About Rod

Rod likes building stuff, particularly steampunk and microscale. He's built for a number of the Dorling Kindersley LEGO books, including LEGO Play and the Awesome Ideas book. When he's not building, he writes, and has published a trilogy of old-fashioned adventure stories. To pay the bills he works in innovation and marketing for one of the world's biggest brewers, inventing new beers and ciders. This is clearly the best job in the world.

Posts by Rod

Marching along we’re Adventurers, singing the song of Adventurers

The Annual Meeting of the International Adventurer’ Club from The Knit Knight is a genuine old-school treat. The meeting room is stuffed full of interesting artefacts and curios from around the world — statues, idols, hieroglyphic panels, and at the center of it all, a Pegasus skeleton. There’s a nice collection of adventurer characters in attendance too — a mix of classic and newer minifigs which works surprisingly well.

I like the model, but it also makes me sad, reminding me how much I loved the now-defunct Adventurers’ Club at Pleasure Island in DisneyWorld.

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LEGO Space base plays host to excellent fleet

ZCerberus will make Benny The Spaceman very happy with this huge star-base built in Classic Space colors. The model was created for Brickworld to play host to the builder’s spaceship display.

The base is very smart, with nice landing pad details and good rockwork. But take a closer look at some of the spaceships themselves…

Click to see more images of this fabulous display

Endor scout trooper has all the cool

This custom Imperial Scout Trooper from Omar Ovalle just oozes the laid back cool of a Californian motorcycle cop. The speeder bike itself is nice, and I like the base and suggestion of vegetation, but it’s all about the trooper’s attitude — shades in place, and that relaxed stance, leaning back on his ride like he’s daring you to break the speed limit.

This starship has Herculean power

Hot on the heels of an impressive Classic Space creation, Michał Kaźmierczak brings us this chunky beauty of a spaceship — the military transport Hercules.

There’s some lovely color blocking and striping on display here, but it’s the jagged recessed area filled with dark gray greebles which steals the show. Nice work on the tiny trans-yellow windows up front too — done with regular 1×2 plates “split” with some gray tape.

As well as the great build itself, Michał has deployed some good photo-editing skills to launch the ship up into space where it belongs…

Alt-WW2 mech waddles into battle

Marco Marozzi has built an Alt-WW2 tripod mech which manages to look both menacing and cute at the same time. The arms and fists on this thing are wonderfully beefy, and the use of Power Miner wheels for the torso adds nice depth of texture.

If you like this sort of dieselpunk alternate-history building, be sure to check out the Brothers Brick collaborative build for BrickCon 2016 — WW2 1949. There’s some great models starting to show up in the group photo pool for the event — get building and get yours in there too.

LEGO Mars rover in action [Video]

It seems Jeremy Williams paid attention to our unsubtle hints when we covered his fabulous Ares 7 Martian Rover model — he’s produced a video of the rover in action. Take a look — you can see the vehicle’s independent suspension and four-wheel steering make short work of the terrain.

To top it all, this video was shot on the Martian scenery layout at the UK’s National Space Centre in Leicester. The authorities there let Jeremy sneak in to do his shoot before regular opening hours — a very cool filming location for an excellent model.

Fantastic weekend at Bricktastic Manchester

Bricktastic is an annual fan show held in Manchester in aid of Fairy Bricks — a charity which aims to brighten the lives of sick children by providing hospitals with LEGO sets.

This weekend saw thousands of LEGO enthusiasts descend on the show to see displays from some of the best UK builders, gawp at massive creations, try their hand at Mindstorms robotics, and enjoy some building of their own.

Here’s a short overview of some of the cool things Brothers Brick saw at the event, starting with the awesome Bright Bricks dragon which towered over the exhibition space…

Click through to see more pictures from the event

My office is panelled in the finest LEGO mahogany

Nice woodwork here from KaiNRG/Geneva. This courthouse is appropriately grand and intimidating with some excellent parts usage to create the wood panelling and the strip of carpet. Those NEXO Knight shields also look good — nice to see these parts showing up in a low-tech Castle creation.

England 1216 – the siege of Dover Castle

aido k has created a wonderful piece of microscale cartography depicting England’s south-eastern coast in 1216. The different castles are all excellent and this feels like the sort of map a medieval lord might have planned his attacks with. I admire these kind of creations based on historical reality, but I can’t help but imagine a microscale model like this depicting Westoros…

Elaborating on his theme, the builder has gone on to create another model of Dover Castle itself — still in microscale, but closer-in. Particularly nice work on the defensive walls and towers, although I suspect the carefully balanced tiles might not stand up to sustained attack!

LEGO Alien Facehugger is blocky nightmare fuel

Daniel Stoeffler wowed us a couple of months back with his LEGO Manta Ray and now he uses a similar studs-out building technique to create an altogether more sinister creature. This rendition of an Alien Facehugger slithering out of its egg is properly giving me the heebie-jeebies.

Daniel says the egg is 50cm tall and the Facehugger beastie is 1m long. Impressive stuff, but if I had this on display in my house I’d never get a wink of sleep.

Hair-raising encounter with a troll

Check out this fun scene from aido k—a troll in its cave about to be interrupted by a group of soldiers. I’m not sure who’s going to come out best in this encounter, but I think my money is going on the big guy. There’s fabulous parts usage here for the troll’s hair—that’s an octopus! It’s so good it actually distracts attention from the equally cool use of an upside-down treasure chest as a mouth.

LEGO hamburgers this good are rare

We’ve featured some of nobu_tary‘s fabulous LEGO recreations of food in the past, and here’s another excellent meal-based model—a burger with an egg topping.

The individual elements of the build are spot-on, and the overall presentation is excellent. Just looking at the image is making me hungry. This burger definitely came with a side of awesomesauce.

About Rod

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