This collaborative display of Mordor by Chris Perron and Scott Semple incorporates lights to make the lava look unbelievably realistic. Check out the details shots on Flickr, and don’t miss seeing the microscale Minas Morgul dwarfed by the rest of the build.
Jason Allemann has come up with a design for Lego ballista that can launch a 2×4 brick 15 feet (which will let you hit almost any target in even the biggest dioramas). The best part is that he has posted step-by-step instructions for you to build your own. Time to get ready for battle!
Friends of mine in the US used to own a Japanese minivan and it was reliable, comfortable and great for road trips, but about as exciting as wet noodles. When I think of Japanese cars in general, the first ones that spring to mind are tiny little boxes on wheels that seem more suitable for a shopping trolley and the second ones are competent but boring sedans. However, this impression isn’t fair at all, as shown by the Datsun Z240 by LegoMarat.
Z-cars are exciting. The 240Z had the looks of a classic long-bonneted sports car, but without the dodgy electrics that plagued similar endeavours from England. The roof on the model looks a bit too flat to me and the wheel arches are a bit awkward, but the model has presence. This is helped by its dark blue colour and the nicely curved flanks.
It doesn’t just look good; it too has some very clever engineering inside. It drives, powered by two Power Functions motors and using a servo motor for the steering. These are controlled via a nifty third-party Bluetooth controller, called an SBrick, which is specifically designed to interface with Lego Power Functions. It allows the user to operate them via an app on their smart-phone or via the internet. Its development was funded via a kickstarter campaign that Nannan reported on in July last year. You could be forgiven for thinking that this too must be Japanese, but it was actually designed in Hungary.
To many of you, this may look like just another building created in the popular “Café Corner” style. But to those of us that were creatures of the Eighties, it’s immediately recognizable as Flynn’s, the videogame arcade featured in the 1982 pre-cyberspace pre-Matrix movie TRON.
Using fluorescent bricks and black light, Joel Baker has managed to impart his creation with the neon look and feel of the original. It has a complete interior featuring all manner of vintage arcade machines, and even the secret doorway that appeared in the 2010 follow-up TRON Legacy.
Conveying action in a microscale LEGO scene is impossible unless it’s action on an epic scale. Pascal Schmidt demonstrates this perfectly with his model of a volcano raining fiery death on what I assume is some poorly-situated Roman era town. Note the NPU (“nice part usage”) of white ray guns in the pyroclastic cloud.
For some reason this reminded me of a build from last year that we kinda overlooked, a microscale tornado by Jimmy Fortel, created during a round of Iron Builder, and featuring some more NPU (the seed part for the contest was Mixel ball and socket joints).
The Homeworld series of games featured some truly fantastic space ship designs, providing inspiration for tons of Lego space ships, but I’ve never seen anyone attempt to render a copy of this particular ship before now. De_chef has built a micro scale version of the epic Bentusi harbor ship from the games. As you can see above, he’s incorporated lights, and delivered photos that really show off the shape and illumination. Beyond that, he also built a series of smaller ships to accompany it in display, really bringing the scale to the forefront.
While Mario may be one of Nintendo’s most enduring videogame characters, Kirby has been around almost as long. And this lovable ball of fun has some pretty cool powers too, like inhaling his enemies to steal their abilities, and not being a ridiculous cultural stereotype. Heck, he even had his own cartoon show once …suck on that Mario!
Fun fact #1: During development of the first Dream Land game in 1992, Kirkby was intended merely as a simple placeholder graphic for the real character, but the designers loved him so much they used him in the final game. Fun fact #2: This LEGO version of Kirby by Swan Dutchman uses the Bram Sphere technique, which is anything but simple.
To boldly go to space – the final frontier – and prosper, my friend.
My mangled Star Trek quotes aside, this magnificent Enterprise model comes to us from Chris Melby. Chris has done a fantastic job with the circular disk of this iconic ship, managing to make it entirely studless. Don’t be deceived, though, this is actually a huge model at over 5 feet in length.
We tend to focus on LEGO system on this blog, in part because most of us are not really into the aesthetics of Technic models. However, as the Alfa Romeo 4C Spider by Jeroen Ottens shows, sometimes a clever combination of curved Technic panels and soft axles can be a really effective way of capturing the shape of a voluptuous car body.
The Italian tricolore striping also adds to the model’s visual appeal.
The printed micro-figs introduced with LEGO’s new SHIELD Helicarrier set seem to be generally well received by fans. Our Facebook poll suggests 2 out of 3 of you are in favor of them! So I expect before too long we’ll see people customizing them. Customization of classic mini-figs is nothing new, but customization of the newer Friends mini-dolls is way less common….
And that’s a shame, because I for one find them more aesthetically pleasing. If LEGO could just fix their rather limited range of motion, I think it’d be great to see them used in future Movie or TV based LEGO themes. Flickr user JustJon obviously agrees, and has been repainting one Friends fig every week along those very lines:
Pictured above, as if they needed any introduction: Luke Skywalker; Sailor Moon; Ghostbuster; Deadpool; Catniss Everdeen; Red Sonja.
UPDATE: The creator just pointed out that he previously created an entire set of superhero Friends customs, which are equally awesome and can be seen here.
A lot of people start their builds by fiddling around with a few pieces until they find an interesting-looking combination. This then becomes the starting point for a cool new mecha or spaceship. That’s not how I do things. For most of my models, I start by planning, followed by a lot of procrastination and getting side-tracked into building other (easier) things and then some more planning, lather, rinse, repeat. Once I start putting parts together things move quickly, but the planning process can take several weeks or, in the case of Airwolf, as long as two years.
In the eighties, starting with Knight Rider, there were several shows that featured some sort of hi-tech vehicle as a central plot device or even as a character. Both Blue Thunder and Airwolf featured helicopters, but Airwolf was definitely the better show. It had one of the best theme-tunes in the history of television and, though they now appear terribly dated, the plots were a bit darker and more interesting than in most of the other shows, often dealing with espionage and the Cold War. Furthermore, the helicopter itself was based on the super-sleek Bell 222 and was armed to the teeth, with retractable guns and a ventral missile launcher.
The reason why the process took so long is that I don’t start building until I have convinced myself that I can build the model to a suitably high standard, which in this case meant building that sleek shape and those cool retractable weapons. What finally sealed the deal was finishing Blue Thunder, the realisation that I could replicate the shape using various new curved parts and by hinging the cockpit windows, as well as a video I saw of the missile launcher retracting on an RC model.
As the current Iron Builder contest nears its conclusion, both teams continue to churn out amazing builds. But after many rounds of being cut to length for one purpose or another, the ribbed flex-tube seed parts seem to be getting progressively shorter and shorter. That doesn’t seem to be hampering their efforts though, judging by these two wonderful scenes by Tyler Clites:
Long-in-the-tooth readers might even notice that the old lady in the scene above is actually a reprise of a character that Tyler built for a previous Iron Builder contest – right down to the use of the blue seed part from that round!
