A Custom Minifigure - with desk and wheelchair

Name of Model: Sigfig/Wheelchair Instructions

Created by: Bladewood

Found at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bladewood/sets/72157607175259554/

Details: A long-lasting craze among LEGO fans is trying to create yourself as a minifig. Known as a "sigfig", these characters often litter flickr to the point where it can be hard to find actual models alongside all of the lightly customized minifigs. It's pretty unusual for a sigfig to actually feature clever building techniques on its own, but this particular one does. As you can see in the vignette pictured to the left, Bladewood has designed a perfect minifig-scale wheelchair. Yes, I know we just featured the Bionicle wheelchair a few weeks back, but trust me, this is spectacular in a completely different way. Check out the wheelchair's building instructions to see the exact parts and techniques used - it's a really clever design.

Beatles Mosaics

Name of Model: The Beatles in legos

Photo by: Tracy Lee

Found at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tracyleephoto/3698392436/

Details: I've featured a Beatles mosaic before, but since today (9/9/9 - the last time in our lifetimes we'll be able to write the date with only single digit numbers) is apparently Beatles day (Number 9...Number 9...Number 9 - trust me, it makes sense if you've heard the "White Album"), there's a need to feature another Beatles creation. Much like the last Beatles mosaic I featured here, this one uses dithering to get the LEGO colors to more closely resemble photo colors. That's where the comparisons stop, though - rather than trying to track down rarer colors, the builder of this one focused on using the 6 basic colors that have been widely available since the late 1990's - red, yellow, green, blue, black, and white. Rather than trying to track down plates for the studs-up approach, a studs-out approach was used (that is to say, the bricks are arranged flat on a baseplate instead of built into a large wall). For a really good look, check out the original size image of the mosaics - it's clear enough to count as building instructions. Regrettably, I didn't prepare this far enough in advance to get proper information on the builder, methods or inspiration photographs. Based on comments on other LEGO mosaic photos from the same photographer on flickr, I believe that this was built by the photographer's husband.

Peeron New Years' Update

This was my first new year with Peeron's recent updates RSS feed in my feed reader, so it was my first time to see a full year's worth of sets' instructions added to the site. If you're not familiar with Peeron, you really should become familiar with it - it is an excellent resource for set inventories, building instructions, catalog scans, and other LEGO-related data. Set inventories are added as soon as possible, but the general rule for scans of building instructions is that they shouldn't be posted until a set has been out for three years (this was decided long ago, but it remains standard practice). 169 new instruction scans were added today, covering about half of the kits released in 2005.

Trophy (with instructions!)

Name of Model: Big Trophy

Created by: Dave at BrickPlayer.com

Found at: http://brickplayer.com/blog/2008/04/30/big-lego-trophy-plans/

Details: Here's a good one for all of the college kids in the midst of finals season - a victory trophy sculpture. I like the version shown in the instructions, but the partially translucent one built for the winner of a contest looks even better. Both this large trophy and the smaller trophy have complete building instructions posted at the site above. There's also a parts list in addition to the directions. While the translucent parts can be hard to find, this project should be pretty easy for anyone to try in slightly different colors - those are all basic bricks in this one (not even any plates!)

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.

Rooster

Name of Model: Rooster

Created by: ApophisV

Found at: http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=255575

Details: This little chicken features quite a few unusual parts used in very clever ways. That tail is the feather from a pirate's cap, and it's attached to the rest of the model by the bottom of a spaceship's control lever! There are also quite a few new slopes and studs-not-on-top pieces in here. If you can round up the parts for this one, you can try it out for yourself with the provided building instructions.

Small LEGO Sphere Project

Name of Model: Small LEGO Sphere Project

Created by: Ed Hall

Found at: http://www.brillig.com/lego/sphere/

Details: Here's a fun one we can all try at home - a small, fairly simple LEGO globe with building instructions available online. You do still have to make sure you put the parts together in a way that they will stay, but that shouldn't be too difficult. They're in a normal .gif image file too, so you can even see them without having to deal with CAD and such. What's particularly elegant about this globe is that it's at a small enough scale to be easy to build, but at a large enough scale that the rounded effect works using only standard LEGO bricks without any of the more precise LEGO plates. Some larger LEGO globes with continents and such were featured here last month.