Tag Archives: Vehicles

LEGO planes, trains, and automobiles! Well, maybe not trains, since they don’t like to play with the other LEGO themes, but here you’ll find all our favorite cars, buses, boats, ships, helicopters, and anything else with an engine (and some without).

MAKS’ Liebherr crane is a lot smaller than you may think

This is probably not a sentence you read every day, but I happen to have a weak spot for well-built cranes. It’s the reason why I absolutely love the minifig-scale Liebherr 1050-3 mobile crane built by Polish builder Maksymilian Majchrzak (MAKS).

I built one of these myself more than a year ago, on a larger scale, and consequently am very familiar with the shape and the details. We have also previously blogged a Liebherr 1050 built by Makorol, who also happens to be from Poland (what do they put in the water there?). This model, which was remote controlled with Power Functions, was even larger than mine.
What is particularly impressive about the crane built by MAKS is that, despite being only 8 studs wide, it really isn’t a lot less detailed than either of the larger models. In fact, it looks just like the photographs of die-cast models I used as an inspiration.

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Ready to Race with this LEGO R/C Car

Spanish LEGO fan Fernando (Sheepo) shows his crazy engineering skills with this beautiful recreation of a Caterham 7, a small British sports car. Technic builders never cease to amaze me with the amount of functionality they can build entirely with brick and still pack into a small frame, and this model is at the top of the game. It’s got all the LEGO R/C car bells and whistles, including disk brakes, a full transmission, and complete suspension.

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.

Rubber Ducky

While my own eyes are pulled more to the tugboat, Schfio‘s “LEGO x Rubber Duck Project” is clearly all about the duck. And you can’t argue with Sesame Street.

Riding in Style: ZIS 110

Tim Inman‘s (rabidnovaracer) gorgeous little beauty just screams class. Or rather, quietly informs you that certain decorum is required and screaming is unbecoming of those who ride in this particular vehicle.

Either way, he presents this ZIS-110 limousine, from 1946, which really is just a fabulous way to travel.

A Temple in the Clouds

A temple in clouds of steam and smoke, that is. This Japanese shrine reminds me more than a bit of the great wizard Howl’s Moving Castle, though Jimmy’s (6kyubi6) version has some different styling cues. It’s gorgeous all the same, and sure to instill a healthy respect for religion in anyone who comes across its path.

Simplify, then add lightness

Colin Chapman, the founder of the British car manufacturer Lotus, famously expressed his car building philosophy as: “Simplify, then add lightness.” There’s nothing simple about the Lotus Exige built by Rolands Kirpis (rolic), but in all its eye-popping lime greenness, the model beautifully matches the shape and look of the real car.

I don’t think there are many LEGO car builders who can make curves quite like these.

Anatomy of Speed: Lego Motorcycle by Silvavasil

We blogged Russian builder Silva Vasil‘s cool LEGO bicycle last month, but now he’s back with a super cool old-school motorcycle. I love how it looks like a transparent human anatomy model, with all the organs and veins showing in different colors.

The people’s motorcycle

This month’s LUGNuts build challenge, is called “Behind The Iron Curtain!” and is all about building vehicles from (former) communist countries.

Rather than a Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, the sort of thing Lino Martins (Lino M) normally builds for these challenges, he now brings us something rather more utilitarian and military: a classic Ural motorcycle as used by the Red Army during WW-II, built in olive green and black. Not one to forego flashy colours, he presents it together with a brick-built Soviet Flag. Classy!

The LEGO Build-it Book: Amazing Vehicles, out Jun 2013 [Exclusive Excerpts]

No Starch Press continues building a library of LEGO books this year with their forthcoming The LEGO Build-It Book, Vol. 1: Amazing Vehicles, due out on June 22. The book features LEGO vehicle designs by Dutch builder Nathanaël Kuipers and Swiss builder Mattia Zamboni.

The book will feature step-by-step instructions for ten vehicles that you can build from the same LEGO bricks, ranging from a stroller to a rescue truck.

To whet your building appetite, we have an exclusive preview of pages from the instructions for the Off-Roader, Go-Kart, Muscle Car, Street Car, and Rescue Truck models (click through for large photos).

The LEGO Build-It Book, Vol. 1: Amazing Vehicles is available for pre-order from Amazon.com and No Starch Press.

Ferrari 250 GT

Wait a sec., that isn’t a Matchbox car…

Angka Utama creates quite possibly the cleanest little LEGO car of all time. With highly efficient piece usage, he achieves the lines of the 250 GT in near perfection!

Picture perfect profiles

Some people see LEGO as a toy, other people see building with LEGO as a form of art, but some people, myself included, tend to use it as a medium for building scale models. There are obvious limitations when building a scale model using mostly angular elements of a certain (minimum) size, but nonetheless it is possible to achieve a high degree of accuracy.

Lately I have been updating some of my existing models, including my F/A-18 Hornet strike fighter. Another builder who is working on a LEGO model of a Hornet (or make that Hornets -plural) is Corvin Stichert. He recently made a direct comparison between a line-drawing of the real jet and a side-view of his work in progress made in LEGO Digital Designer.

He did such a good job that it made me (and him) wonder how my Hornet stacks up. (In fact, I was a bit worried, as I do have a bit of a reputation to uphold.)

Well, I am not disappointed and I think you’ll agree that, even though Corvin and I have made some rather different choices, the agreement between both our models and the profiles is about as good it gets on this scale.