Details: Recently, QuéLUG put on a show at ExpoRail. This two-day show at the Canadian Railway Museum appears to have been a great success. The theme this year was "coastal town" and the group worked together to combine many great models into this spectacular layout.
There are 287 photos to see in the official flickr photoset.
Details: There aren't enough people willing to try making mosaics for minifig-scale creations. This model goes a ways towards fixing that - there are mosaics in brick-built (sidways) floors, and on the inner and outer walls. I don't think I've seen a minifig-scale bowling alley before, but this one will be tough to beat. The roof is removable - tiles were used to make that lift off the same way the "modular building" sets have their floors lift up. This is perfectly in scale for those buildings too!
Details: Recently featured on Brick Town Talk (which you should be reading in addition to this blog anyway), this Burberry store stands out as a high-water mark amongst recent highlights in the Cafe Corner standard of modular building (I post those highlights over at Brick Town Talk instead of here at LMOTD, but I did feature another model by the same builder this past March). Some of my favorite bits here: The Grand Emporium's awning technique recast in gold using parts from the Battle of Alamut, the use of a wheel and a dish for a unique gold-ish flourish at the top, and a group of bracket-plate-tile testures on the second floor (this actually adds up to the width of a normal brick and gives you that vertical stripe effect). I'm also a big fan of the studs that face toward the front of the building - the added texture looks great, and it's a feature that tile-crazed LEGO fans tend to forget actually looks pretty good in many contexts.
Details: At one point, there was a rumor that the next Cafe Corner style set would be sand blue. It's a shame that we didn't get a new kit in that color, but this model would be hard to top even if Jamie Berard (the designer of Cafe Corner, Green Grocer, and Grand Emporium) did pursue that color in an official set. While this whole model is fantastic, some highlights include the horse statue, the clothing racks, and the stunning architecture. The corner in particular is an interesting trick - instead of putting a full edge on the building with an angled doorway and windows, we get a column that just rounds things off. I'm pretty sure the texture there is achieved by use of click hinge bricks facing opposite directions. Corrected by a reader Wednesday morning: This effect is built sideways in two different directions - those tiles are actually attached to 1x2 slopes, and we're seeing the sloped surface face outward. A clever and very easy solution!
Official information about the new Grand Emporium kit (which had briefly appeared on the Shop at Home website without any real announcement last week) has been scarce. International prices are still hard to pin down, and we still have no idea when the official release dates are. Strangely, though, in spite of the lack of information or fanfare (don't they know how excited we are about this kit?) the kit has surfaced for sale at LEGO Brand Retail locations in the UK. Brick Street over at Brick Town Talk was able to buy the kit at the Milton Keynes location for £139.99. He's been building the kit and reviewing it online as he builds it. There are tons of interesting details just in the box art he posted, and the pictures of the set's insides are even better! My search for 10211 (the Grand Emporium's set number) seems to be the best way to pull up all of the review posts at once.
Details: I know I've blogged many models based on the Cafe Corner kit before (I'm also a contributor at Brick Town Talk, where we've previously featured today'smodels). These are different because they're actually really small - just 5/8ths the size of standard LEGO bricks. They are built with Modulex bricks, which the LEGO company manufactured for use in architectural models (they were not sold in venues where LEGO bricks are generally available). Building with Modulex is an interesting challenge - the part selection is radically different from what's available with standard parts, and even the colors aren't standard LEGO colors (although some of them are quite similar). In spite of all that, Brixe63 was able to successfully render these two popular LEGO kits (Market Street and Cafe Corner, both recently discontinued) in Modulex form.
Details: I took one look at these two lovely buildings and said "oh yeah".
Wonderful proportioning is used throughout the whole creation. Some very subtle details add alot to the overall appearance. I'm particularly fond of the 1x2 bley plates stuck between the studs to give a grill effect on the top of the tan/bley building.
Details: It's hard not to get my attention when you're mixing scales in a clever way. The Technic figures (which originally came out in the late 1980's, surfaced occasionally in LEGO sets over the years, and then were widely available in the late 1990's, until they started with the Bionicle characters...) work great here, but their unusual scale - pretty close to Belville, just a little smaller than Miniland 0 makes them hard to work into models most of the time. The temptation would be to use Belville or miniland characters as children, but the minifigs work surprisingly well here. The best part? The minifigs are details to match the Technic figs as much as possible, using sunglass-clad heads and even a Dr Inferno arm for the cyborg kid. This is apparently just one module for a collaborative display at BrickWorld (which ended over a week ago...) so we may see more of these soon.
Details: Here's a series of Great Ball Contraption modules. It looks like the only thing these all have in common is that they were posted early this morning in my timezone. Some of these have apparently been part of group GBC's at shows, and some of these aren't still assembled. As usual, there are quite a few interesting ideas to try out here, whether you're looking to try a group layout or just making your own machines. Usually with GBC modules, the colors are a bit random (function over fashion), but these have some nifty color choices too.
Details: Do you remember the Power Puzzle Theme of the current FIRST LEGO League competition? Well, an innovative robot that emerged this past week is a jarring thought experiment. After finding a way to quickly get a perfect score 3 months ago, the team decided to see if it was possible to have a robot jump over the wall and solve their competitor's "Power Puzzle" as well - all within the original time alloted. Surprisingly, they pull it off amazingly, and are able to do the entire thing with only the 3 motors in the LEGO® MINDSTORMS NXT kit. It does look like they used additional parts for the various modular frames that are added on for the various missions.
I'm pretty sure I've figured out the tricks here: They're using a light sensor to enhance a dead reckoning steering system by recalibrating when they hit darker spots in the competition mat. A number of large liftarm frameworks are used to actually do the specific tasks. Beyond the two motors used to move the robot around, a third is used to move an axle with two sets of three liftarms coming off of it. One of those liftarm sets connects to the visible large frame, but the other two are shorter and just there to "grab" the frames that move things. It's an interesting approach to modularity, but I can't help but wonder just how sturdy the whole thing is - would it work in situations where you need to go more than a few feet? In any case, this is impressive.
Recently, QuéLUG put on a show at ExpoRail. This two-day show at the Canadian Railway Museum appears to have been a great success. The theme this year was "coastal town" and the group worked together to combine many great models into this spectacular layout.
kit. It does look like they used additional parts for the various modular frames that are added on for the various missions. 
