About Ralph

Ralph Savelsberg, also known as Mad physicist, is an actual physicist, but he's not all that mad. He has been building with LEGO ever since he could first put two bricks together. He primarily builds scale models of cars and aircraft. You can find most of Ralph's stuff on his flickr pages.

Posts by Ralph

London in a snow globe

The professional builders from Bright Bricks have a reputation to uphold for building big things for Christmas. In 2011 their 38 ft brick-built Christmas tree dazzled travelers passing through St. Pancras Station in London and set a record for being the world’s largest LEGO tree. Last year they built the world’s largest LEGO Advent Calendar for Covent Garden. This year they’ve built a fantastic collection of London landmarks to go inside the world’s largest LEGO snow globe. It measures an impressive 3m x 3m x 3m (10ft x 10ft x 10ft). It’s quite possibly the only LEGO snow globe and neither the snow nor the globe are made of LEGO, but who cares?

Snow gets blown through the globe and it has a tunnel down the middle that visitors can walk through, to be pretty much surrounded by it and to possibly feel a bit like London mayor Boris Johnson did in Feb 2009, when one of the largest snowfalls in recent history dumped 20 cm of white flakes on his city, bringing it to a stand-still.

I had the pleasure of visiting the Bright Bricks workshop in early October, when this project had just gotten underway. It must be tempting to cut some corners (perhaps even literally) here and there when building professionally for an audience that largely consists of people who don’t build with LEGO and who may not appreciate all the intricacies, but these are high-quality models. Having seen some of the builds at an early stage, I was very impressed by the level of detail and the clever build techniques that went into them.

The snow globe is on display at Covent Garden London until early January.

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Four score and seven years ago...

This 19th of November marks the 150th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The Battle of Gettysburg, which took place several months before, was the bloodiest battle of the American civil war and many of the dead were hastily buried in temporary graves. They were subsequently reburied in what was to become the Gettysburg National Cemetery. The Address was one of several speeches that marked the official consecration of the cemetery.

Gary Brooks (Gary the Procrastinator), who is no stranger to TBB, has expertly recreated the scene of President Lincoln giving the speech. At the time, the reception of the speech was mixed, but it has gained a prominent place in the history and culture of the United States.

Battlefield taxis

For some reason, a lot of military builders choose to build their military vehicles in dark grey. I suspect that it is because more suitable colors, such as tan, dark green or olive green, are expensive and because relatively few parts are made in them. Of course, if you do want a color that is available in vast quantities, you could always opt for a United Nations color scheme. This is exactly what Project Azazel has done for two of his new vehicles: an M113 Armored Personnel Carrier and a Armored Infantry Fighting Vehicle (AIFV).

The M113 was developed in the mid-fifties, when the US Army needed a new Armored Personnel Carrier. It had to be smaller and lighter than existing vehicles, so that it could be transported aboard the then-new C-130 Hercules airlifter. The key to keeping the weight of the M113 down was a new welding technique that allowed using aluminum for the armor instead of steel. It first entered production in the 60s and is still in use with the US Army and many export customers all over the world. It also spawned many different versions, including the AIFV. This was a more modern and more heavily armed version. It wasn’t adopted by the US Army, but was further developed for export customers, including the Netherlands, Belgium, Turkey and South Korea.

One thing I like about the model vehicles, besides their refreshing white paint scheme, is that they don’t appear to be ridiculously large.

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.

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.

Star Trekking, miniland style

I am currently enjoying reruns of Star Trek The Next Generation on Belgian TV. When I saw the first episode a few weeks ago, many years after I first saw it, I was a bit surprised at how dated the series looks nowadays and how young most of the actors were. Of course, many Trekkies consider Captain Picard, Cdr. Riker and their crew to be young upstarts. The real Starship Enterprise is captained by Kirk, with Spock serving as his first officer and Uhura, ‘Bones’ McCoy, Chechov, ‘Scotty’ and Sulu making up the rest of the cast.

Ryan Ziegelbauer (rionz) has recreated all of them in miniland form. Despite the limitations inherent to building miniland figures, to me they are all instantly recognisable. The only thing missing is a cardboard set that wobbles slightly!

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.

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.

Formula One redux

Back in 1975, long before the classic eighties Model Team sets that I had as a child, LEGO already made a series of realistic models of real vehicles, in the so-called Hobby sets. One of these was Lego set 392, Formula One; a model of a race car that, considering the limited parts that LEGO made at the time, was remarkably detailed.

Of course, with the fancy newer parts that we have today, it’s possible to make it smoother and more detailed, which is exactly what LegoExotics has done.

If you have Power Functions in your castle, magic is superfluous

Perhaps it’s just me, but I would never have imagined that LEGO Power Functions and LEGO Castles would go well together. There may be other examples out there that I am not aware of, but Marco den Besten (Ecclesiastes) proves me wrong with his Acirhon’s Nest.

At a first glance it’s a decent-looking castle with a bit of a fantasy theme. Take a closer look, however, and you’ll note a moving representation of a waterfall, a bear that moves in and out of its cave, some sort of bat circling one of the towers and warriors emerging from hatches in the top of another tower. Powerful stuff.

Collaborative displays rock

As nice as the individual models that we blog are, I think there’s often something really special about collaborative builds. The collaborative display by Pennlug at Brickfair, for instance, was one of my favourite things on show and Bricksboro Beach, built by members of Brickish, was probably the nicest display I have ever personally been involved with.

Last weekend, Legoworld took place in Utrecht in the Netherlands. Even though it is the public event closest to where I live and the largest LEGO-event in the Netherlands, I could not make it there myself. This is unfortunate for a variety of reasons, including because I would have loved to see the collaborative city display by lowlug-members Erik Smit (عʈ¡ – ʇıɯs ıʇə ʞıɹə), Tijger-San, Thomassio, Mockingbird, Arjan Oude Kotte (Konajra), Neverroads, Ruben Ras (workfromtheheart) and JeroenD (in random order).

The individual elements, such as the cafe-corner compatible buildings (such as the ones by Tijger-San pictured above) are nice, but the whole display is one of those ‘whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ kind of things. You could walk around this and would keep noticing new things. If you want to get an impression of what it must looked like to members of the audience, check out Erik’s video.

The Stingers’ Hornet strike fighter

It’s no secret that I like the F/A-18 Hornet (albeit not as much as I like the F-14 Tomcat), so I’m always happy to see a nice model of this US Navy strike fighter.

Ryan Harris (Shep Sheppardson) has built a fine example in the markings of US Navy Strike Fighter Squadron 113, better known as the Stingers. This was the first US Navy combat squadron to start flying Hornets back in the eighties and is still active today. Some elements of the model aren’t all that different from other Hornets (including my own), but looks very much like the real deal and has a few interesting features. I’m primarily very curious to find out how the intakes are held together.

British Airways beauty

Sometimes LEGO builders drop off the map all of a sudden. Real life priorities take over or they lose interest. If the only way you followed the stuff that Ed Diment (Lego Monster) built was via flickr, you might think that the same at happened to him. To some extent it has. Ed’s real-life priority, however, is LEGO-related: he has become a professional LEGO builder, who, together with Duncan Titmarsh, runs a company called Bright Bricks. They also built the jet engine we blogged a while ago. Today, for the first time in a long while, Ed has posted one a new model on flickr.

It is a 1/55 scale model of an Airbus A-380 airliner, commissioned by a toy shop in Heathrow Airport. I already saw pictures of this a few weeks ago, whilst visiting the Bright Bricks workshop, and have been eagerly anticipating blogging them ever since. I know from Ed that being a professional LEGO builder means often spending time building things that aren’t necessarily all that interesting as well as dealing with a lot of red tape, such as health and safety rules and planning permissions. Ed is an airplane buff, however. Back when his LEGO-building was just a hobby, he built a model of Concorde, for instance. It is no surprise then, that the Airbus was one model that he himself was looking forward to building.

The real aircraft is a bit of a blimp, but the way the difficult compound curves on the fuselage were sculpted, the way the wing profiles and engines were built and the wonderful Brick-built British Airways markings on the tail make this model a thing of beauty.

Mechabrick: turn your minifigs into mecha

One of the many cool things I didn’t list in my report on Steam 2013 was mechabrick.

It was started by British AFOL Ben Jarvis that combines three of his passions: Lego, robots and wargaming. Ben has launched a kick-starter project to get it under way. If successful, this should enable the launch of the first mechabrick kit, which will consist of all the parts you need to turn four minifigs into kick-ass mecha (with friggin’ big guns, of course) and four boards that are to be combined to form the play board. The kit will also contain stickers to customise the mecha, as well as dice and a rulebook. Mechabrick is more than just a war game with mecha, however. An essential and fun part of the game will be building the scenery and obstacles on the game board with our favourite plastic bricks. Ben built a rather impressive example for the show.

At the event I had the opportunity to handle two of the prototypes and they looked (and felt) promising. I’m sure that plenty of you, like Ben, are fans of Lego, robots and wargaming. Check out the pictures in the flickr group and the project page. If you like what you see, you can pledge your support.