that just happen to use LEGO as pieces… There’s Brikwars but I don’t think that’s really LEGO-specific enough. And there are various LEGO-produced games, such as chess and such, which are neat but not really innovative at all.
No, I’m thinking about a game where you have to build some structure out of LEGO while your opponent tries to stop you while building their own. I remember once I came across rules for such a game but don’t know what I did with it.
Does anyone know of any such games? If not, how about creating one?[tags]lego,games,boardgames,strategy[/tags]
Each year for the past couple of years BayLUG has put on an exhibit at the Museum of American History in Palo Alto, CA. 
This year was no exception. The exhibit ran from December 16 through January 14. I didn’t actively participate in this show, though, as I was busy with holiday madness and illness. But the show went on without me, and I managed to go there last Thursday, when the museum played host to a reception for the local Yale alumni club. While I was there I took some pictures using my new phone (I got a Treo 700P recently) and I just now posted them on Flickr.
You can click the photo to the right to view the photoset or see the pictures as a slide show.[tags]lego,baylug,bayltc,moah,trains,paloalto[/tags]
In BayLUG‘s recent exhibit at MoAH, Bruce Chamberlain set up a display of minifigs protesting to save the 9V trains line. Here’s a pic:
If you want your voice to be heard, visit the Save 9V Trains site and register your opinion![tags]lego,trains,9v,save 9v trains[/tags]