Gabriel Thomson just posted this beautiful creation, depicting the New Holland Honey Eater, a bird common in Southern Australia. I haven’t seen a build of a real animal look this good in a long time. I can only imagine the time and effort that went into getting the shape just right, let alone making it stand up without any external support.
Many thanks to Tim Inman for the heads up.
BrickWarriors is a new company, specializing in custom weapons and accessories designed for use with LEGO minifigures. They recently sent me a complimentary review package of their initial offering.
The quality of the pieces is on par with the other well-known custom companies. While the plastic doesn’t feel exactly like LEGO, it is very close and the pieces are sturdy. None of them feel flimsy or brittle. At the time of this writing, there are only four colors: Black, Red, Brown, and Dark Pearl Gray. The color matching for the black and red pieces were identical to the official LEGO pieces to which I compared them. The brown pieces were very close to official pieces and the dark pearl gray was just barely lighter in color than the pieces I checked it against.
The fit and compatibility was good. None of the items appeared to stress the hands of the minifigs. The weapons have multiple grips points in the places you would expect the real guns to have them. The hats, helmets and armor all fit well. They were not loose or too tight.
There was one item with some fit issues. Before sending me the items, the designer informed me that the horn attachment points on the Minotaur head had issues. Brickwarriors uses the official LEGO horns for the Minotaur and apparently LEGO made the horns slightly larger than the standard bar connection. The Minotaur holes are sized for the standard bar, therefore the horns stress the hole a bit. I checked this out and the official horns fit very tightly (I had some trouble getting them out) but other bar pieces fit just fine. BrickWarriors informed me that they are currently working on their own horns, which will be sized correctly. Also the neck hole on the Minotaur is tighter than on official Lego heads, but it does come off easily.
The company has made an effort to maintain the look of official LEGO pieces. Mostly this works for them pretty well. One place that I don’t think it works very well is in regards to the solid trigger guards on the guns. The company told me that they chose this design because they thought that it maintained the look they were trying to achieve.
The price of the items is reasonable, with US$1.00 being the price for most of the weapons and smaller accessories. The larger guns are priced at US$1.25. The armor, other bodywear, and helmets are US$1.50. The most expensive item is the Minotaur head at US$2.50.
The weapons and accessories cover quite a range of genres, from Sci-fi and Fantasy to Historical and Modern items. As a dyed-in-the-wool Castle fan, I’m partial to the Fantasy Items, but Space, modern warfare and apoc fans will enjoy the modern and futuristic armor and weapons.
Overall, I thought this was very good first run of items and hope to see more from this company in the future. They have a number of unique items that help them stand out and will fit nicely into any collection of custom minifig accessories. If you wish to see more, you can view all the pictures of the items in my BrickWarriors Review Pictures Set.
Not only was it really difficult to choose a `lead’ shot for this amazing collection of castles, it’s quite hard to quite describe the bizzarre form of creative genius RoxYourBlox has used for them. They’re casles, but not as you’ve ever seen them. Making tidy work of both LDD and excel for the trigonometry he (I assume) has created some of the oddest geometric castle-like structures I’ve ever seen. And you should see the one that didn’t make it to the brick.
BrickCon, the LEGO fan convention in Seattle September 29th through October 2nd, is fast approaching and we’d like to invite convention exhibitors to participate in The Brothers Brick’s collaborative display: Numereji 2421.
We have a nice backstory worked out, but the concept is simply a space frontier town 400 years in the future. Isolated crash survivors reconnect with their space traveling home culture.
No worries about making it fit the display parameters perfectly, we’ll have fun figuring out how to make it work.
We’ll be offering prizes in four categories:
Best Overall Creation
Best Landscape Feature
Best Building
Best Vehicle
Brandon Bannerman, the writer of our backstory, has also posted pictures of cutaway sections of the centerpiece crashed ship, The Howland, which he’s building so that you can get a better idea of the ship’s shape and structure in order to build partial sections of wreckage or buildings from ship scrap if you’d like. I’m going to build a barn for giant lizards based on this shape.
If you have any questions please feel free to ask them here or in the Numereji Flickr Group. Also, don’t forget to fill out a MOC card on the BrickCon attendee page.
If you’re looking for inspiration, we tried to include plenty in our “Building New Howland” post. I’ve been especially motivated by the art of Robh Ruppel, and watching Firefly.
Looking forward to seeing how it turns out.
The now closed Eurobricks Spaghetti Western contest has seen a steady drip feed of great wild west creations. When Marshal Banana posted his entry I was struck not so much by the great buildings, but by the absolutely excellent period furniture.
This is simply incredible. I passed it over several times because I thought it was a drawing. People are always saying that some build or other doesn’t look like LEGO. Well, this one really doesn’t. This build is nothing short of outstanding. Mark Anderson built it. Obviously, he is awesome.
A VV-308 LOCUST, that is. This incredible fighter, by Nate DeCastro is a thing of beauty. The sleekness is something that many builders try and few achieve. Nate achieved it…and then some.
Tyler Clites is in the midst of a whirlwind of creations while participating in the IronBuilder competition. The current piece is the yellow triangular sign piece that he uses for the chicken’s beak in this one. I’m loving the pose and sense of comic tension in this work.
Cole Blaq tears it up with what he calles a “tablescrap”.
While reading Bricks Down Under tonight, I came across a new web-based tool that looked very exciting (and a title too good not to copy). Rebrickable, made by Nathan Thom, is a brilliant website which offers a tool where you to enter sets you own, and find sets (and MOCs) you can build. So if there’s been an old set that you’ve always wanted to own, maybe you’ll find you already do.
The website went live early due to a leak so its range of sets is currently limited but it is increasing.
Nathan (The Grandpappy) has more than put his bricks where his mouth is with an excellent two vehicle set. It looks like it’s got a touch of Exo-Force and a touch of Space Police III, and it’s definitely got a touch of class.
