Details: Take a close look a this building facade - it's not minifig scale. It's not really miniland scale, either. This classic house is in an interesting medium scale that fits perfectly on 15 inches (48 studs) of baseplate going across (I'm not sure just how deep it is). The details are amazing, and the colors - this builder uses so many rare parts and colors that it's hard not to be jealous about all the great stuff going into the models. For this sort of beautiful details, though? Completely worth it.
Details: This is really a hard project to sum up quickly - there are 3 NXT programmable bricks in use, but also pneumatics, tread links, a remote control, 9V power for a compressor...this is actually a fully realized portion of an assembly line. While the conveyor belts look great, the real feat is the life-size flexpicker, based on the robots sold by ABB for use in manufacturing. The engineering of the machine itself is pretty clever (even if it is a copy of an existing non-LEGO robot), but there are a few other engineering feats here as well. Anyone who has tried building a robot on this scale knows the challenges of creating a sturdy frame out of LEGO - or even just building something out of LEGO that can handle the weight of several motors moving quickly below. While other large-scale 'bots I've featured here have used metal frames (and received no criticism for it!), this one goes all-out.
I'm a little jealous - if I were trying to make a flexpicker, I'd probably have done it on a small scale, with a metal frame, and without realistic conveyor belts. This goes a bit beyond just capturing the mechanisms or building the robot - this is a work of beauty.
Since I know people are wondering - I will be trying to round out the week and see if I can get this blog going again.
Details: Every so often, the various Bionicle fansites out there will do a building contest. Most of these contests are based on Bionicle-style creations, but the most exciting ones to those of us who aren't Bionicle fans are always the contests that ask builders to use the Bionicle parts to build something outside of the theme. This sculpture of a rose is beautiful, and fitting for Valentine's Day today.
Love is sacrificing rare colors like dark red, dark green, pearl gray, and trans-dark-blue, isn't it?
Most of the building techniques here are fairly straightforward - the two to catch are the paird-up masks at the top and the use of loose balls from ball-and-socket-joints to put dark green socket beams close together (Close up photo: http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?i=2815373 ).
LEGOLAND California is commemorating today's inauguration ceremony with a long-running miniland display. LEGOLAND's existing miniland DC attraction now includes many of the famous guests of the inauguration and throngs of additional visitors.
Since we all know about LEGOLAND and the master builders that work there, I'm going to focus instead on trying to gather up as many photos and videos of this display as possible. I'm expecting a mix of professional photos and amateur photos to appear over time over the next few months, since this display will be up through late May 2009. I will update this post as more photos and videos come to my attention.
I am really sorry about doing this - I just sat down to catch up on the past two days of posts and event announcements, and now I'm finding that my laptop's CD drive is out of commission. Normally, I'd say that the CD drive isn't needed for blogging and try to keep updating this blog anyway, but the CD drive's problem is that the drive won't go back into the PC properly. I will need to bring this PC in for service.
I have access to some other machines and I will try to post a few updates while this computer is out-of-commission, but I expect things to be choppy for the next few weeks. This is a very busy time for me anyway, so perhaps the break will be a good thing.
Details: This is a nice set of sculptures recently acquired by the Bellaire Historic Society and Toy and Plastic Brick Museum. This is one of many rare items that they've been able to showcase - the odds are pretty good that if you've found a bizarre LEGO display piece, you can track down info about it through this museum. I haven't seen too much info about these particular sculptures, but there are several more photos currently on flickr at the top of one photostream. Enough photos that you could copy the techniques, anyway - I'm sure I'm not the only one who does that...
Bram's Sphere Generator - tool that allows you to decide all the specifics of a sphere's dimension, and then creates a LDRAW file that shows how to build it with plates in a studs-not-on-top fashion.
Less immediately useful but a bit more convenient for those of us with no studs-not-on-top parts to spare is Timothy P. Smith's Lego Sphere Generator, which also generates output in LDRAW format. This is all studs-up, and the CAD file uses only 1x1 plates.
Another exciting option is LSculpt, which can create studs-out-in-all-directions plans for any shape at all.
There is one more option listed in that 1000steine post I linked to above, but I'd prefer not to recommend expensive software sold on a license basis (all of the options I've listed above are free). (yes, this is in place of a model today - just thought I'd change things up a little)
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.
I might put together a proper "model of the day" post today yet, but for now, I'd like to point out a few of the new-for-2009 items just released by LEGO and now available from the official LEGO Shop-at-Home site
The newly revived Pirates line has some great kits. They look a little pricey in terms of average price per part, but trust me - the new parts are fairly high-quality with lots of new elements, improved versions of printed parts,, and even extremely detailed new minifigs with printed hats. These cost a bit more because these parts are actually more expensive for LEGO to manufacture - the new parts are so well-made to justify the "high" price.
I've taken a liking to this particular set, which cleverly uses click hinges to hold up the parts of the shipwreck - so you can actually pose the wreckage to make it look like it's in varying states of decay without actually taking it apart:
Also of note is the new Construction theme for town. Some great parts are being revived for this line. Have a look at this set, which features the treads from the all-too-short lived 8275 Bulldozer kit AND the older style of Technic turntable:
Those sets also include windows and other useful elements for rounding out a construction scene.
There are also more licensed lines - small new sets for Star Wars and a few updated versions of Spongebob Squarepants scenes. The new Indiana Jones Shanghai Chase set has some neat cars, though:
Also new is a brightly-colored line similar to the Rock Raiders line from 1999. The rock monsters this time are pretty exciting, with marbled translucent sections on the part. I'm also a big fan of the new wheel element in a few sets like this one:
There's much more to see, of course - these are just a few highlights I liked. What are you looking forward to this year?
Take a close look a this building facade - it's not minifig scale. It's not really miniland scale, either. This classic house is in an interesting medium scale that fits perfectly on 15 inches (48 studs) of baseplate going across (I'm not sure just how deep it is). The details are amazing, and the colors - this builder uses so many rare parts and colors that it's hard not to be jealous about all the great stuff going into the models. For this sort of beautiful details, though? Completely worth it.
