They may only come in a few varieties, but LEGO’s Mixel eyes have triggered a surge in “character builds” over the past couple of years. And while I tend to use a Sharpie for my character’s eyes, Mixel eyes still offer many creative possibilities. Combined with some creative use of handlebar and wing pieces, this fully poseable drunk business man by Swiss builder Bricking Dave is probably the most entertaining example I’ve seen in a while. No office cubicle should be without one!
Marco Marozzi builds mecha in a very interesting style. If you page through his gallery, you’ll note long, tall torsos, and a lot of equally long arms, and very few with a humanoid head. This creation in particular shares those proportions with its Friends pilot. This latest shares those traits, and features a bulbous cockpit which I love. My eyes were additionally caught by the huge claw-grabbers this thing is sporting for “utility.”
Over the years several people have constructed mechanisms to get coaxial rotors on their helicopters to spin in opposite directions, including Henry Oberholtzer. Recently one of his ingenious creations was successfully adopted by Matt Hacker for his AH-5 “Chogenbo” (Japanese for Kestrel). The end result is one of the coolest and most believable near-future helicopters that I have seen in a long time. Matt unveiled the model at Brickfair Virginia in August, where it won the ‘Best Military’ category. I have been eagerly anticipating him posting pictures of it ever since.
Let me apologise for the info dump in advance, but there is no denying that I am a bit of an aviation geek. (It’s fewer than 4000 words, I promise.) Coaxial helicopters are cool. There is a fundamental limit, of about 400 km/h, to the forward speed of conventional helicopters. This is essentially set by the blades being swept forward reaching the speed of sound -this is a bad thing- and the blades being swept aft, also known as the retreating blades, moving too slow through the air to generate lift. This is called a retreating blade stall and is also a bad thing. That going faster is difficult is evidenced by the longevity of the current record, set by a modified Westland Lynx as long ago as 1986. If you want your helicopter to go faster, you’ll have to get creative. However, coaxial helicopters, with two sets of counter-rotating rotors on top of each other, do offer the promise of considerably faster flight. The retreating blades on a coaxial helicopter do suffer from retreating blade stall, but the resulting loss of lift is compensated by the lift generated by the blades of the other set on the same side of the helicopter moving forward. To see the coaxial rotors on Matt’s helicopter in action, check out his video.
Here’s an excellent scale model of a classic kick scooter by Piotr Machalski. It’s not exactly one-to-one scale and probably isn’t safe to ride. But it does fold up, and Piotr came up with a neat approach to the wheels:
The name Notre Dame may be most widely associated with a certain cathedral in Paris, France. But the cathedral of Notre Dame is Strasbourg (also in France) is actually more than twice as tall. In fact for over two centuries it was the tallest building in the world – taller even than the Great Pyramid of Giza – eventually being surpassed in the Victorian era by such behemoths as the Eiffel Tower and the Washington Monument. But it still remains one of the finest surviving examples of late Gothic architecture, and is nicely captured here in microscale LEGO form by Daniel Stoeffler.
From our “We missed it two months ago, but it’s still pretty awesome” department, here’s a fantastic scene from Star Wars by markus19840420, whose sleeping AT-AT we featured here back in June. Luke swooshes his T-16 Skyhopper model while Threepio takes an oil bath. In addition to a micro version Luke is playing with, Markus’ scene even includes the briefly glimpsed “real” T-16 outside the doorway.
Almost ten years after his previous foray into the middle east, mysterious artist/activist Banksy recently popped up in the Gaza Strip, in an effort to once again highlight the plight of people in this region. Flickr member TheBrickAvenger was inspired to recreate one of the Gaza pieces in LEGO:
Some LEGO “purists” may scoff at the choice of the stacked bricks technique used here. But hey, maybe the builder was using it to make a statement? Or maybe there was literally no other way to create this image convincingly at mini-fig scale. Either way, the result is impressive – especially when you consider the effort it must have taken! For context, here is a photo of the original:
There are so many ships in the Star Wars Universe and always new ones to discover if you’re a casual fan. I’ve never heard of the Wild Karrde smuggling ship until seeing this rendition by KW Vauban. The model stays true to the appearance of the original and even features a detailed interior that you can see in the gallery on MOCpages.
Looking like something right out of LEGO’s own Architecture series, this microscale model of the iconic statue of Christ The Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro is the work of German builder Jens Ohrndorf. Proportioning, detail and texture are hard to get right at this scale (especially with a human figure) but Jens nails it, and the result is immediately recognizable.
“Talented” and “prolific” make a great combination in a LEGO builder, and like many of the builders we feature here on The Brothers Brick, Finnish builder Eero Okkonen manages both. Following his fantastic LEGO characters from Nausicaä, Eero has tackled Palutena, Goddess of Light, from the Kid Icarus series of Nintendo games (also featured in Super Smash Bros.). Never shy of color, Eero incorporates numerous pearl-gold and light-blue trans-clear elements.
Read more about the build on Eero’s blog, Cyclopic Bricks.
“We are the best kept secret in the galaxy. We monitor, licence and police all alien activity on the Earth. We’re your first, last, and only line of defense. We live in secret, we exist in shadow.”
Men in Black is a 1997 hit movie starring Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith as agents ‘K’ and ‘J’, who are part of a secret US government organisation that deals with extraterrestrials living on Earth. Their standard mode of transport is a nondescript black Ford LTD, called a Ford P.O.S. by ‘J’, that turns into a gravity-defying rocket ship at the push of a red button.
I’ve been meaning to add this vehicle to my collection of cars from movies and TV series for a long time, but I didn’t want to build a boring black sedan unless I could make it transform. In the movie this was done using CGI and, to my knowledge, there are no transforming toy versions of the car. This made recreating it in the real world a bit tricky. However, after Optimus Prime I felt fairly confident I could get it to work, albeit with a bit more fiddling than merely pushing a little button. I also decided to post the model only after I made the video showing the transformation sequence.
Every so often we come across LEGO versions of iconic album* covers, although more often than not they’re unconvincingly recreated using mini-figs. So it was refreshing to see umamen take a crack at some fully brick-built ones:
Pictured above: Nevermind by Nirvana (1991). One Step Behyond by Madness (1979). London Calling by The Clash (1979).
Album covers represent an absolute gold mine of immediately recognizable material for possible LEGO treatments. If you’re a builder, why not take a crack at some of your favorites – we’d love to see what you can do!
(*Album: How your parents got their music before iTunes)