Live Blogging a Fire Brigade Build

Richard at Brick Town Talk recently got his hands on the new Fire Brigade kit (so have I, but I didn't say much about it) - and he is live blogging the experience. The first four installments are already online. He's finished the "1" bags already and will be finishing this model tomorrow morning (in the UK). Of course, you're already following Brick Town Talk, right? BTT is the best source for Cafe Corner inspired MOCs and the latest news on this series of modular buildings designed by Jamie Berard.

10197 Fire Brigade

Fairly nice set, and for only $150 I think it's a pretty good deal. Read more on TBB. (This has been covered everywhere, and I don't see the point in adding a lengthy post to the pile.)

Red Inn

Name of Model: Red Inn

Created by: crises_crs

Found at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/33774513@N08/3269744847/ and http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=331414

Details: Here's another awesome town building. The catch? It's really castle-era. The windows are really fence pieces, and the roads are all stone (and with a clever technique I haven't seen before - nice use of medium size plates to get an effect many of us thought you needed tons of little plates to do!) With all the great techniques, colors and details in this model, it's to miss the macabre plot involved. More great photos (including interior shots) are at the BrickShelf link above.

This is Wednesday's model of the day

Futuron Labs - A Town / Space Model

Name of Model: Futuron Labs

Created by: ME

Found at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dp3/sets/72157607275256729/

Details: I'm a bit surprised that the other LEGO® fans blogging out there haven't pointed out the bizarre lack of properly shown models online coming from me. Well, at long last, you now get to meet me as a builder and not just a critic (although I, for one, think I am fascinating and reasonably clever). I started building the Futuron Labs building a little while ago, but I decided to properly put it into the Cafe Corner style and add some more vignettes to prepare it for the Reasonably Clever Brick Science Contest. The contest ends Monday morning at 3:14 AM EST. If you haven't been following LEGO for the last 22 years or so, you'll probably miss a few of the in-jokes I've put in the descriptions of the photos. I'll leave it up to you to decide if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I did include a few set links to explain some late-80's Futuron references, but it's kind of hard to find just one link to explain some of the other things. Feel free to send me questions. There were a few neat techniques here, and I tried to give enough inside and partially-assembled shots to make them all obvious. Most of the studs-not-on-top stuff was pretty simple, but I don't think I've seen the large panels used this way before. I'm really happy with my microscale monorail, and I liked the street vendor with the "spaceships" that are really binoculars. I don't know if I'll use flickr to publish my models in the future, but I think that the "note" feature on there - which allows anyone with a flickr account to mark a section of the photo and leave a comment - will be useful for these photos. I really tried to pack tons of detail into this model - I highly recommend looking at all the photos, although I do have less of a impartial view on these photos than I usually do (I know my photography skills need work, at least...) By the way - I've decided to try to relaunch this site on October first. The break will give me a chance to catch up (primarily) on more high-priority things on my schedule. Also, I'm hoping to build up a buffer of models by using Scheduled Post Publishing more often. I don't know if/when we'll see another one of my models properly written up (or featured), but hey, at least I'm trying to get a little time in for LEGO fun. My internet connection remains a bit erratic, but getting off of a day-to-day schedule for this site should offset that (and of course, thanks to my friend Matthew, who caught me up on a few newer MOCs during a break on this past Monday).

Clever Cafe Corner-Style Bank

Name of Model: Corner Bank

Created by: Dave Sterling

Found at: http://www.mocpages.com/moc.php/62667 and http://news.lugnet.com/announce/moc/?n=4238

Details: The links above do a very good job of explaining this building's background and even providing entertaining commentary - so I'll stick to discussing the building techniques. Café Corner fans have much to enjoy here - the perfectly-matching proportions are the first thing to stick out. It looks like those floors could be directly swapped out for the ones in the Cafe Corner. On the first floor, the terrace makes great use of tan, dark tan and dark red tiles to give the grounds a distinctive look. I love the use of official stickers for the studs-not-on-top sign over the door. If you've ever tried building in this style, you know how it easy it us to run out of windows, so the method used for stretching them out here is worth noting - Green Grocer wall segments are put in the middle, and the windows themselves are at a half-stud offset from the rest of the wall. I agree with the builder about that helping to capture the Gothic look. Finally, the row on the top makes use of 1x1 studs-not-on-top headlight bricks to make a row of plates face outward. My first reaction was that this must take a ridiculously large amount of parts. However, if you look more closely, you can see that there are actually four 1x4 plates and one 1x3 plate on each side - and those only have the headlight bricks on each end. I've always hesitated to try this because of the gaps it can cause, but I think that using this technique at equal intervals and with black bricks behind them actually makes a great effect here. The second floor has more of the same excellent techniques - offset windows, CC- and GG- styled wall sections, and studs-not-on-top detailing. The wheels in particular were hard to figure out - note how there are no visible Technic pins there. I believe that the wheels have been attached to round 1x1-plates that are connected to large studs-not-on-top brackets (by placing the round plate in between the studs on the bracket). The decorative elements on the angled portion are great, too - I generally think of the bars as a fence piece, but that really works here. On the top of the second floor, I'm loving the railing - the technique is nothing new, but it's more widely used on trains than on town buildings. Don't ask me what's under the windows on the third floor - I'm still not sure what I'm seeing there (I'd love higher-res photos, but I'd take a good explanation for what that part is too - for now I'm guessing that they're some sort of hinge part). The window offset is a bit deeper, but it works pretty well. I think that using angled parts instead of angling parts was a wise choice for the front corner - not to mention a good excuse to use an odd space part in a town building. The Basic 3+ windows might just be my favorite feature, though - they're pulled off here just as well as they are in the Cafe Corner, and the slope bricks used here are much more readily available then those wheel-well elements are. The roof line is classy and very similar to the Cafe Corner, but there are some new details there too (and of course, they're all excellent). Long story short: my kind of town building. Of course, if you're really into crazy town techniques and working Technic and Space elements into "normal" buildings, it's worth taking a look at my DGXPO photos where you can see a few crazy ideas I've tried out but not blogged about yet. I love seeing these sorts of techniques, because it requires a good deal of cleverness and imagination, and also gives an explanation of why various bizarre LEGO® sets are worth buying. My parents are always asking me why I buy some of these things, but they're usually impressed when they see how many bizarre parts can be used in fairly "normal" contexts. Of course, that's a topic for another day...

Chip Shop / High Street

Name of Model: Chip Shop (from High Street)

Created by: Mad physicist

Found at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/madphysicist/sets/72157604106424747/

Details: One of the difficulties of maintaining an "of-the-day" blog is that I wind up holding off on many great models for the sake of trying to keep a good variety on the front page. This is actually the second time this week that I've picked out a model that really is best looked at as a sequel to an older model that I just haven't had a chance to blog about yet. If you want a look at the older model (a curry house) first, you can see it in the same gallery. Together, these two excellent buildings are called High Street. It's anyone's guess if/when I'll get to featuring the curry house here, but I'm told that there are plans for more buildings in this style... This style is actually a unique mix of popular English architecture with the Café Corner format of town models. As with the previous building in this series, there's an excellent sign with lettering, but this one goes a bit further by also having fish and sandwich signs. The bottom two floors of this one also have interiors. I'm particularly jealous of the bay window though - those 1x4x2 windows are rare parts and they work very well here.

David Stott Building

Name of Model: David Stott building, 1929, Detroit. First 3 stories displayed at GTE 2006. Completed as a 31 story skyscraper for NMRA 2006. Completely rebuilt in April 2008 to make it more accurate with 37 stories.

Created by DecoJim, Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/decojim/ Brickshelf: http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?m=DecoJim

Found at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/decojim/sets/72157604761140171/ and http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=170584

Details: That picture to the left really is the model and not the life-size building. I think it's safe to say that when you take a model this size outside and find a camera angle that good, you're probably as much of a photographer as a builder - not that this looks like it was easy to build at all, but you know what I mean. Obviously, quite the dark orange collection was required here. It looks to me like a half-stud offset for the windows and inner archetectural elements, and those windows look solid black to me (which isn't a technique I'd think to try, but it looks good here - although those could just be smoke-colored windows too, which do occasionally appear in sets). While the scale is a little bit lower than many other minifig-scale models I've seen (6 bricks high per floor versus 7 in most sets or 10 in Cafe Corner), this is still technically minifig scale. The life-size David Stott Building in Detroit, Michigan, USA, is 133.1 m (437 ft), while this LEGO® model stands 2.286 m (7.5 ft) tall. This is one of several buildings featured in the Flickr gallery above - the whole gallery is a beautiful representation of what must be some of Detroit's finest buildings. The Brickshelf links above include work-in-progress pictures. This is the second version of this model - it was first built for a show in 2006, but this April 2008 revision features some improvements in scale and accuracy.

Town Hall

Name of Model: Town Hall built in 2 weeks for 1000steine event August 24th - 26th, 2007

Created by: LEGO® designer Jamie Berard Blog:http://sideshowjamie.livejournal.com/ Brickshelf: http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?m=SideShowJamie

Found at: http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=272790

Details: I've been thrilled to see over the past few months how much involvement LEGO® designer Jamie Berard has had with fans. He has become famous recently for designing popular sets like the Café Corner, but he also has made numerous appearances at events and been interviewed by a number of publications. Today's model is a town hall that is compatible with the Cafe Corner modular building standard. It was built over two weeks in 2007. Of course, some of the details point out advantages of working for the company - check out the windows made from hard-to-find garage door components. Also visible in that photo are some studs-not-on-top details using both bricks and a large amount of the 1x1 cheese slope pieces - and if you take a close look at the window frame, you'll notice that that's mostly done with studs facing outward instead of upward too. Other techniques, though, explain why they don't make sets like this. For one thing, there's the use of transition brown colors to get a realistic wood tone on the outside of the building (in 2003, the LEGO® company decided to change the color brown from the traditional shade to a new shade called "red-brown" or reddish brown. The newer color is molded in a different way that took a while to perfect - and in the interests of keeping costs down, LEGO decided to release thousands of brown pieces with small differences in shading. Some people are upset about this for obvious reasons, but using these pieces together with the older brown pieces and the final version of the new red-brown color does give a nice wooden effect). For another, this is enormous (15 inch / 48 stud square baseplate) and would be cost prohibitive. The columns are an excellent touch, and don't miss the gargoyle (an owl and a pair of biscuits in front of two wheel wells) or the bell (a "Mayan" coin, 1x2 tiles, and inverted 2x2 dish, some black studs-not-on-top pieces and two black rounded elements) either. My personal favorite technique, though, has to be the trick for the second-floor balcony overlooking the meeting room. It looks like a few tiles are extending the floor outward a little bit, and two of the round fence piece's post are latched onto by space robot arms.

Cafe Corner Spaceroll

Name of Model: 10182 Space Cafe Roll

Created by: mashikuf

Found at: http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=293891

Details: This is one you really have to look at to believe. It's a combination of a roll-bin, a space station, and the Cafe Corner set. We've previously featured the set and some models inspired by it, but this is the most original twist I've ever seen on the concept (I ought to clarify - when I first blogged about the set, Amazon had a bargain price for it, but they're currently selling it for about $60 more than the LEGO store is). The rounded sides of this model unfold out, and then you can see the colors of the set mixed with a variety of Space theme parts. The door with the Exploriens half-cylinder really stands out, but there are tons of great details here.

Fancy Pizza Parlor

Name of Model: CC Style Pizza restaurant

Created by: Brickmann

Found at: http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=273642

Details: Here's another brilliant town building modeled after the Cafe Corner set. This one is a bit different though - it's a sort of avant-garde pizza shop in an old building with realistic colors. It can be tempting sometimes to make all houses out of brightly colored bricks - especially when the grey shades can be hard to find and properly match. The color of the walls wasn't actually the biggest hurdle for this model though - that would be the large amount of smooth tiles used on all of the floors and stairs. It's too bad, though, that this type of thing requires so many different specialized parts from different eras of the LEGO company - classic space computer panels are mixed in with newer dark green tiles and that's all on top of the old gray bricks. This is a beautiful model, and for the reasons mentioned above, it's probably one of the most ambitious layout-sized city models you'll ever see.

Modular House

Name of Model: Modular house created from parts in the 4954

Created by: misc2006

Found at: http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=273214

Details: Now this is a great project that you can probably try at home - it's a beautiful modular house (similar to the Cafe Corner set) that was made as an original alternate model for the 4954 "Model Town House" kit (which, by the way, you can get free shipping on if you order through Amazon). The nice thing about little projects like this one is that you can easily determine if you have the parts or not - in fact, when I was little, the LEGO® club magazine (I think it was called Mania Magazine at the time) used to feature instructions for models that could be easily built from just one widely-available kit. Enough of the "marketing" type stuff though, truth be told this is also a very well-designed original house too. I love the architecture here, that upper balcony, the awnings for the door and windows (the ones on the top look like the part that goes over the car wheels in the main model!). There's even a flower bed and outdoor lighting here (creative ways of doing both of those, too). The bench in the back is a great use of studs-not-on-top parts in this scale, and there's even a proper staircase featured. I would have preferred some furniture (wasn't the original point of modular building to make it possible to show off furnishings?), but oh well. It's difficult enough to get things like that textured studs-not-on-top front to work well.

Original House Designed as a Historic Cafe Corner Neighbor

Name of Model: Historical corner house with archway on the Cafe Street

Created by: tacvud

Found at: http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=267113

Details: This gorgeous house is one of many that has popped up recently in the online LEGO fan community. The idea is that it looks like it would fit into a city block with the Cafe Corner Cafe Corner set. This one features some nice details - most noticeably a clever use for Castle-themed parts in a LEGO town. I love the way that studs-not-on-top parts and rounded front parts are used here as well.

Cafe Corner

Name of Model: Café Corner

Found at: Amazon

Details: Today's model is actually a LEGO set available from the LEGO company. This is one of several newer models made with fan involvement and featuring quite a bit of details and nifty tricks. There's also some awesome modular components to make building larger models with multiples of this set easy. Some details are available on The LEGO Store's page for this model, but it would help this blogger out if you bought it through Amazon - for $20 less and free shipping, if you're willing to preorder!

Today's (Tuesday's) post is up late due to a laptop's sudden inability to charge. Updates might be dodgy for the rest of the week, but they should be up-to-date soon.