I wish that Hollywood would stop making watered-down renditions of Eighties classics, no matter how slick they are, and would instead focus on something new. 
However, Marin Stipkovic‘s rendition of Robocop looks like a classic to me.
Posts by Ralph
The Boeing Triple Seven is ready for take-off.
We have previously featured large airliners, but few (if any) of them built to minifig scale (Ryan McNaught’s A-380 is technically only half an airliner). Calum Tsang started designing his minifig scale Boeing 777 back in 2006, shortly after one of the real aircraft set a new long-distance record for commercial airliners. He started building in 2011 and has recently fitted new wings and engines. This dedication has paid of, because it is big and it is beautiful.
The model is a whopping 200 studs long and has a similar wing span. With that size, Calum has had to use wood to strengthen the fuselage spine, as well as a few metal struts to support it, but it’s a very nicely sculpted model. One of my favourite bits is the tail fin, with a brick-built version of the logo that LEGO use for the aircraft in recent City sets.
Building prehistoric creatures with Bright Bricks
Building with LEGO professionally may sound like a dream job to many of us. Recently, whilst I was in the UK for Brighton Modelworld I caught up with Ed Diment (Lego Monster), who gave up his job as a management consultant more than two years ago to partner up with Duncan Titchmarsh, who is the UK’s sole Lego Certified Professional. Together they run Bright Bricks.
We talked about being a professional LEGO-builder and discussed their latest event. From the 26th of February to the 27th of April, the Milestones Museum in Basingstoke (UK) hosts the Lost World Zoo. Bright Bricks and various members of the UK’s LEGO community that were drawn in for this, built dozens of models of prehistoric creatures and plants, that are now on display in the museum. They were finishing the models for this during my visit and I lent a hand working on a 4 meter tall model of a Moa, which is an extinct New Zealand walking bird. They also built a massive sabre tooth tiger, which I photographed in the company workshop.
Two more smaller examples are the ammonite by Tim Goddard (Rogue Bantha and a sabre toothed squirrel, built by Joe Perez (Mortalswordsman).
Visitors to the museum can also take part in activities, such as building a life-size woolly mammoth out of LEGO bricks. Yes, you did read that right: life-size. These guys like to do things big.
The company has been steadily growing. It currently employs about a dozen people working full-time, as well as several more on a temporary basis. The growth has meant having to move several times, because space in the workshop kept running out. They’re now based in a large unit on an industrial estate in Hampshire. Even though this is probably larger than all their previous workshops combined, the number of people, the large builds and the vast numbers of parts that they have in stock means that it can still be pretty difficult to move around in. The growth has also come with an increased amount of red tape. For instance, UK law requires a company of a given size to have an environmental policy and a health and safety policy, that includes having to find out how much heat is produced by a vast quantity of LEGO going up in flames. Ed probably spends more time on this and on dealing with clients and the media than he does on building. He still builds a lot, though, and with a seemingly endless supply of bricks. According to Ed, his current job is not as much fun as building AFOL models all day, but it is still definitely more fun than a regular job. Having spent a day putting more bricks together than I normally do in about a month, I can believe him (although I was still happy to go back to my day job).
If you’re in the South of the UK, I highly recommend that go check out the Lost World Zoo.
Digging deep
Many of you may know Arjan Oudekotte (Konajra) as a LEGO shipbuilder. However, when he started posting his models on-line a few years ago, he mainly built large diggers. I know he is working on several new ships, but he has now gone back to his roots and built this impressive Caterpillar 7495 rope shovel. These machines are used for open-pit mining
It is power functions remote controlled, like most of his diggers, and while the size of this thing may suggest otherwise, it’s actually minifig scale.
The lightweight fighter just entered the big league
Most of the older models by Everblack are essentially his own refined versions of models that were already out there. They are very nice and I’ve blogged a few, but with his new F-16 he has moved into completely new territory.
The F-16 was developed in the seventies as a lighter and cheaper alternative to the F-15 Eagle. As such, it’s relatively small for a modern jet. Everblack’s model isn’t small, however. Its scale is a whopping 1/18, which is about twice as large as his previous models. This large scale has allowed him to do some beautiful sculpting on the jet, skillfully using curved slopes. Judging from the way the undercarriage and the wings bend, the large size does come with a few penalties, but my word, it looks stunning.
Toyota’s retro cruiser
Pēteris Sproģis generally builds excellent small vehicles, but lately he has been building larger ones and they do not disappoint either. His Shelby Mustang recently won the 75th LUGNuts challenge and he has now built a superb rendition of Toyota’s FJ Cruiser.
Toyota’s orginal FJ Land Cruiser set a new standard of reliability for off-road vehicles, practically replacing the traditional Land Rover in Africa, whilst in the US it gained a bit of a cult-following. The FJ Cruiser is a modern interpretation of this classic, with similar off-road performance and with retro styling. I don’t think it’s a particularly pretty car, but compared to other Toyotas, which are about as interesting as wet spaghetti, it is distinctive. When building a model of a car with distinctive looks, like the FJ Cruiser or a Hummer or VW Beetle, you can mess up the proportions pretty badly before it will no longer be recognizable. However, Pēteris’ model is just about perfect.
My howitzer is bigger than yours
In the fifties, the United States experimented with artillery that could launch nuclear weapons. Not to be outdone, the Soviet Union developed the 2A3 Kondensator 2P self-propelled howitzer. Andy Baumgart (D-Town Cracka) has built a highly detailed 1/30 scale model of this unusual piece of Cold War history.
Early nuclear weapons tended to be on the bulky side. Consequently, whilst many modern self-propelled artillery pieces have a caliber of 155 mm (6.10 inches), the caliber of the Kondensator was a whopping 406 mm (16 inches), which is more in line with a battleship main battery. It was one of the largest self-propelled artillery pieces ever built. It was unwieldy, had a low rate of fire and never entered service, but it makes for an impressive model.
Brickish in Brighton
Last weekend, more than a dozen members of the Brickish Association descended on the seaside town of Brighton in the Southern UK for Brighton Modelworld. This is an event for modelbuilding of all kinds, from wooden dollhouses to gasoline-powered mini tanks large enough to seat a person. This was the seventh time that Brickish had a display there and the fifth time that I attended myself. Here are a few of the highlights.
Julie Greig (Jujem71) displayed a collection of minifigs that represent various generations of Doctor Who and their assistants, which were instantly recognizable to many fans of the series.
A British TV show that is not nearly as well known outside of the UK as Doctor Who is Stingray. It showed the adventures of a submarine called Stingray, which was home-based at a town/mi;itary base called Marineville. This was built in microscale by Andrew Danieli (kaitain).
We also had a collection of rockets, including my own. Mine were completely dwarfed, however, by the moon rocket from Tintin built by Ian Greig (Bluemoose) and the space Shuttle Endeavour built by Ed Diment (Lego Monster), Annie Diment (Mrs Monster), Naomi Farr (euphonica) and Stuart Crawshaw (OptimalControl).
More pictures of these and other LEGO models at the event can be found in the Bricks at brighton flickr group. It was hard not to notice how, for instance, the train displays seem to change very little from year to year. Perhaps the (largely) elderly gentlemen who build them add a new house or a new tree every now and then, but the LEGO display is completely different every year. LEGO is so much more flexible and this makes us very popular with the visitors and the organizers alike. I’m already looking forward to next year’s display.
All Ferraris are beautiful, even the ugly ones
Remember the Alfa Romeo racer I posted a while ago? In that post, I made a remark about the truly hideous nose of the Ferrari F14 T, which is their Formula one car for the 2014 season. To get more air under the car, where it is accelerated to create down force, race car designers want to raise the nose far from the ground. This led to the noses on Formula 1 cars steadily creeping upward over the years. In fact, they were getting so far off the ground that they were beginning to pose a danger to other drivers in case of a crash. Consequently, this year, new regulations were introduced that limited how high the nose is allowed to be and this has led to some ‘interesting’ engineering solutions.
Ferrari’s method resulted in a decidedly crooked shape. Nathanael L. has built a model of the F14 T, but at first I didn’t even really notice the small kink. It’s a beautiful car. Mind you, Ferrari’s solution is by no means the ugliest. I can’t imagine anybody building Torro Rosso F1 car any time soon…
3...2...1...Launch!
In little more than a week, I’ll be joining more than a dozen other members of the Brickish Association at Brighton Modelworld in the UK. This is a show for scale models of just about any kind imaginable. In the last years it has seen an ever-growing contingent of LEGO builders displaying their models to a discerning audience. Brighton is a wonderful town and the show is always huge fun. Expect a report in due time. At Brighton, among other things, we’ll be displaying a collection of rockets and missiles, including the whopping minifig scale rocket from Tintin built by Ian Greig (bluemoose). This idea prompted me to have a go at a few of the military models that have been on my to-do-list for months.
The first is a Patriot missile Transporter-Erector-Launcher (TEL), as used by the Dutch military. Patriot is an American surface-to-air missile system intended against aircraft and ballistic missiles. A single system consists of a number of trucks with a radar, command post, generator and communications equipment, coupled to a number of launchers. In the Dutch military, these launchers are mounted on trailers pulled by DAF YAZ-2300 tractor units. Dutch, American and German Patriot units are currently deployed to Southern Turkey, to defend against Syrian ballistic missiles.
My second model is a ballistic missile on its TEL. The (in)famous R-17 Elbrus, better known as the Scud, was developed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It was widely exported to Soviet allies, including several Warsaw-pact countries as well as various counties in the Middle East, such as Syria, Libya and Iraq. Scud missiles also found their way to North Korea, which developed its own versions and in turn exported those to Iran. My model represents an Iranian missile, known locally as the Shahab-2, on its Russian-built MAZ-543 TEL.
Ballistic missile defense is a fascinating high-tech and high-stakes business. A typical short-range ballistic missile, such as the Scud, travels through the upper reaches of the atmosphere and plummets down towards its target at about five times the speed of sound. To intercept it far enough from its target, the interceptor missile travels at a similar speed. The intercept has also been described as hitting a bullet with a bullet.
The models were interesting to build, because they have lots of details and things that hinge, but also because of their camouflage. Camouflage is designed to break up the contours of an object and to allow it to blend into the background. The colours tend to be arranged in patches. Randomly throwing bits with different colours together doesn’t give you the right look. I tend to use the following guidelines:
1) the border between colours should ideally never be a straight line of more than 3 or 4 studs long before it changes direction.
2) once a border has changed direction once, it should change direction again quickly
Of course, this gets progressively more difficult as the number of colours in the scheme increases and as you move to smaller scales. I wouldn’t have been able to do it if I hadn’t finally gotten my hands on decent numbers of small dark green plates.
And the winners of the 75th LUGnuts challenge are
About four weeks ago, I announced the 75th build challenge organised by LUGNuts, the online group for LEGO car nuts. There normally are no prizes for the challenges, but because this was our 75th we decided to add a little extra incentive. Members could build a car, obviously, but with other members assigning the car in question. The builders of the winning cars get prizes, but also the members who suggested them. The judges had a hard time choosing, but after I tallied up all the votes, we reached a conclusion. Without further ado, here are the winners of the 75th LUGnuts challenge. The comments below the images, written in italic script, are by Lino Martins ( Lino M), who, for lack of a better word, serves as LUGNuts’ ringleader.
In first place:
Pēteris Sproģis shows us all how its done with his stunning1967 Ford GT500. He could have stopped at just building the car, but he sets the scene and tells a story with an entire diorama of a Mustang car pulling a Mustang horse.
In second place:
What happens when Lamborghini turns 50 and has a midlife crisis? The Egoista, as built by Curtis D. Collins (curtydc). Trophy brides half your age will forgive a guy’s pot belly and comb-over if he owned this baby. But you can’t take her with you as its only a one-seater. Awesome job, Curty!
In third place:
Lego Junkie. lives up to his name with his totally awesome Ford RS-200. (…) Good show, Junkie. May you never seek recovery for your addiction.
The winning cars were assigned by Raphael Granas (r a p h y ), Rolands Kirpis (Rolic) and Dylan Denton (/>ylan/>.), respectively.
We post contest announcements on TBB fairly regularly, but I realise that we don’t actually always show the outcome. If it is this good, however, that’s a big omission. Congratulations guys!
New shoes for old tanks
Remember the Brickmania track links kickstarter project? It reached its funding goal and the first models that use these tracks are now appearing online.
These fine examples, an M4 Sherman and two different versions of the Stuart light tank, were built by LegoUli. These already were some of the best examples of minifig-scale US WW2 tanks out there and built in old dark grey to boot. This is a difficult colour to use, because all kinds of handy parts builders have become used to, such as cheese slopes, were never made in this particular shade. It is probably the closest match to the colour of the real vehicles, though. The old track shoes were a bit narrow, but thanks to the new track links, this has now been rectified.