The Dragon’s Tooth Lighthouse
Finally, I’ve gotten around to posting my lighthouse! So, I give you…The Dragon’s Tooth!
This is my tallest creation yet!
Here’s the whole illuminated Gallery
Archive for October, 2006
You are currently browsing the The Brothers Brick weblog archives for October, 2006.
Into the heart of danger with the H.M.A.S Fearless
These won’t be news for those of you who saw the work-in-progress pictures on Flickr or who saw them at NWBrickCon, but I finally took decent pictures of my three recent steampunk creations. Enjoy!
H.M.A.S. Fearless
The brave women of Her Majesty’s Royal Flying Corp pilot the steam-powered gunship Fearless into most certain danger!
Leftenant Cavendish’s Marvelous Amphibious Contraption
On a voyage of discovery in deepest uncharted Asia, Leftenent Henry Cavendish of Her Majesty’s 13th Expeditionary Forces improvises a means of vehicular transport, using a native canoe, wagon wheels, and a boiler of his own invention. His musket also spews Greek Fire.
Mr. Renoir’s Ornithopter
Unbeknownst to most modern historians, Pierre-Auguste Renoir followed in the footsteps of great artist-inventors of the past (including his hero Leonardo Da Vinci), fabricating fantastic winged contraptions and flying them throughout the French countryside.
And of course the full photoset on Flickr.
Soren’s Galbady Gamma with Ballute System
Soren Roberts has updated his Galbady Gamma with a ballute system:
While we’re at it, here’s a bonus mecha, a Soren-original called Gravity:
News: BrickJournal Issue 5
Editor Joe Meno has announced the release of BrickJournal issue 5. Click the image to download the “BIG” issue (10.9 MB):
Of particular note for long-time TBB readers are articles and photo essays by Mark Stafford, MisaQa, and Malle Hawking, among many others.
On a related note, LEGO Shop@Home will be donating 1% of all purchases to BrickJournal (up to $10,000) between now and December 31st — which of course includes Christmas shopping — if you start your shopping from the following page:
http://shop.lego.com/landingpages/brickjournal/
So, how does one pick up sponsorship from LEGO? Hmmm…
News: More 2007 Set Pictures from Amazon.de
Eurobricks reports that Amazon Germany has posted more pictures of the January-June 2007 LEGO sets. Check out the Ferrari, Technic, and Exo-Force sets in this post, and the Aqua Raiders, Star Wars, City, and Creator sets in this thread.
Here’s my favorite new Aqua Raiders set, the as-yet-unnamed 7776:
A shipwreck?! Unbelievably cool.
And check out the set Jamie Berard designed, 4953 Fast Flyers:
Finally, LEGO is releasing two official mosaic-building sets with some cute designs, 6162 and 6163:
For those of you who want to see all the 2007 set pictures from Amazon.de in one place, Brickshelfer HJR has them all in a set of conveniently organized galleries.
Nelson Yrizarry’s Fate of the Arctus IV
You’d be insane to not love multi-genre-builder Nelson Yrizarry’s latest floating rock. Featuring arctic landscape, polar bears AND a mashed orange ship, it is sure to be something special!
Pantsbots, rise up against — oh wait.
Pantsbots are adorable, convivial characters who want nothing more than to help their Spacemen friends:
(Spider-Pantsbot, Schizo-Pantsbot, and Bodyguard-Pantsbot by Arpy 2.0)
Sometimes, though, Spacemen take advantage of the loyal little fellows:
JordanTN put it best:
One day when pantsbots become Minorities they will use this image to show young PantsBots how cruel the spacemen were to them all those years ago…
Arpy, you’re a bad, bad man.
Arvo’s Commodore
Brickshelfer Arvo’s latest LEGO recreation of a real-world object is a Commodore VIC-20:
Hurray for the 1 MHz processor! Three cheers for 5 KB of memory! Spend countless hours in your mom’s basement playing Blitz!
The Making of a Princess
The castle layout at NWBrickCon included an adorable female minifig with a long skirt I’d never seen before. I’ve recreated the design as a princess below:
I asked for permission to take her apart, learning that the “skirt” piece was actually the torso from an old fig. I promptly ran off to the Brick Bazaar, where by a stroke of luck Bob Kojima was selling these old figs for 50 cents each. I picked up a pair of them:
Taking a break from sorting this weekend, I tried to recreate this minifig design, but couldn’t figure it out, so I came up with something similar of my own:
To create a long-skirted castle minifig of your own:
- Take the head off an old fig with a 2×2 base and no arms.
- Insert a Technic axle pin into an axle joiner.
- Put the axle pin and joiner inside the old fig’s body and thread the pin through the head-hole.
- Insert the Technic pin into the minifig torso.
Note: The Technic pin will only fit into an old-style minifig torso. The new-style torsos have flanges (or something) that prevent it from fitting.
Unfortunately, my camera’s battery was dead by the point when I saw this in the display, so I didn’t get a closeup picture of the black farmer’s hut the lady was standing next to. If you know whose design this is, please speak up!
EDIT: According to commenters on Flickr and Classic-Castle Forums, the farmer’s hut was by Gary McIntire, and the weird little figs are from BASIC sets released between 1981 and 1990.
MaK UDK38 Schenkel Diorama by Tim Gould
Back in July I blogged Tim Gould’s LDraw version of a “Maschinen Krieger UDK38 Schenkel.” Now, Tim has posted pictures of his design in real bricks, complete with a nice diorama to showcase it:
House elves, rise up against your oppressors!!!
I like Flickr user Arpy 2.0’s sense of humor. Here’s his “House-Elf Liberation Front soldier” carrying the regimental emblem into battle:
Go, Dobby, go!
News: Space will be back!
Straight from the typing fingers of newly minted LEGO Ambassador Nelson Yrizarry:
Yes – It’s official. Space will be returning.That’s all I can say.
A nice slice of mecha
Getting away from NWBC, now. Man, I wish I could have been there! The pictures show too much good stuff to take in at once!
Fradel Gonzales, commonly known as Slice151, have built a very nice pair of mechas that he call Chirashis. They are viewable in his flickr photostream, and are certainly fantastic in their black sleekness.
NWBrickCon 2006 Coverage Summary
With all of my own coverage out of the way (I just added my day 3 write-up to my original post), let’s wrap up NWBrickCon 2006 with a summary of coverage on the Web.
First up, coverage by Josh and me here on The Brothers Brick:
- Off to NWBrickCon Day 1
- NWBrickCon Day 1 Report
- Breakfast at the Bellevue LEGO Store
- NWBrickCon Day 2 Report
- Dave DeGobbi’s Goliath Steampunk Airship
- NWBrickCon Day 3 Report
- Josh Does NWBrickCon (with link to detailed write-up on Classic-Castle Forums)
Brendan Mauro has kindly posted a batch of videos to YouTube, capturing many of the creations with movement of one sort or another. Check out the camera mounted to the front of the moonbase monorail:
Next, various conference attendees have uploaded their pictures to the Web. I created a NWBrickCon group on Flickr, and it currently has over 380 pictures from the weekend. Check out the member list to see Flickr members who attended the ‘con. Josh also uploaded all of his pictures to a nicely organized set of galleries on Brickshelf.
Finally, the bazaar was a huge draw at NWBrickCon this year, with many vendors and individual sellers presenting their products for sale. Here are the ones whose contact info I remembered to grab:
- AuctionBrick: Buy and sell LEGO products.
- Big Ben Bricks: Ben Fleskes’ custom 9-volt train sets and parts.
- Brick Creations: Former master modeler Bill Vollbrecht’s custom LEGO creations.
- BrickArms: Modern minifig weapons from Will Chapman.
- Horseshoe Bend Rail Road: A LEGO Christmas train from Matt Chiles (Matt, if you see this, let me know if you want me to publish your contact info).
- Little Armory Toys: Custom minifig weapons.
- Math ‘n’ Stuff: Local Seattle toy store.
- Matt’s Mushroom Bins: The Perfect LEGO sorting solution from Matt Chiles.
- The TBP Group: LEGO Certified Professional Dan Parker’s company (ditto, Dan).
Post links in comments if you run across blog posts, more pictures, other videos, or anything else TBB readers might like to see.
It’s okay because he calls them abominations…
My path to the dark side assured, let’s get a head-start on Halloween with some great “abominations” from self-described “evil mad scientist” Windell Oskay:
Windell has written up a nice article on How to hack LEDs into Lego minifigures for Halloween, as well as a second article on his many Lego Abominations.
Here’s a hilarious example titled “Squid King Fu”:
Be sure to check out the full photoset on Flickr.
Thanks for sending this in, Windell! You’re such a bad influence… ;-)
Josh Does NWBrickCon
After spending an incredible weekend at NWBrickCon this last weekend, I finally got my journal online.
You can read it here.
It was a ton of fun to see all the creations and meet so many Lego fans. Of course, the highlight of the weekend was finally getting to meet Andrew in real life. As I looked through my pics of the public hours, I had a bunch of Andrew so I give you the Dunechaser Montage!
With his roaming Aztec gods:
Pointing out the finer details of Castle building:
Posing with his Serenity crew:
