Tag: BayLUG

BayLTC at TCA 2012

The Bay Area LEGO Train Club displayed a train layout at the Train Collectors’ Association Cal-Stewart Spring Meet, in Santa Clara, California, on March 2-4, 2012.

This is one of our favorite events to display at, as they have a fairly low stress environment and it is in a very nice facility. We set up our exhibit on Friday afternoon, March 2, and finished setup Saturday morning. On Saturday, however, the show was only open to members of the TCA who were there for the Meet, so the crowd levels were low-stress. Sunday was busier, as it was open to the public from 10am-2pm. In past years, the attendance for the public day at this event has been fairly light, and we haven’t bothered putting up our “sneeze guards” (Plexiglass barriers that keep the little kids from reaching into the layout), but this year we quickly realized they had done a much better job promoting it, and we had to scramble to get the sneeze guards up before too many fingers found their way into places they shouldn’t (or worse yet, took things they shouldn’t … you know how grabby little kids can be around toys). Once we had them up, the crowd lightened up again, but we were still glad we did it.

This event was held at the Santa Clara Convention Center, where we will be holding Bricks by the Bay in two weeks. While we were there, I had a chance to meet with our representative from the Convention Center and tour the facilities we will be using along with some of the convention volunteers who were also participating in the layout. We finalized the BBTB event schedule and locations where all the activities will be held.

This year the layout was a rather unusual shape for us. Usually we make a big ring of tables, and Bruce brings a gate that carries two tracks across it, so we can have two loops of track circling the entire layout. But Bruce wasn’t able to attend so we tried a new design, making a large “C” shape instead, with the two loops of track doubling back at each end, making a total of four tracks around the layout. It worked quite well, but it presented us with a new esthetic challenge, as there was now a stretch with four parallel tracks and no structures. When I saw that Friday night, I decided we needed a signal gantry, so that night I whipped one up and I am quite happy how it came out.

Take a look at the pictures from the show. Click the image below, or view all the photos as a slideshow.

BayLTC at TCA 2012

February 2012 BayLUG Meeting

Last Saturday was the February 2012 meeting of BayLUG (Bay Area LEGO Users Group) at the Museum of American Heritage in Palo Alto.

I wasn’t able to stay for the whole meeting, but I did bring a couple of things I’d been working on – a gas station and the head of Kermit the Frog. I entered the latter in our contest, whose theme was “Movies,” and won the adult category! There were lots of members with minifigs, parts, and sets for sale, and a few people bringing their latest projects. For the kids, there was an activity where they could build things to make up a town layout. And of course our vendor Angel was there with his bulk LEGO which was as popular as always.

You can see photos of the meeting on my Flickr account.

BayLUG January 2012 Meeting @ Dave Porter’s

Every January for the past several years, BayLUG has had a meeting at the lovely home of member Dave Porter who has a huge personal layout on display. People bring their latest creations to show, and stuff to sell, and we have our annual first meeting of the year. This year we had elections for new club officers. Click the image for the full set of photos, or view them as a slideshow

I brought my 14 Friends sets that I had built for the “Fortnight of Friends” series to display, and people of all ages really enjoyed looking at the new parts and colors in the sets. The animals were particularly popular among the kids … in fact one of the little girls who apparently had not yet learned the meaning of private property had wandered off with the bunny, both kittens, and the hedgehog! When I noticed they were missing I started asking around and finally this little girl was answering very cagily that she thought she had seen them somewhere in Dave’s layout upstairs… I left the room along with her parents and a few minutes later she came back, having “found” them. It was all rather cute once I had resolved the mystery. But my stuff had been handled so much I felt no choice but to wash all the parts when I got them home. They’re drying as I write this, and I look forward to finding uses for all the new parts and colors…

By the way I have a huge backlog of parts to sort. Anyone want to come over and help me work through it?

Wrapping up the Living LEGO-cy Show

The last day of BayLUG‘s annual “Living LEGO-cy” show and teardown took place on Sunday, January 15th. My pictures are available online. This is an event we do every year at the Museum of American Heritage in Palo Alto, CA, as a fundraiser for the club and for the museum. This year we had excellent attendance, with a peak of 841 people coming through on the 30th, which was the most people we’ve had in one day since we started keeping track (and charging $2 admission).

Here’s a group photo of club members taken during teardown. Click the photo to see the rest of the images, or view them as a slideshow.

Group Photo

Our next event is the Train Collectors Association Cal-Stewart Spring convention, open to the public on Sunday March 4th, from 10:00am-2pm. It’s a toy train show and one of our favorite events of the year. Two weeks after that is the Bricks by the Bay 2012 convention – the convention runs Friday through Sunday, March 16-18, and is open to the public on Sunday the 18th.

Nice article about BayLUG museum show

A local newspaper has a great story on their Web site about the BayLUG/BayLTC exhibit at the Museum of American Heritage in Palo Alto. The article comes with a gallery of photos and videos, and I’m pleased to report that three of the four videos show my models (City Park, Caltrain, and Scrambler). [Aside: I just noticed that the pages for those last two are out of date, and I never blogged about the Caltrain cars I’ve built… sorry I will update that soon.]

There are only three days left in the show: Fri-Sun, January 13-15. If you haven’t made it out there yet, best do so soon!

Maker Faire 2011

My local LEGO club, the Bay Area LEGO Users’ Group, has been displaying at Maker Faire every year since it started in 2005. Maker Faire is an amazing event, full of all kinds of creativity, from knitting to robots to welding to music. A lot of the art cars and artistic displays that Burning Man is famous for can be seen at Maker Faire in a much more pleasant climate. Regardless of your hobby, it’s a hobbyist’s paradise. And if you’re ever looking for a new hobby, it’s the perfect place to find one.

We had just over 20 club members participating to some degree, at various points during the setup and event. We set up the tables and displays Friday afternoon and Saturday morning, and opened to the public at 10am Saturday. I have no idea how many thousands of people came through, but the crowds were nonstop all weekend. The show wrapped up at 6pm last night and we quickly tore down and packed up the display.

We had a 40′ by 50′ space set aside for our club to use, and we divided that up into four distinct areas.

In one corner we had a train/town layout, which is where I spent most of my time. We had a downtown area with buildings, cars, trucks, etc. I had two blocks, one featuring my Blackburn Hotel and other buildings, and the other with my City Park. We also had a suburb full of houses and smaller businesses, and a train yard for storing the trains that weren’t running. Inspired by the Log Cabin set, we had a little campground area featuring two of those cabins and one large one that I made out of three of that set. I also parked my RVs in that area, and we had a lake with an island full of bison/buffalo in the middle for reasons I don’t really understand, but they were cool buffalo. I called them the water buffalo. There was a large open space on the layout which we filled with creations built by kids in our MOC building area (see below).

Besides the town/train layout, we had a row of tables along one side with all sorts of other creations by our club members, including some of my sculpture pieces, Marcello’s Japanese Navy WWII ships, Charles’s spaceships, some Technic creations by Jeremy, and some of my assorted models including the big yacht and some of my 7-wide cars.

The other two corners of our space were devoted to a MOC building area and a Mindstorms demo area. In the MOC building area, we had bulk LEGO parts dumped out on the floor and kids of all ages were invited to build whatever they liked out of the parts. We displayed the parts on the train layout so that the kids could contribute to our display. The Mindstorms area featured live demonstrations of robots of various types run by Eva and Steve, who worked tirelessly all weekend showing the robots off to the public and teaching them about LEGO robots.

To see what it all looked like, click the photo below or click here for a slideshow of all the pictures.

Maker Faire 2011

Wrapping up the Palo Alto museum show

Yesterday was the last day of the BayLUG/BayLTC show at the Museum of American Heritage in Palo Alto for another year. We had hundreds of people come through to admire the exhibit including a few friends of mine.

BayLUG/BayLTC Group Photo

The show is called “Living LEGO-cy” and this was the 7th time we’ve had it. For the first 5 years it was free, but then in 2008-9 the crowds were totally beyond our ability to manage, and it taxed the museum’s and our ability to handle, without any benefit to either institution. So we started charging $2 per person last year, enabling BayLUG to provide a loan to support the startup of Bricks by the Bay’s first convention. This year we kept it the same, though BBTB no longer needs the financial support, and raised a tidy sum for both the museum and the club (who split the income 50/50).

Click the photo above to see all my pictures from the event, or you can view a slide show of the images. See also the opening weekend post I made last month.

As in previous years, we filled the room with LEGO. In the center was a 12′ by 25′ train layout, and all along the sides of the room we had various miscellaneous LEGO exhibits on all types of themes. A few of us had some space to sell LEGO and LEGO-related accessories – I got rid of a bunch of sorting containers I no longer use (tackle boxes and stackable containers) and some bags of parts that I didn’t need; others were selling whole sets and minifigs and other small items. We also used this as an opportunity to solicit for new club members, which we had several of, and to distribute flyers for Bricks by the Bay 2011, and lots of people said they would be there. If you missed out on this exhibit, a similar one will form a centerpiece for the Bricks by the Bay exhibit hall. Hope to see you there!

MoAH 2010 Opening Weekend

This past weekend was the opening for the annual “Living LEGO-cy” museum display by BayLUG (Bay Area LEGO Users’ Group) over the holiday season at the Museum of American Heritage in Palo Alto, CA. The show runs through January 9, 2010 and is open Fridays through Sundays except holidays.

MoAH 2010 Opening Weekend

Click the picture for all the photos or view them as a slide show.

BayLUG September 2010 Meeting

BayLUG had its September 2010 meeting on Saturday, September 18 at Johannes’s church in San Leandro, CA.  The contest theme was “National Parks” and I put together a model for it in just a couple of hours before leaving home for the meeting.  My model is a Glacier National Park tour bus.  I’ll post more about that with better pictures soon, but you can see it in the photos of the meeting.  Click the image to view the pictures or see them as a slideshow.