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).

Diving to the unknown depths in style

It’s been ingrained in my mind that when I see a LEGO build with a yellow body and a blue transparent cockpit, it’s going to be an aquatic vehicle. This is all thanks to the classic colour pallette from LEGO ‘s Aquazone theme. This stylistic submersible is quite compact and sleek and allows travelling to the depths of the wide ocean in style. I see a similarity to the silhouette and curves of a dolphin jumping out of the water and it makes me wonder if that was builder Thomas W.’s inspiration.

Read on to see this little submarine in its natural habitat

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Car broken down in the middle of nowhere? Call Lonely Joe for a tow.

Some LEGO builders find a niche in the community and spend most of their time building there, churning out beautiful creations that all fit a similar genre. For some that’s castle, for others that’s space, for others it’s Bionicle, and for others it’s some licensed theme or other. For TBB 2019 Builder of the Year Andrea Lattanzio, that niche would be shacks and automobiles. Few builders out there can equal the clean lines and perfect textures of his buildings; just look at the uneven tiles for the siding, and the perfection of sideways masonry bricks for the adjacent shed. The build is nearly studless, which helps those clean lines, and the photography is pristine, which helps too.

But don’t let that expert photography fool you; this is not a simple build. You don’t get a studless look by accident, not without plenty of SNOT (studs not on top) techniques. Plus there are myriad clever parts usages. For example, there’s a hockey stick and a harpoon holding lamps; there are pirate hooks on the truck’s bumper; and those sideview mirrors are mighty cleaver, I mean, clever. And speaking of the truck, Andrea’s vehicle designs are as clean and elegant as his shacks; no studs, crisp color blocking, and perfect shaping and scaling.

Taking the gasser to a car show

Earlier this year, before the COVID-19 pandemic, I was looking forward to spending three weeks away from home this summer. At the end of July, I was going to attend BrickFair Virginia. After that I’d fly to Denver, to make a road trip with a friend. I’d subsequently return to Virginia for a work meeting before finally jetting home. Now, of course, none of that is happening. Instead, I’m currently having a short “staycation” at home and will actually be working most of August. In the hope of putting myself into a relaxed vacation mood nonetheless, I built a Chevrolet Express conversion van a couple of weeks ago.

It is a very American concept: convert a regular passenger van into a luxury cruiser with captain’s seats, rear seats that can be folded into a bed, tinted windows, a raised roof, cool rims, and some snazzy graphics on the outside. SUVs have cornered much of their market in the last decade or so, but this is the kind of vehicle I imagine would work well for long road trips and family vacations. I particularly enjoyed building the pattern into the sides, with dark tan and old dark grey plates. However, as much as I enjoyed building it, the end result was a bit underwhelming. So, to fit my vacation theme, I considered building a trailer for it, with a jet ski or an all-terrain-vehicle. However, I wasn’t looking forward to building either.

I finally got a little bit excited thinking about putting a custom car on the trailer instead. Custom cars generally don’t float my boat, but since I liked building the pattern on the van so much, I relished building a car with a paint scheme with flames. To fit the van it had to be American, of course. So, I picked a “Gasser”. This is a particular type of classic drag racer. It uses a body shell of a stock car, with really fat rear tires, a stripped-out interior, an oversized engine, and a jacked-up front end. The flames are optional, but I built mine using yellow, bright light orange and orange plates. The car is a ’57 Chevrolet Bel Air, which is just about the most American car I can imagine. It isn’t quite the holiday vehicle I had in mind, but at least it’s fun.

Junk speeders are what we need in a galaxy far far away

I’m a fan of the realm of possibilities in the Star Wars galaxy and especially for vehicles that could have been taken a page out of the storylines. This Junk Speeder by Thomas Jenkins gives that vibes of a single-engine mashup of what a scavenger or thrifty junkyard dealer would have up for sale or trade. For a moment, I would think this would be a perfect transport for Ewoks if they decided to venture outside of their forest dwellings. What makes this a sturdy build are likely the technic parts and pins integrated across its wingspan.

Check out Thomas’s other features that we’ve covered from a galaxy far far away.

This is what you get when you stop sorting and start mixing

Couple weeks ago, we got the first look at this summer’s LEGO Technic sets including 42112 Concrete Mixer Truck set. One of the reasons we don’t see concrete mixers among official LEGO sets that often is that the vehicle like this one requires a special drum element — a very bulky single-purpose piece. But Kirill Mazurov proves that you don’t need big solid elements for awesome LEGO builds. Using a bunch of common and affordable panels, he managed to recreate the shape of the drum very precisely. With almost no holes, the structure looks as smooth as the one in the official set, and I love the mix of white and red colors. In case you’ve been following Kirill’s works, I believe you have already guessed that this mixer has a lot of functions. Make sure to check out the video under the cut.

Click here to see the video…

Build your own plucky little forklift [Instructions]

The next time you are building a warehouse scene, home improvement store, or automobile repair shop, and you want a neat looking forklift, consider taking inspiration from de-marco, who has shared video instructions for this three-wheeled lifter of heavy things. The black protective cage and a transparent orange cone provide great details.

The Trans-Am wins the drag race standing still

I’ve been a rather prolific LEGO car builder in my day and the Pontiac Trans-Am has been on my to-do list for quite some time. I’ve never scratched it of this said to-do list as I’ve been rather intimidated at the prospect of building this icon of American muscle. Well, leave it to my friend and master car builder Firas Abu-Jaber to really knock this one out of the park! He tells us it took about a month-and-a-half to complete and it came with some difficulty, even for his considerable skill.

This alternate view shows off the opening doors, hood, and trunk as well as the seats and dashboard. The seats move forward, the armrest opens; it has all the niceties you could expect from a Firas original creation. The chrome tailpipes reflect nicely on that slick surface. And while we’re at it, let’s admire that gold steering wheel! I have just three words for this iconic classic American muscle car; alright, alright, alright!

This is not the first time we’ve been enthralled with Firas’ style. Not by a long shot.

She carries a spare tire with her

A LEGO builder who goes by the name of -Disty- has built a totally rad lady on a futuristic bike. Her hair and outfit give her a cyberpunk feel that is so popular in post-apocalyptic movies. Both the bike and rider are fantastic builds on their own but together it’s a dose of perfection. But what happens if she were to blow a tire? Well, the builder cleverly used an inside-out rubber LEGO tire as her halter top, which presumably she could use in case of a blowout. According to my limited research just now she would thus completely break the law in Utah, Tennessee, Indiana, and parts of Mexico. Some states have ambiguous rules on the matter, some select US cities are OK but in free-thinking Ontario, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia she can totally rock out with the girls out! Way to go, Canada!

New York’s Best and Bravest are life savers

My hair may be turning grey, and I have a job, a professional reputation and responsibilities, but hidden just under the surface is the same six-year-old boy who marveled at his first LEGO fire truck, back in the eighties. With the pandemic, for many of us, the last few months probably haven’t been easy. For me, personally, things could be a lot worse. I am healthy and so are my loved ones, I have job security and can work from the comfort of my home. Nonetheless, I am stressed by the uncertainty and by a never-ending amount of work, in combination with not being able to do many of the things I usually do to relax, such as traveling, meeting friends and attending LEGO events.

One thing that does help is being able to channel that six-year-old. I pop up to my loft and put some LEGO bricks together almost every day. And what does my inner six-year-old lifesavers? Well, fire trucks, of course. With a few decades of building experience under my belt and an adult’s disposable income, they’re obviously going to be elaborate. This pair of vehicles represents a Seagrave ladder truck and an ambulance, as operated by the New York Fire Department (FDNY). They are life savers in a real-world sense, but building them also kept me from going nuts.
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SPIKE on a bike [Video]

Several months ago, we reviewed LEGO Education’s new product, SPIKE Prime. And just a couple weeks ago, we featured news about the latest addition to the Mindstorms theme, the SPIKE-esque 51515 Robot Inventor. This new generation of programmable robotics brings bright colors and fresh ideas to the table. We’re already seeing some awesome builds coming from the education community, like this bike by the folks at Creator Academy Australia and Project Bucephalus. What’s so awesome about it? It’s self-balancing. This little guy can ride along on its own without tipping over (as long as there isn’t a wall). Click the link below to see it in action!

Click to watch!

LEGO Technic Summer 2020 sets fully revealed [News]

Last week we had a first look at the June-December German consumer catalogue images of the upcoming Summer 2020 LEGO Technic sets. Today we get to have a look at the actual box art as revealed by the retailer Meinspielzeug. While we still do not have the regional pricing, part counts are now available for all three sets. These will be available August 1st 2020. We will update the US, UK and Canadian retail prices as we get more information.

Click to see the box art of the new Summer LEGO Technic 2020 releases

New wheels for my LEGO Ambulance service

Some LEGO fans primarily collect sets; others focus on building their own creations. I’m very much in the latter camp. That doesn’t mean I don’t collect anything LEGO-related, though. I don’t just build for the sake of building and sharing pictures on-line. Most of my models fit into collections, like my Japanese cars, that I display at shows. Because they are part of a collection, I tend to keep them around for a long time. However, as a result, by now some of my vehicle models are so old that their real-world counterparts were retired years ago.

Case in point: the Dutch Chevrolet Express Ambulance that I built in 2009, as part of a collection of Dutch emergency vehicles. If I were to display this at a show, some of the children there might not even recognise that an ambulance used to look like that. So, even though there aren’t any shows in the foreseeable future, due to the pandemic, I felt my Dutch LEGO paramedics could do with a new set of wheels. The current type in North Holland, where I live, is the Mercedes Sprinter. All its doors, including the sliding doors in the sides, can open, to give access to a detailed interior. The lights on the roof have a snazzy aerodynamic shape, which was fun. I particularly enjoyed building the colour scheme. Ambulances in the Netherlands are yellow, with a complicated pattern of diagonal red and blue stripes. As I did with the old Chevy, I recreated this using stacked plates. Stickers would have given me a cleaner look, but to me this looks more authentic as a LEGO model. It is good to go for a few more years.