Posted by
Lego Model of the Day
at
1:35 PM
| Name of Photo Gallery: Different sculptures from the Pirat-Ride | | Created by LEGO-employed Master Builders | | Found at: http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=215685 | Details:
 Now for something completely different - a gallery of photos from the LEGOLAND Billund Pirate Ride. Captain Roger, shown in the thumbnail to the left, also made an appearance in LEGO magazine many years ago. There's a delightful human element to this set of sculptures - they look like real people, and they have some good non-swashbuckling scenes in here. The fiesta, for example, features more women than the entire Pirates line of sets did (LEGO has made an extremely disproportionate amount of male minifigs). The uniformed soldiers featured here suggest to me that the sculptures in these photos were made in the late 1980's or early 1990's - when similarly-colored soldiers were "the good guys" in the Pirates sets. Of course, the nature of a ride like this is that there are tons of little things hidden in there - many exciting details aren't clearly visible in the photos. I bet most people don't even spot the hanging bats while on the ride. |
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Posted by
Dan
at
11:19 PM
| Name of Model: Amusement parks and buildings | | Created by: kwycstix | | Found at: http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=240036 | Details:
 Amusement Park Rides present interesting building challenges. It can be very hard to build these large machines at minifig-scale. The few official models in this theme are all in microscale or done without rides. The parts demands are often too expensive for builders to finish a model - online searches turn up tons of plans for rides and buildings done in CAD software but never actually built. This particular set features a building and no less than four rides done in minifig scale - and as a bonus, one ride in microscale.
The first stunner in this set is a minifig-scale Ferris Wheel that looks like it really works. X-pods are used as the cars - simplifying the design issue of holding the weight of more complicated chair mechanisms. The colors are nice too - normally a simple color scheme makes more sense, but the bright colors are visually attractive and also hide the problem of getting enough of certain parts in certain colors. A sturdy platform and other necessary ground-level details are well fleshed out as well, making this model detailed enough to add to any town layout around too. 
A small roller coaster is another standout in this layout - and this one did clearly take a very large amount of time and special parts. The one-seater cars aren't able to move on their own, but they look detailed enough sitting on the track - which is made of pneumatic tubing. The pneumatic tubing is cut into very small sections (I do NOT recommend trying this at home) and then held parallel between pneumatic-T-tubing-connector pieces. Those pieces used to be obscure, but they're increasingly used for details in a variety of LEGO® models. Combined with well-placed Technic axles, 2x2 round bricks and a variety of special parts for details, this makes for a very convincing roller-coaster track effect. Of course, the extra car and queue kiosk round things out brilliantly as well.
There are two other exciting minifig-scale rides and a building (it looks to me like it houses a set of bumper cars) in the gallery above too.
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