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

Tigelfah Castle

In the last week or so, new pictures by James Pegrum (peggyjb) kept popping up in my contacts’ latest photos, offering tantalising glimpses of an amazing Castle model coming together. James has now posted a picture that shows just about the whole thing, although he couldn’t quite capture all of it without doing some major remodelling of his house. The castle is not based on any particular real one, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t look realistic.

Admittedly, I’m not a connoisseur of Castle models, but this one strikes me as really rather good, for a couple of reasons. My fellow brother Gambort once explained that, to be good, a LEGO city should ideally not all be built on the same level or on a rectangular grid, except perhaps if it’s meant to be somewhere in a particularly flat part of the United States (I am paraphrasing a bit and this latter part is my own addition, but it is a nice bridge to the next sentence). There are no castles in the United States, except for generally cheesy-looking fakes, and I reckon that LEGO castles too get better by not being rectangular and level. James’ model ticks both of those boxes.

This is as good as it gets for now. However, it will still get better. This is merely James’ contribution to a collaboration with seven other members of the Brickish association. Their complete layout will be unveiled at the 2013 Great Western LEGO show, which will take place on the 5th and 6th of October in Swindon, and I am very much looking forward to seeing it with my own two eyes.

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Stobart Scanias rule the roads of Britain

In the last few days I have written blog posts about the latest creations by Dutch truck builders (Nanko Klein Paste’s DAF and Dennis Glaasker’s Scania), but now it’s my own turn.

Since about two years, I’ve been building a collection of British vehicles to display at shows. In the summer of last year, I travelled from Portsmouth to York in the company of a group of British LEGO-building friends, going to a LEGO-show. Along the way we discussed my plans for building more British vehicles. During the five-hour drive we saw at least two dozen trucks operated by the Stobart Group. This company was founded by ‘Steady’ Eddie Stobart and operates more than 2000 trucks, mostly Scanias. They are ubiquitous in Britain and instantly recognizable. It was obvious that, if I was going to build a truck for my collection, it had to be a Stobart truck (or lorry, as my friends insist on calling it).

It took me a while though. One of the things that make these trucks/lorries so recognizable is their rather funky-looking colour scheme and even though the graphics on the real vehicles are done with stickers, I wanted to build them out bricks. This was complicated, obviously, but the end result does give a decent impression of what it looks like on the real Scania.

In little more than a week, the 2013 Great Western LEGO Show will take place in Swindon in the UK. My collection of British vehicles will be on display there, including this truck, as well as my B-52 model.

Classic Dutch DAF

Hot on the heels of fellow Dutch truck builder Dennis Glaasker, Nanko Klein Paste (nkle) has also built a new truck. Unlike Dennis’ trucks, it’s not all shiny and full of chrome, however. It’s a much more utilitarian-looking Dutch DAF 2300 truck from the early eighties.

There is much to like though, such as the construction of the radiator with a small edge around it, the SNOT construction on the side of the cab and front bumper and the detailed chassis, engine bay and working tilt cab. Growing up, I used to regularly see trucks like this and I absolutely love it.

Cool Scandinavian Scania

Many European truck lovers have a soft spot for the Scania brand. In some ways its reputation in Europe is comparable to that of a brand such as Kenworth in the US; they’re driven by proper truckers rather than by mere truck drivers. They are also popular among customizers, and Scandinavian custom trucks stand out, with lots of chrome and airbrush artwork. Truck builder extraordinaire Dennis Glaasker (bricksonwheels) has recreated this typical Scandinavian custom look in his latest Scania model.

This behemoth is more than 1.5m (5 ft.) long and remote controlled with Power Functions. The spectacular airbrush artwork, with a Pirates of the Caribbean theme, was made with a custom sticker and Dennis uses non-standard chromed pieces, with a very cool result.

Autobots are go!

Sometimes a model doesn’t need to be hugely complicated or full of wonderfully clever new connections of parts to be great, although there is definitely some clever stuff going on here if you look closely.

If, like me, you grew up watching cartoons in the eighties, the Autobot logo built by Jason Alleman (True Dimensions) really needs no further explanation. If you want to build your own (and you know you want to), you can even download instructions from Jason’s own website.

Buccaneers and buried gold

I have to start with a confession: I don’t remember ever reading Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson, but I did see the animated TV series as a child, I saw the Muppets version several years ago and I’ve actually been in Bristol. Unfortunately, none of those experiences are of much use when describing what is going on in the latest scene built by Matthew Hurt, which depicts the Hispaniola in the port of Bristol at the start of its journey.

So, instead I’m going to focus on some of the details that make it such a great model. Check out the different types of textures used for the roof-tiles of the warehouses, for instance, or the brick-built sails. Then there’s the weathered look of the quay. And finally, the sails cleverly incorporate log bricks that make them look far more like cloth than if they would be built just out of regular plates and bricks.

Wicked robot

Most of the robots featured on this blog come equipped with big guns or giant swords. Cool stuff, without a doubt, but the robot built by Carol Price (Mrs Wobblehead), looks at least as menacing to me, despite its disarming grin and conspicuous lack of armament. I think there’s something a bit wicked about the grin and there’s definitely something fishy about secret underground lairs.

The robot is a large version of the series 6 collectible minifig and, while it may not set the world on fire with super-sophisticated building techniques, the scene has a lot of clever details. I simply love the sense of humour involved in building it.

Bringing down “Yankee imperalist air pirates” with the Cuban SA-2 Guideline

Andy Baumgart (dtowncracka) obviously has an interest in military equipment from the (former) Soviet Union and its allies. After building his cracking ZSU-23 Shilka self-propelled anti-aircraft artillery, he has turned his attention to something a bit more obscure: the Cuban T-55 mobile SA-2 Guideline launcher.

The SA-2 Guideline is a Soviet surface-to-air missile developed in the nineteen-fifties, which was exported to Soviet allies all over the world. During the Vietnam war, North Vietnamese SA-2s were used to shoot down close to 200 US aircraft, known as Yankee imperialist air pirates in contemporary propaganda. Before then, SA-2s gained notoriety when they were used to shoot down Francis Gary Powers’ CIA U-2 spy-plane over the Soviet Union in 1960 -an incident which caused great embarrassment to the US government- as well as a U.S. Air Force U-2 flying over Cuba during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

By now the SA-2 is an old clunker. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, however, Cuba has been unable to buy more modern and more mobile air-defense equipment. By mounting an SA-2 and its launcher on top of an obsolete T-55 tank chassis, Cuban engineers have managed to come up with a slightly more mobile version. To me it doesn’t look as though it can do much damage except to Cuba’s roads, but it is a great choice for a LEGO model, expertly built by Andy.

The right tools for the job

One of the things I noticed fairly soon after I moved to the UK (not being a native speaker of English) was that, despite being taught English in school, watching too many American TV series, reading English books and being able to hold my own in conversations about my work in English, I still had some gaping holes in my vocabulary. My job in the UK involved doing experiments in a wind-tunnel, which included working closely together with lab technicians. I could handle their southern English accents, but the names of tools were often completely beyond me, apart from really obvious ones such as a hammer or a screwdriver. If MacGyver never used one, I was basically lost.

David Hawkins (davidhawkins. 1964) has built these very accurate-looking carpenter’s tools in LEGO, which, besides being nice and decently photographed models, instantly reminded me of the time I didn’t know what a wood plane was called and went: “It’s one of those things you use to remove the surface of wood”, only to be handed a chisel. Anyway, you try to name all of these tools in a language that isn’t your own!

The Kawasaki Vulcan is ready to cruise

Harley Davidson is still going strong, but in the sixties competition by Japanese motorcycle manufacturers almost drove them out of business. Japanese bikes, such as this Kawasaki Vulcan modeled by LegoMarat, don’t have the same ‘swag’ as hogs, but there’s something to be said for a bike that works every time you start it and that doesn’t make your teeth rattle when idling (or so I’ve been told). Irrespective of whether you like Japanese bikes or not, this one does make for a very nice model.

When I first saw it, I wasn’t quite sure I was looking at LEGO. Part of that is due to the windscreen, which indeed isn’t LEGO, but it’s also because of the nice amount of chrome, clever combination of parts for the headlight and just the right level of detail.

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.

Holy Crotch Rocket Batman

Sometimes life as a blogger for TBB can be frustrating. Yesterday I spent more than an hour fruitlessly pouring over my pictures of the most interesting models I saw at Brickfair, to only find that we had pretty much blogged all of them when they first appeared on-line. Then again, on other days it is easy. I did not have to think about a title for this post, for instance, because Matt Armstrong (Monsterbrick) came up with the title for his picture himself.

I never cared much for LEGO’s Super Heroes figures. To me they looked too much like kids’ stuff, with little potential for making something interesting out of them. However, this model has made me think twice. The Batman figure itself may be ‘juniorized’, but that does not mean Matt cannot build a kick-ass motorbike to go with it.