lego – Page 67 – Bill Ward's Brickpile

January 2008 BayLUG meeting

I’ve fallen a bit behind blogging about recent BayLUG meetings, though I did post the pictures online. Here we have pics of the meeting in January at Dave Porter’s house in Woodside. We also had a meeting in Palo Alto on February 24, but I missed that one as I was out of town that weekend. Our next meeting is this coming Sunday, April 20, at MoAH in Palo Alto, and it’s open to the public so come by and say hi!

Club member Dave Porter has a house in the mountains where he puts up a display every year for the holidays featuring a very detailed train layout with lots of great scenery. And every January for the past few years, the club is invited up to view the layout and have a big meeting at his house. It’s always a lot of fun.

Click the big picture to go to the set page on Flickr, or you can view a slideshow of the photos.

MoAH Exhibit 2008-01-05

Exhibit of the Bay Area LEGO Users Group at the Museum of American Heritage in Palo Alto, CA.

Every year BayLUG puts on a “Living LEGO-cy” exhibit at the museum during the Holidays. We put it up in early December and take it down in early January. Families crowd the room to stare at our creations every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday during this period. It’s a lot of fun, but it can be a lot of work. I took these pictures on the last day of the latest exhibit, on January 5, 2008, just before we tore it all down and took it all home.

Click the big picture to go to the set page on Flickr, or you can view a slideshow of the photos.

Interview: Bjarne P. Tveskov, Classic LEGO Space Designer

There’s a very interesting Interview on BoingBoing with Bjarne P. Tveskov, Classic LEGO Space Designer.

I grew up on some of these sets! I started collecting Space LEGO sets in the late 1970’s when I was a little kid, and spent most of my spare time building and rebuilding classic LEGO spaceships and bases.

My Track Geometry page translated to Italian

My Track Layout Geometry page has been translated into Italian!

A few days ago I received an email from Alex Cordero of ITLUG (Italian LEGO® Users Group) saying that they were interested in translating the page into Italian. He just contacted me to let me know that it was done; you can view the finished page on the ITLUG Web site (EDIT 9/15/2008: updated URL).

This is the first time something I’ve written has been translated into another language, and I’m very flattered and pleased that it was deemed worthy for this treatment.

I don’t speak a word of Italian – though I do have some Spanish – so I don’t know how accurate the translation is, but I hope that it proves useful to Italian-speaking LEGO fans everywhere!

BayLUG Display at MoAH now through January 6

The Bay Area LEGO Users’ Group has a display currently on view at the Museum of American Heritage in Palo Alto, CA. The display was installed on December 8, and these photos were taken on December 15.

You have two weekends left to enjoy the display! The exhibit is open Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays from 11am to 4pm. Hope to see you there! If you plan to stop by, let me know in advance and I’ll see if I can meet you there. I’m scheduled to help staff the layout on Saturday January 5, but may make other random appearances as my schedule and whim suit me.

My models on this layout include all the buildings in the city block containing the “Blackburn Hotel” and the coast guard base on the “water” table.

Click the big picture to go to the set page on Flickr, or view a slideshow of the photos.

Modular 16×32 Buildings

These two buildings, both built on 16×32 stud baseplates, have been featured in many BayLTC displays over the past couple of years. They were built in a modular fashion so that floors can be mixed and matched if desired, and taken apart for more compact storage and transport.

The blue building has a removable module for the two upper floors, and another one for the roof. The red building has one removable module, consisting of the upper floor plus roof. The Blackburn Hotel was built according to the same standards.

The trouble with this modular design though is that the architectural style of the different buildings clashes too much; they would never be combined in real life.

These buildings have now been disassembled, largely because I feel that 16×32 is just too small of a footprint for a realistic building. I am now working on new buildings using a 32×32 or larger size footprint. I brought the works-in-progress for this project to the October BayLUG meeting.

Click one of the big pictures to go to the set page on Flickr, or view a slideshow of the photos.

BayLUG Meeting on October 14, 2007

Pictures from the October 14, 2007 BayLUG meeting.

On Sunday we had our ninth anniversary meeting of the Bay Area LEGO Users’ Group. Here are the pictures I took during the meeting. I used my cell phone camera, so sorry about the quality. I used it because I forgot to bring my digital camera. The ironic thing is I discovered I had my digital camera in my bag after all, but not until after several people had gone home… See the individual photo pages on Flickr for captions and more information.

Click the big picture to go to the set page on Flickr, or view a slideshow of the photos.

Blackburn Hotel

The Blackburn Hotel is a building that I have displayed may times as a part of the Bay Area LEGO Train Club layouts at train shows and meetings, but never blogged about.

It is one of several 16×32 footprint downtown buildings which I created for the layout one time a few years ago when I heard that several of the members who usually bring buildings to train shows weren’t going to be participating in one of the shows, and we desperately needed downtown buildings.

The building is five stories tall, built mostly using black bricks with tan trim and red windows. The unique feature of the hotel is the signs: a rooftop “BLACKBURN HOTEL” sign and a vertical sign that says “HOTEL” which is intended to be placed at a street corner, but can be rotated 45 degrees to be used for a mid-block placement.

The name was suggested by my wife. Partly it is due to the color, and partly due to the fact that I was watching an English Premier League football (soccer) match on TV as I was building it featuring Blackburn Rovers (I support any team that has American players, and Blackburn have an American goalkeeper, Brad Friedl, as well as the New Zealander Ryan Nelson who used to play in Major League Soccer).

Click the big picture to go to the set page on Flickr, or you can view a slideshow of the photos.

BayLUG at Chabot Space & Science Center, August 25, 2007

On Saturday, August 25, 2007, members of the Bay Area LEGO Users Group converged at the Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland, CA.

The meeting was primarily supposed to be about LEGO Space, and most of the members brought space-related models to show. Charles and Adrienne stole the show with a huge arrangement of microscale spaceships and a dramatic centerpiece: a giant red and white Bellville/space/castle mashup, which converted at the touch of a hand from a dramatic castle to a viciously armed spaceship! Other models featured were Jim’s version of the pneum-ADD-ic machine (design by Kevin Clague) from the book LEGO Mindstorms Masterpieces, Jeremy’s Mindstorms and Technic models, Kevin’s Star Wars base (on the ice planet Hoth, from The Empire Strikes Back), John’s medieval half-church, a desert train diorama by CJ, and a miniature downtown by yours truly.

We have talked about having more meetings there, perhaps with a bit more promotion, either later this year or early next year. Stay tuned!

Click the big picture to go to the set page on Flickr, or view a slideshow of the photos.

Yoda Build Event at Hillsdale Shopping Center

LEGO has been doing these “Yoda build events” all around the country as promotions for their retail stores. We finally got a chance to participate in one!

Members of BayLUG spent most of the weekend of July 20 and 21 helping out with this project. A Master Builder from LEGO, Stephen Gerling, was on hand to construct the giant LEGO sculpture of Yoda from Star Wars. It was based on a smaller model built almost entirely out of 2×4 bricks in brown, tan, and sand green colors.

To build the giant sculpture, kids were invited to come and construct giant LEGO bricks. Each brick was 8x16x4, or exactly 4x in each dimension the size of a standard 2×4 brick. Lots of 2×4 and 2×8 bricks in each of the three colors were on hand, and laminated instruction cards were set out for the kids to follow. We ended up with many many bins full of the giant bricks, which were used to construct the Yoda sculpture. In fact we had plenty of bricks left over, so at the end we took the instructions away and just let the kids build whatever they wanted.

The event was a lot of fun. We didn’t get paid, but we got some very special deals on bricks from the store to compensate for our time :-)

Click the big picture to go to the set page on Flickr, or view a slideshow of the photos.