Buick 1955 Century Riviera 4-door Hardtop

Name of Model: Buick 1955 Century Riviera 4-door Hardtop

Created by: lego911

Found at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/29987108@N02/tags/1955/

Details: Here's yet another fantastic car - a spot on likeness of a Buick 1955 Century Riviera 4-door hardtop. This one's a bit drool-worthy just on parts (can you imagine being able to make something snazzy in dark red, chrome, and tan?), but there are also some techniques here that I don't believe we've seen before. Using the small horn element for door handles is ingenious, the working doors blend in perfectly with the mosaic pattern on the sides, the fender greebles came out right on both ends, and the use of clear cheese slopes for windshields came out much better than I'd expect. You can even spot a steering wheel inside the cabin. The working hood unveils an engine. The techniques near the front wheels aren't as obscure, but personally I really like how they capture the right look here.

4-Wide Mobile Command Center

Name of Model: Micro Agents

Created by: nolnet

Found at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nolnet/tags/microagents/

Details: There's an interesting phenomenon in recent LEGO's more recent kits - cars are getting bigger. 4-studs wide became fairly standard in the mid 1960's, and didn't really go anywhere all through the 1990's. Of course, minifigs are themselves nearly 4 studs wide, and real cars generally seat two people in the front - so these cars, while fun, were almost always incredibly out of scale. Minifig scale has always been considered a meaningless term by many serious LEGO fanatics, since the car scale has little to do with minifig size, train size, building size, etc - there are just too many different scales that the company has sold as made for minifigs over the years. This gets a bit painful for some of us long-time LEGO fans - we have 4-wide cars lining our roadplates, and now we're getting cars that are more accurately scaled (or even overscaled, which is the case for the set this model is based on), and suddenly it's clear that many of the cars we've been buying for years are the wrong scale. Naturally, we're finding clever ways to change the scales and sizes of things to make things more consistent. Which size to switch to is a topic of much debate, but the creator of today's model decided to take the awesome Agents Mission 6: Mobile Command Center kit (a 12-stud wide beast that contains a number of smaller vehicles and all sorts of goodies) and turn it into a 4-stud wide truck (with 6-wide trailer) closer in scale to the vehicles of my childhood. I don't know if I should call this microscale (it is a less than half-size version of a real set) or minifig scale (it matches the "minifig-scale" vehicles of my childhood), but it is darn awesome. Well, now that I look through more of the photos and see the interior of the trailer (awesome!) and the smaller versions of two other Agents sets, I'm thinking I'll call this microscale. Or, again, maybe just "awesome". I think we're at a new "awesome"'s per post record...