Great Train Expo, Pleasanton, November 2006

I spent much of Thanksgiving weekend at the Great Train Expo in Pleasanton, CA, at the BayLTC layout.BayLTC Pleasanton train show layout Click the photo to see the rest of my pics on Flickr, or check out the slideshow.

As usual, my primary contribution was in the downtown area, where I lined both sides of one street (mostly) with my models, including the Blackburn Hotel and Luigi’s Italian restaurant. I didn’t build anything new for this show, as I really haven’t had the time to build lately and my LEGO work space is currently a big, big mess. Hopefully I can get that cleaned up soon and get back to work![tags]lego,trains,trainshow,pleasanton[/tags]

LEGO At Work

I brought in some LEGO models to show off in my office at Oracle.Me with LEGO Click the image to view the photoset on Flickr or view a slideshow.

On display is my DC-3 and some office buildings which were featured in the BayLUG "downtown" store window display at the LEGO store recently.

My coworkers have enjoyed the display a lot. All the comments I have had have been positive. I’m surprised to see that most of them think that the models are from kits, rather than my own design, and once I explain that they are generally very impressed.

My plan is to periodically rotate the display, most likely in sync with the BayLUG show schedule. Have you ever brought LEGO to work? What was your coworkers’ reaction?
[tags]lego,office,atwork[/tags]

BrickFest PDX 2007

I’m very excited by the recent announcement that BrickFest PDX 2007 will be held next spring (March 30 – April 1) in Portland, OR. I missed the last one (in 2004) and after attending the big BrickFest in Washington, D.C. I’m very excited about all things BrickFest. I’m definitely planning to go, and hoping some of the other BayLUG members will take part as well. It’s unlikely we’d do anything as organized as schlep an entire train layout up there the way we did for the BricksWest 2003 convention, but hopefully we can make our presence felt in some way…

Mark your calendars now! Will I see you there?

Track Layout Geometry

Three years ago (on November 21, 2003) I wrote a page on my old site about
Track Layout Geometry showing some of the interesting things you can do with LEGO train track, for example, this method for running track on the 22.5° diagonal:

diagonal-22-turn

I was browsing my favorite blogs today and noticed that the page got mentioned on Mike Walsh’s blog (link removed, as his site has apparently been compromised). That prompted me to take another look at it, and I decided it really would be better to put it here on the Brickpile site. So I moved that page to this site, and changed the page on the old site to redirect to it with a 5-second delay using JavaScript. Thanks for the link Mike (and sorry for changing it out from under you)!

Trick or Treat

In honor of Hallowe’en I present this vignette.
Trick or Treat

This was actually first mentioned in an earlier blog entry about the October 2006 BayLUG meeting. I entered it into the club building contest which had a theme of “harvest.” Get it? Harvest of souls? I know, it’s macabre and tasteless. Sorry, but my mind just works that way sometimes.

Anyway, it features two kids innocently trick-or-treating. There’s a girl dressed as a doctor and a boy dressed as a policeman. But no medical skills or law enforcement training can stop the Grim Reaper!!

View all the pics by clicking the above image, or click to view the photos on Flickr (slideshow) or on Brickshelf.
[tags]lego,vignette,halloween,death,grimreaper,trickortreat,house[/tags]

What kind of car should LEGO make?

Found on the Classic-Space.com LEGO Forums:

Apparently the LEGO company is thinking about making a new set which would be a model of a car. Not just any car though – one chosen by the LEGO fan community!! That’s right, we get to nominate any year/make/model of car that we might want to see rendered in the brick. What would you pick? Comment here or post in the original thread. (If you comment here I’ll forward your choices on…) The LEGO Ambassadors will collate the “votes” and LEGO will hopefully release a set of the most popular choice.

The rules? he car must be from the past 30 years, and well known in the US and the UK.

What’s my choice? I have to go with the VW Bug. Or maybe a Hummer. Maybe a VW microbus? A Corvette? 1965 Ford Mustang! No wait, too old.

This may take some thought. For now, I’ll stick with the Bug (they were still making them in the late ’70’s so it barely squeaks in).

And of course, whatever they don’t pick would still be good fodder for us to try to make, just for the challenge…

United Air Lines DC-3

When my father left the Navy and joined United Air Lines in the late 1950’s, he flew this plane, the DC-3.
DC-3

Like my Lunar Mobile Lounge, this has been at several BayLUG meetings, and now I am finally posting about it here.

Also like that model, it is motorized. There are two motors, located in the fuselage: one which powers the propellers and the other which makes the landing gear go up and down. There is a battery box in the fuselage that powers the propellers, and a wire coming out of the entry door leading to a battery box that controls the landing gear. In both cases, a Technic axle passes through the fuselage and the base of each wing. For the props, there are bevel gears in each engine which drive the propshafts. For the landing gear, the axle is mounted directly to the mechanism. A roof panel is removable to view the mechanism inside. Here’s a video I made to illustrate how it works (it’s also available as a QuickTime movie on Brickshelf):

There are other parts that move as well: the ailerons, elevators, and rudder are all freely hinged. Oh, and the wheels rotate :-) The wings and vertical tail can be removed easily for storage and transportation.

The fuselage is designed using half-stud offsets to achieve the desired shape. This means the walls are very fragile as they cannot be properly interconnected.

On the leading edge of each wing are “de-icing boots” which are made of rubber in the real plane. These are modeled using a curved brick that I got at LEGOLAND California in their “build it and buy it” area in 2003. I don’t know if they were ever part of an official LEGO set, but I never saw them anywhere else. It’s the same shape as the trans-light-blue spotlights in the Soccer sets. These “boots” are attached at an angle using plate hinges and plates, and have half-stud offsets to follow the desired wing angle.

Overall this was an interesting experiment in half-stud offsets and integrating a Technic mechanism into a realistic looking model. I learned a lot making this and hope you enjoy it.

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

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.Lunar Mobile Lounge

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]