Tag Archives: Vehicle

LEGO planes, trains, and automobiles! Well, maybe not trains, since they don’t like to play with the other LEGO themes, but here you’ll find all our favorite cars, buses, boats, ships, helicopters, and anything else with an engine (and some without).

The Miura is a red raging bull

Italian tractor manufacturer Ferruccio Lamborghini was a man not to be messed with. When he complained to Enzo Ferrari (of the eponymous sports-car manufacturer) that the busted clutch on his Ferrari was the same one as he used on his company’s tractors and about poor service, Enzo Ferrari famously snubbed him by telling him that, as a tractor manufacturer, Lamborghini couldn’t know anything about sports cars. Lamborghini set out to prove him wrong, by starting a company to build the best Grand Tourer money could buy. He chose a raging bull as the company’s emblem.
Since then Lamborghini has become famous for its supercars and, according to the guys from Top Gear, is the maddest car company of them all. Senator Chinchilla has built an excellent model of one of the fist ones: the Miura Jota

Lamborghini Miura Jota

Unlike Ferrari, Lamborghini doesn’t have a racing history, focusing on road cars. The Miura Jota however, was a development of the road car intended for racing. This explains the particularly unadorned look of the car, when compared to the already very clean design of the ‘normal’ Miura. The car never took part in a race, however. In typical Lamborghini fashion it crashed and then burned to a cinder during a test drive.

Most of the car models we feature are basically detailed sculptures, with perhaps a few functions such as steering or opening doors. I don’t tend to blog pure Technic models. This is not because I don’t appreciate the skill involved in building them, but for me it’s about the aesthetic. I prefer the look of system builds. Senator Chinchilla’s Miura has a beautifully sculpted body, with opening doors and an opening clam-shell engine cover. Underneath the voluptuous curves lurks a Technic chassis with steering, working suspension, gearbox and a transversely mounted engine, like the real car. It combines the best of both worlds.

Thanks to Jack Marquez (Ewok in Disguise) for the suggestion.

This hot rod is bigger than yours

It was inevitable, really. We’ve blogged hot rods and a full size LEGO car before and British LEGO-Technic enthusiast Simon Burfield built a working Lego vehicle large enough to carry a person a while ago (which we sadly neglected to blog at the time), but now there’s an actual full-size drivable LEGO hot rod, large enough to carry two people. This crazy contraption was built by Australian Steve Sammartino and Raul Oaida, from Romania.

About half a million bricks were used in the construction. The wheels aren’t made out of LEGO elements, obviously, and neither are a few of the other structural bits. The engine, however, is built with no fewer than 256 LEGO pneumatic pistons, which are powered by compressed air and can propel the car to a speed of about 20 km/h. According to Steve he is neither a car enthusiast nor a Lego enthusiast, which makes me wonder just how big things get if he is enthusiastic!

Via the BBC. Thanks to billyburg for the suggestion.

Ed Roth’s Rat Fink recreated in LEGO by Adam Grabowski

Adam Grabowski (misterzumbi) is usually quite laconic in his posting, so you can tell he’s excited about his latest LEGO work by the length of the accompanying prose. In short, he has recreated the famous Rat Fink by Ed Roth. And he’s done so with the help of some paint to make sure he got RF as close to source as he possibly could. Enjoy!

RatFink016a

The little big rig is a zippy RC

Back in 2009, LEGO released two sets (8183 and 8184 ) that got me pretty excited. The reason for my excitement was that these sets contained a car chassis that could be remote-controlled using a Power Functions IR-remote. This would make it relatively easy to build your own relatively compact remote-controlled car. I bought one, but it had about as much directional control as a puppy on a wet floor; it constantly bumped into walls or bits of furniture. It was fast, though.

Little Big Rig

Curtis D. Collins (curtydc) has now used a similar chassis to build his “little big rig”. He too reports that the steering isn’t great, but also that it is a zippy a little RC. I believe that, certainly with those big wheels. I also think it looks pretty cool. Like Barry Bosman’s Monster Masher, it has a certain toy-like quality to it that reminds me of the RC cars that were around when I was a child.

The cars are the stars

Back in June, I posted a collection of Eighties film and TV vehicles, which at that time consisted of four cars (and fifth one that wasn’t in the picture). Lots of people offered me suggestions for which vehicles to build next and I kept going.

Movie and TV vehicle collection

Top row from left to right: American Graffiti, The A-Team, Back to the Future, Batman (1989), Blues Brothers, The Dukes of Hazzard; middle row: Ghostbusters, Gone in 60 Seconds (2000), Inspector Morse, Knight Rider, Magnum P.I., Miami Vice; bottom row: Mr. Bean, Only Fools and Horses, Starsky & Hutch, Terminator II Judgement Day, Tomb raider and Top Gear.

By now, a few months later, I’ve got 18 vehicles. They are not all from the Eighties anymore and a few British ones sneaked in. I am really enjoying building these. Unlike many LEGO car builders, I don’t have it in me to come up with my own cool or custom car designs. I tend to build scale models of existing vehicles and most are bog-standard production versions. The cars that are the stars in movies and TV series, however, are often a bit more flamboyant. Building them means I still get to build the scale models I like so much, but with a few extra sprinkles on top and the often funny characters that go with them. There are a few obvious vehicles still missing from my collection, such as cars from any of the James Bond movies, but I am not about to stop this any time soon.

The Lamborghini Countach is Eighties car porn

As a child, back in the Eighties, I had a poster of Lego set 5580 Highway Rig, above my bed and I know I’m not the only LEGO car builder who fancied that particular model. However, if there would have been poster of the Lamborghini Countach built by Rolling Bricks back then, I might have replaced the poster with its image.

Countach 07

The Countach was the maddest supercar of the Eighties. It was super fast and hugely impractical and had a shape that was out of this world. The LEGO version is pretty much super too. Check out the clever half-stud offsets for the front fender and the SNOT work used for the rear one as well. In fact, every time I look at this model I notice some clever combination of parts and it wouldn’t be complete without working scissor doors. It’s hard to imagine this car being done better on this scale.