About Tromas

LEGOmaniac for life, TR has never forgotten the joy that playing with LEGO brings. With three young sons it is just further reason to never stop playing. Typically a SPACE! builder, but has been known to dabble in TOWN! as well. Has to yet to try CASTLE! in any meaningful amount. So please feel free to check out his flickr account if you are up for some SPACE!, the occassional TOWN! and very little, if any CASTLE!

Posts by Tromas

CVF-104 – Microscale Aircraft Carrier

Jacob Unterreiner (4estfeller) says he was inspired by Stijn’s awesome Marine Air Ground Task Force and that inspiration has resulted in quite the spectacular near-future microscale aircraft carrier. This thing just screams to be played with…and we all know Jacob is sitting in his room right now pew-pewing and swooshing to his heart’s content!

Check out Jacob’s full Flickr photoset for detail shots of the air fleet and the build progress.

And here is a video of the play features:

To top it off, community poster maker and all around nice guy Pascal did the photo editing for Jacob. Now is that the sign of a great community or what? ;)

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King Candy Cy-Bug

Bruce Lowell brings the fun with his most recent build…the King Candy Cy-Bug from Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph. Again Bruce shows that he is a master at creating builds with a tonne of character. But where is Ralph when ya need him?

More Views

Whoa! Slow down there big rig...

Disclaimer – mildly sappy post to follow…

Remember this post I did a few months back? Well, I still feel the same about the online community, however, I now have some very serious concerns on where this community is headed…yes, and it is all due to the recent changes to Flickr.

I felt that these concerns were serious enough that it justified a separate post, as opposed to me simply commenting on Andrew’s again.

Really this is a personal plea to all those that feel it necessary to leave Flickr. I know many are very upset about the new format, have issues with the new pricing structure, and take offence to how Yahoo handled the system rollout. But at the end of the day is it worth the fragmentation of our community? Personally I don’t think it is. Honestly, I am not entirely happy with the new system, but I also don’t hate it to the extent that I want to see the history of what we have on Flickr lost.

At the end of the day there are no perfect solutions. I don’t think we can expect Yahoo! to go back to the old system, but I don’t think it is realistic to expect/hope for every contributing member of the current community to seamlessly move to an alternate site. Therefore I think that the only ‘solution’ is to wait it out and see what happens over the coming weeks.

This is about more than just Flickr and it’s individual users, this is about a thriving community of friends spread across the globe with years of history. The site may look vastly different, but as of right now the people are exactly the same. So before anyone rage quits, may I ask that you first stop, take a deep breath and think about our wonderful COMMUNITAY!

Most sincerely,

Big group hug!

Sunday morning R-Type fix.

Sitting in the Starbucks drive through and figured I would multi-task (don’t worry my car is safely in park…it is a long line).

This morning’s fix of R-Typey goodness comes from halfbeak with two rockin’ edits…one old-school and one new-school.

In other news, I finally got my caffeine fix now as well…

PINK!

Well I guess technically fuchsia. Regardless, this R-Type by F@bz is downright wonderful and very unique representation of the source. The exposed mechanical components coupled with the brilliant colouring make this incredibly fun to look at. It also helps that I find it reminiscent of one of my favourite LEGO starfighters of all time, Max Braun’s Nayvyr PSX-6.2.

Here is the full photoset.

Gulf Porsche 917

Flickr user bobalexander! has not only built a car with a very non-LEGO shape, but he has done so in a very tricky colour. Even with the limited parts availability of Maersk blue, the iconic shape and colouring of this classic racer are perfectly captured.

We had previously featured Malte Dorowski’s 917, and it is always neat to see the different tactics taken by builders on the same source material.

Be sure to click through all of the photos to see the details and working components of Bob’s build.

Brickfête 2013

Janey Gunning asked if we could share the following press release in regards to this year’s Brickfête.

To all AFOL, LEGO collectors, builders, hobbyists, enthusiasts within walking, driving or flying distance of Toronto, Canada.

The Brickfête Team is honoured to invite you to our annual LEGO Fan Convention. Join us for some good times completely focused on our beloved obsession with the brick. You will see some amazing displays, have chances to get involved with fun games and event, as well as hear from official LEGO Designer and LEGO Master Builder.

This July 11, 12, 13 and 14, 2013!
Hilton Hotel, Airport Rd in Toronto, Canada

To register for the four days visit the AFOL portion of our site and please note, space is limited so act now, operators are standing by.

We are returning to the same hotel as last year, and have secured decent room rates (however those end soon, so book now before you end up paying full rates.)

If you are from out of town (or country) we are located right across from the Toronto Airport, which means you can just fly here, board the shuttle to the hotel and not worry about renting cars, maps or public transit.

Join our website’s free forum if you have any questions or want to discuss things such as sharing a room, collaborative builds, or just a chance to connect with others before the event.

Our list of events are being posted and there is something for everyone to get involved with.

Have you built something cool that others would love to see???

Do you want to hang out with other amazing builders?

Listen to LEGO guest speakers or get involved with build challenges or contests!

Don’t forget those prize raffles and all the other fun activities!

Want to have chances to win LEGO prizes or bid in the LEGO auction??

Display with us and enjoy the company of other AFOLS.

If you are new to conventions and are hesitating… check out this forum post and feel free to ask questions.

The general public is invited to view the awesome LEGO Creations on display during the following public expo days:
July 13th and 14th – 10am until 3pm
Tickets sold at the door and online

All the rest of the details and more can be read on www.brickfete.com

See you in July,
Janey Red Brick & Chris Magno
On behalf of the entire Brickfete team!

“A festival run by fans, made by the fans, for the fans.”

Daft Punk

Does this count as a mosaic? Regardless, this creation by diegoboy is flippin’ rad!

I totally have revolution909 in my head now…and that is a good thing.

R-Round Up

Being almost at the half way point of the R-Type & Beyond starfighter build challenge, we have seen a very nice assortment of brilliant builds of all sizes shapes and colours.

Here is a quick round up of my favourites so far.

Shannon Ocean brings his retro space style with this rockin’ entry.

Pasukaru76 has been churning out a tonne of builds in both micro and minifig scales, but this colourful addition has to be one of favourites.

Mike Yoder blows it out of the water with this behemoth.

Pierre E Fieschi created perhaps the most colourful entry so far, and it works so well on all levels.

HatRabies has been keeping pace with Pascal on the number of submissions with a continuing variation of a micro R-Type…with each post they get better and better.

There are plenty more brilliant creations, so please head on over to the submission thread if you haven’t already checked it out.

You still have a little over 2 weeks to join in on the fun…hopefully by that time I will have mine done too.

May TBB Cover Photo Winners

Well the month of April has completely flown by and it is already time to pick new winners for our Facebook and Twitter cover photos.

I was lucky enough to do the selecting for this month, and since Andrew’s picks for April were of the sci-fi variety, I thought I would switch things up this month.

For Facebook I chose Legopard’s ingeniously quaint Nano Modular Buildings.

For Twitter, the winner was Tobigo’s epic oil rig which we had blogged last week.

Since this is still a relatively new idea, I am going to copy and paste Andrew’s observations from last month. Once again there were several pictures that were fantastic except for the fact that the orientation would not have worked. Also I was kind of hoping that some of the previous month’s submissions would have been re-submitted as per Andrew’s ‘hint’…but that may just be something that we readdress for future months:

Since this was our first month, here are a few random observations about what worked and what didn’t:

This isn’t how you get blogged, but we certainly found a few gems we’d missed otherwise!
There were scores of gorgeous photos that just didn’t work because of the composition, mostly because of where Facebook and Twitter put our logo and page text on top of the photo.
Vertical (portrait orientation) photos really don’t work at all. As much as I love looming medieval towers and tall sculptural figures, we can’t really use them on Facebook and Twitter.
With so many great buildings, vehicles, and dioramas, it’s extremely unlikely that we’ll ever choose to feature a photo of a single minifig for a whole month.
It’s a good idea to brand or watermark your photos online, but large branding is distracting when the photo is going to be used as the “face” of The Brothers Brick, so I skipped past photos with big logos or chunks of text.
We love microspace here at TBB, but since I’d been using one of my own microspace photos for the last year or two on Facebook, I excluded several remarkably awesome photos (like Pierre’s) for this first month. Looking ahead, we’ll definitely be taking into consideration the subject matter or theme of what we’ve recently featured in selecting the next month’s photos.

R-Type & Beyond

Just a quick announcement.

For the first time in nearly 2 years, we at the Starfighters Group are having a monthly build challenge. This month’s theme was suggested by Shannon Sproule and is quite simple; just build a starfighter based on or inspired by the iconic video game series R-Type.

So if you are interested in partaking in the fun, just head on over to the discussion thread, we’d be happy to have you as part of our Space Corps!

More than meets the Starfighter

This all started with an email from Peter Morris a few months back which basically said that we should really be building starfighters that transform. Coincidently I had been thinking about the same thing for some time already, especially since I had tried several times in the past to do it. Any attempt I did make either ended in failure, or resulted in a model that was too delicate and fiddly to actually play with. And in my house LEGO that can’t actually be played with has no place. So with Peter’s kick in the pants incentive I figured I would give it a shot. But this time I was going to make it overly simple (is that even a thing?). I didn’t want complicated transformation sequences, and I didn’t really care to hide the fact that it transforms when in fighter mode.

This was an incredibly fun build, and one that was a hoot to develop…also totally got the kidlets in on the brainstormin’. The end result is incredibly satisfying to both swoosh and transform.

I already have ideas and prototypes for other transforming builds…a tank is in the works and I have ideas for aircraft and other assorted vehicles as well.