I don’t think I’d want to be on the wrong side of this one. It’s not often that I see a helicopter design that looks original, but this one by flickr user piratesxlovexrum is awesome. It’s aggressive and bold, and looks vaguely Soviet-inspired. And I have to point out that great bit of photography.
This mind-blowing working compound crossbow is completely LEGO, and made by builders extraordinaire Sean and Steph Mayo (Siercon and Coral). Be sure to check out the video of it in action! Not only does it shoot, even the cables are made from LEGO train electronics wires.
The Brothers Brick snagged a quick interview with Sean and Steph about this awesome creation:
The Brothers Brick: Where did you get your inspiration?
Sean and Steph: We wanted to use LEGO to shoot a projectile, building something other than a catapult or a trebuchet. We’ve seen lots of epic brick built guns online, and thought it would be tons of fun to create a custom Lego compound bow. This quickly evolved into crossbow for extra stability, as the bow is under tons of tension.
TBB: How long did this build take?
S&S: We probably spent a week playing around with the different mechanics. We had a lot to figure out about the flexibility of LEGO pieces under stress, how much the train cables could take, and which pieces would be useful for the cams. Once that was sorted the actual construction in a couple days.
TBB: Why a compound Crossbow, wouldn’t it have been enough to just create a bow?
S&S: A regular bow honestly would probably have been more effective as a lot of the natural flexibility of the LEGO pieces makes them more conducive to a recurve bow rather than a compound bow. But for ages we’ve been fascinated by the cams, idler wheels, and the mechanics of a compound bow, so we wanted to give it a try!
TBB: How many pieces did you use?
S&S: We usually don’t count the pieces we used, and have no clue how some builders do it, but we estimate around 1700 pieces.
TBB: How far can it shoot/how much would it hurt?
S&S: Disregarding the outliers, it can shoot around 40 feet. As a bow without the compound element it could shoot farther, but we couldn’t resist trying to build the cams. As far as how much damage it can deliver, we’re not entirely sure. We have yet to shoot anyone with it, and it is tipped with a flexible rubber lego (both for the competition this was built for and to minimize any accidental injury). It can likely stick into drywall with a sharp enough tip, but not much else.
TBB: What is it designed from? Is this from a video game or something similar?
S&S: This is an original design, but influenced by the Spartan Laser aesthetic from the Halo series. We also wanted to use the green spikes as viper fangs, so we tried to stick with venomous snake inspired highlights. We picture this to be something a Green Arrow vigilante might carry around.
Be sure to check out some of Sean and Steph’s previous insanely awesome creations, like the giant sushi roll and Cortana hologram.
This sweet mobile fighting platform by Garry features the same cockpit and hull, and then adds legs, rotors, and whatnot onto it to turn it into different weaponized vehicles, all of which look totally BA.
Japanese builder Moko brings us this awesome model of Gipsy Danger, the humongous alien-fighting war machine in Pacific Rim, Guillermo Del Toro’s high-budget homage to mecha.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No Starch Press recently sent me a copy of one of their latest LEGO books, Amazing Vehicles, to review. It retails for $20 USD, though you can currently nab it over at Amazon for $15. Written by Nathanaël Kuipers and Mattia Zamboni, it’s a giant instruction manual in book form for building ten different vehicles. This is Volume 1, and the second volume is slated for release next month.
I’ve never been much interested in any of the unofficial build-it-yourself books, regardless of subject matter, because I always thought that if I’m going to build something that isn’t a set, I want to build my own model that I can claim. Additionally, I’m not much of a vehicle builder.
Nevertheless, since I wanted to give the book a proper review, I sat down to build one of the models. I chose to build number 9, the Street Rod. The book uses the same master set of parts for all of the vehicles, which are laid out on one of the first pages. If you’re just building a single model, though, like I was, you won’t need all of the pieces, and I found it annoying that each model didn’t have a page showing what parts are needed for it.
Instead, I gathered all of the parts for it the slow way, by manually going through each instruction step and finding the necessary pieces in my collection. While a lot of the parts are pretty common, unless you buy a lot of creator sets, chances are you won’t have all of the necessary pieces in the right colors. The book is quick to encourage builders to find substitutes, though. I found all but one red curved slope 2x4x2/3, which I substituted with a 1×4 tile and some cheese slopes (it goes on the rear bumper).
The book is high quality, printed on heavy paper, and the instructions are crisp and clear.
The black pieces (notoriously hard to make out) were even easy to see. I did find the difference between white and tan to be frustratingly hard to see, and honestly I’m not even sure why the models need any tan: the entire book only calls for 3 pieces in tan, and they are mostly used in hidden places.
So I began building the car, and it started off pretty much the way you would expect a Creator-type car to start: some long plates for the base that you build up from. Immediately, though, I was surprised to find that the plates are actually facing upside down, and the entire car chassis is built studs-down. The direction reverses part-way up, and the hood and trunk are studs up.
The engine area was filled with a nifty bit of Studs Not On Top (SNOT) work, and some clever half-stud offsetting. The final model is a snappy looking little roadster, similar in size to the 150-200 piece official Creator vehicles. It’s definitely a lot larger than minifig scale, being 8 studs wide, although I don’t think minifigs would look terribly out of place in it (although, sadly, there’s no legroom for them). I was very impressed with the overall build quality, and I hope the rest of the vehicles in the book hold up to this standard. Seasoned LEGO builders who are used to working with SNOT techniques won’t find anything new here, but for someone who is just getting into using more advanced building techniques, there’s a lot to learn here. This book would have been a goldmine if I’d had it when I was a teenage builder.
Just a few days ago, I highlighted the freaky Joker mech blasting through Gotham, and I noted that more dioramas by these collaborators were in the works. Here’s the next, by 6kyubi6. It’s a crazy scene of downtown mayhem as the sewers unleash a truly gigantic mutant Croc. A plethora of superheroes and even a few other villains dot the landscape as the city sustains its fair share of collateral damage. Both scenes will be on display at Briqu’Expo 2013 in Diemoz, France, next month.
With what just might be the scariest LEGO Joker I’ve ever seen (and as a mech, no less), this model by oLaF appears to be only one part of a multi-stage diorama collaboration between several builders. I can’t wait to see the whole thing, but in the meantime, this segment is worth taking a look at by itself.
Korean fan Myungpyo Kim brings us this awesome Landrover, ready to race in the World Rally Championship and emblazoned with the logo of what everyone knows is the coolest energy company in the world, Octan.
