Tag Archives: Oil

An oil platform built from oil-based bricks.

We all love to build LEGO creations and occasionally some of us even make a bit of money doing it. I don’t know much about Fitec Supply but I hope they paid handsomely for this stunning oil platform by Niek Geurts. It’s tough to pinpoint what scale this is. It’s bigger than what we’d call micro-scale, maybe more in the realm of midi-scale and certainly smaller than minifig-scale. Regardless, the detail here is top notch. I’m loving the cranes, the oranges lifeboats and the helipad. The overall industrial feel of it makes me want to put on a hard hat and some coveralls and check temperature and pressure gauges or whatever else it is they do on oil platforms. With LEGO creations this good, we’ll be certainly be checking the gauges on what Niek is up to from time to time.

Lego oil platform

Drilling beneath the waves, where LEGO comes from

It’s no secret that most LEGO is made from dinosaurs and carboniferous forests. But you have to drill hundreds or even thousands of meters beneath the surface of the earth to pump out that crude pre-LEGO material, often from platforms way out at sea. General Tensai takes bricks back to their source with this incredibly detailed, colorful oil rig that uses countless LEGO pieces in surprising ways. The overall effect is one of large-scale industrial activity full of pipes and conduits, a helipad with brick-built lettering, numerous towers, cranes, and gantries — and even a multi-colored oil slick on the ocean’s surface. But clicking through to the builder’s full-size photo rewards careful examination, from the Technic pump behind the red and white crane to the single minifig leg and yellow parrot projecting below the helipad.

RTT: Oil Rig

Pumpjack goes round and round and up and down

LEGO is made from plastic. Plastic is made from oil. And Gilcelio Chagas is extracting oil with this neat pumpjack. A pumpjack is essentially a device to convert rotational motion to pumping motion to suck oil out of a well. As Gilcelio illustrates very nicely in his video of the pumpjack at work. I lied about the oil bit, you need to go underground for that.

Pumpjack (See in operation )