Yearly Archives: 2013

Dordrecht Water Tower

Erwin te Kortschot (buildingmaster1966) returns to the Brothership on back-to-back Saturdays with this vision in brown that was actually constructed sometime last year but only recently posted to Flickr. The castle-like water tower from the Netherlands was designed by architect J.A. van der Kloes and was completed in 1882. If you find yourself passing through Villa Augustus and in need of rest, the building is still in service as a hotel. You can find more information on the Dordrecht Water Tower here, with some great photos and a history of the region.

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Friday Night Fights (Round 20)

Welcome back fight fans, to Sin City Nevada for another low-blow edition of Friday Night Fights! Tonight’s bout features two masters of minimalism willing to put everything on the line for your entertainment. Let’s go to the tale of the tape:

Fighting out of the red corner, from Cheltenham, UK…David Alexander Smith and his “Owl of Minerva“.

And fighting out of the blue corner, from the cool side of the pillow…the_jetboy and his “Man in the Brown Suit”

As usual, constant reader, you are tasked with deciding the outcome of this pugilistic endeavor by way of comment. On the last edition of Friday Night Fights, good triumphed over evil with a score of 7-3. Tune in next week for another action packed edition of Friday Night Fights!

Factory Friday

Normally I wouldn’t bring up a work related topic with the weekend upon us, but Lee Young (edguy20) has created a pair of brilliant factories that demand your attention. The builder is decidedly tight-lipped about his work, but some models need no description or tedious back-story. The only thing I find lacking is a little bit of action…where are the minifigs?

Edguy is a power metal band from Fulda, Germany but I doubt they have any connection to this second factory. The builder seems to have named it after his screen-name.

Grab your time-card and punch out, it’s Miller time.

“You have been weighed, you have been measured, and you have been found wanting.”

Blake Baer just finished an outstanding Scientific Scale that includes functional details like sliding doors, scales, leveling mechanism, arrows to indicate equality of weight, working weight differential, sliding drawer and working tweezers.

A daring aviator and his plane

From French builder 74louloute comes this amazing diorama of 1930s aviator Henri Guillaumet, a mail pilot in South America who crashed in the Andes and lived to tell the tale. The scene here is brilliant, and the builder is the first I’ve seen to use tiles and the new inverted tiles together to make a super thin smooth wing, and it works marvelously.

It’s always Christmas somewhere

Just to get you in the mood for Christmas, uh, four months early, flickr user LoctiteGirl presents this lovely winter wonderland. The bare trees look like something straight off a classic Christmas card, and I love the forced-perspective castle in the background.

Classic Space is back, bigger, faster

Matt De Lanoy (Pepa Quin) redesigned Classic Space set 6861 X1 Patrol Craft into this sleek X2 iteration. The trans-bright-green windscreen looks dashing on the all-grey ship body, and the updated engines are snazzy. And even though it’s quite simple, I’m also a fan of the brick-built starry space backdrop.

Matt built this as part of a collaboration for his local LEGO store’s community window, so if you’re near the Woodfield store in Schaumburg, Ill. you can check it out in person.

A little cottage on the hill

David Hensel (Legonardo Davidy) has emerged in recent years as one of the best castle builders around, as evidenced by the superb techniques exemplified in this simple little cottage. The rock work both in the bedrock and the stone walls is particularly compelling.

Druid's Cottage

Racing in style

The latest model by Nick Barrett (technicnick) shows a scene from 1956. That year, the Ecurie Ecosse (which is French for Team Scotland) with Ivor Bueb and Ninian Sanderson and their glorious Jaguar D-type racing car won the famous 24 Hours of Le Mans, beating drivers such as the legendary Stirling Moss.

There’s a lot more to like about this diorama. The two race cars have beautifully sculpted bodies, that in defiance of what most of the ‘cool’ people do, boldly show lots of studs. Kudos to Nick! The reproduction of the team’s custom-built transporter has elegant brick-built letters and nice chrome frames around the windows. At a first glance, the lovely canopy looks as though it could be made out of cloth, but it is actually built largely using 1×2 bricks. Finally, the brick-built figures seem to have character somehow.

I’m very much looking forward to seeing the model at the Great Western LEGO Show (aka. Steam) in Swindon (UK) on October 5th and 6th.

Yo, JOE! It’s GI Joe Platform-01

Eric Druon’s (baronsat) version of the GI Joe TRANSPORTABLE TACTICAL BATTLE PLATFORM is what a playable, fun moc should be. Rather than slavishly recreating it in LEGO form, this creation focuses on play features, and is packed full of them. Note the fold-up ramp, the battle command center, the working crane, the gun turret and the missile launchers. In the ’80s, every kid wanted a toy like this. Look out Cobra, I could spend hours playing with this set! I would love to see the GI Joe Headquarters.

Neon Monday

For your viewing pleasure on this Wednesday morning, Pēteris Sprogis brings us the Neon Monday. This is quite a cool little car model. I could believe that it’s meant to be a car of the future, or that it’s a model of a concept car from the 60s. Either way, this thing has vision. While the model is great, the builder has taken things up a notch with an abstract background, all brick-built. It makes of a very eye-catching presentation!

SHIP in a day

With SHIPtember underway, I am going to steal a quote from Tyler Clites as flickr is being inundated with photos of “long skinny technic frames”. Throughout the next month I am sure we can expect many of those long skinny technic frames to transform into wondrous spaceships of all shapes, sizes (provided they are 100+ studs long) and colours. However, for the impatient ones among us, Pascal (pasukaru76) was nice enough to whip up a little SHIP in the first day of SHIPtember for our viewing pleasure…12 hours only in fact.

With Pascal I have come expect minimalist clean styling, and the Lucky Dragon No. 7 certainly delivers on those points. But the addition of those solar sails results in a brilliant juxtaposition of organic and mechanical design features. I love it.