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).

Life-size LEGO RV Sets New Guinness World Record

A life-size, fully functional caravan trailer made entirely from LEGO bricks was presented this week at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, UK, during the 2015 Motorhome & Caravan Show.

[photo courtesy of Guinness World Records]

The trailer set the surprisingly specific record for “largest caravan built with interlocking plastic bricks.” The model uses 215,158 LEGO bricks to faithfully recreate all the functions of a real RV, including running water and electricity. While sadly the heating elements and stove are non-functional lest the bricks melt, the refrigerator is perfectly capable of keeping its LEGO-built food safely preserved. Impressively, even the table folds down into a functional (albeit very firm) bed, just like real caravan trailers. The caravan will be on display Oct. 13-18 at the show, then again at the end of the month for UK’s Brick 2015 LEGO convention.

The model was created by UK’s Bright Bricks, LEGO Certified Professional Duncan Titmarsh and Ed Diment’s company. We’ve featured Ed’s monstrously large military ships many times here on TBB.

via Guinness World Records.

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Biking Large: a Cyberpunk Rocket

This cyberpunk bike would look right at home in Akira, but is actually from the mind of French builder F@bz. Sitting at 55 studs in length, the large scale gives room for plenty of terrific details, the coolest of which are the brilliant incorporation of the hot air balloon panels as a sleek engine cowling and the stacked 2×2 radar dishes for the rear suspension.

Eight bells for the Grampian Don

When it comes to scale models of sea vessels, Dutch builder Arjan Oude Kotte is in a class of his own. When he unveiled a gigantic minifig scale version of rescue vessel the Grampian Don a couple of years ago, we were impressed by all the details and his sculpting of its bulbous bow. But in preparing to show the model at the STEAM expo, Arjan finally completed it with decals, a daughter ship, and built-in lighting, making for one of the most atmospheric and realistic presentations of a LEGO model that I’ve seen in a long time. I can almost feel the cold sea air!

The Art of LEGO Scale Modeling [Review]

In the last two years, my fellow Dutchmen Dennis Bosman (Legotrucks) and Dennis Glaasker (Bricksonwheels) have been working on a book titled The art of Lego Scale Modeling. It is one of a number of new titles released this fall by Nostarch Press and currently costs $21.74 on amazon (down from its normal list price of 29.95).

Both of these guys have been building scale models (primarily of trucks) for years and are long-term members of the LEGO community. For their book they have enlisted the cooperation of no fewer than 22 other builders, from all over the world, to present high-quality photographs of some of the best Lego scale models of vehicles you’ll ever see. I got my copy just before the weekend, because I was lucky enough to be able to contribute some of my own models for this title. I obviously cannot be completely objective here. Then again, no reviewer ever is.

The excellent photographs of the models themselves are accompanied by short bits of text, giving some information about the real-world vehicle, and the builds. These are interesting, but the photographs are the stars. If you are a regular reader of our blog, you will already have seen a fair few of the models, such as the Ferrari 458 Italia, by Nathaneal L.. The top-notch photography shows them in a new light.

Although there probably are other scale models out there of similar quality, the Dennises have made a really nice selection of trucks, including a few by the authors themselves, cars, motorcycles, race cars, cranes, aircraft, military models and ships. A few models were built specifically for the book, such as the wonderful Scania by Ingmar Spijkhoven (2LegoOrNot2Lego).

If you are expecting a detailed explanation of how to build models like these, this book will disappoint you. There’s a brief section on how to build them, with a few useful pointers, but a look at the biographies of the builders included in the back of the book will tell you that most of them have been at this for years, if not decades. You can’t learn to build models like these by reading a book; it takes experience. If you’re looking for instructions, you’re not going to find them either. The instructions for some of the individual models alone would be enough to fill most of the book’s 204 pages. You will find plenty of inspiration, though.

As usual with LEGO books from this publisher, the cover and binding seem pretty sturdy. The pictures are nicely printed in a matt-gloss finish and are printed on decent quality paper. This is what you would expect from what’s essentially a coffee table picture book. What I didn’t expect is the size of the book. I would have liked to see it a bit larger (it is about 20 by 25 cm/ 8 x 10 inches). This size was probably chosen to keep the book affordable. The pages are still large enough to give you a good view of the models and to appreciate most of the details, but some would definitely look even better on a larger canvas. This is a minor niggle. If scale models of vehicles built out of LEGO are your thing (and if not, why not?!), this is a title you definitely do not want to miss.

Cruising with Green T – 1923 Ford Model T

Have you ever just wanted to hop into a hot rod and take off down the highway? Personally, I’d go for Highway 101 as it’s a favorite of mine, but any stretch of road will do.

Norton74 give us this absolutely lovely bright green 1923 Ford Model T, complete with all of the upgrades and chrome you could ever dream of.

I particularly like that the builder has given this beauty her own home in a garage that is FAR cleaner that it has any right to be, and is chock full of details to keep you occupied for your entire work break.

Via Bricknerd.

“Holy interplanetary yardsticks, Batman!”

Movie-centric builder SPARKART! has put together a pretty thorough LEGO history of the Batmobile, from 1966 to the present day. The mandatory tumblers are in there of course. But being an old fart, my favorite has to be the original TV version! I like the scale chosen for these, and also the inclusion of matching figurines. (Hey LEGO company, *this* is what that exclusive Comic Con batmobile set should have looked like!)

Drive your minifig to work in electric style with a LEGO Tesla

The Tesla, arguably what is the world’s first stylish electric car, is a testament to how far electric vehicles have come. The first thing about this minifig scale version by Cole Edmonson was how instantly recognizable it is. Often real life sports cars and sedans translated down to minifig scale loose so much of their distinctive styling that they just look like a generic car, but the proportions of this Tesla give it away. Cole has even provided a very detailed write-up of his design process for this model, which is a cool behind-the-scenes look at what a good builder puts into even a small model.

Full steam ahead

Once again demonstrating his unique mastery of small-scale Steampunk vehicles, Swiss builder captainsmog presents the “100 HOURS OF STEAM” automobile race, a collection of contraptions from such well known Steampunk nations as Francia, Indria and Russilia. Check out the full album to see them all, and many other steam-powered Victorian wonders.

The Big Cat: Incredibly detailed LEGO Caterpillar bulldozer

Some people build spaceships and castles. Others build more down-to-earth items, but build them amazingly well. It doesn’t get more down to earth or well built than this Caterpillar D11T by Davy Linden, which can plow through mountains of earth with ease. The D11T is an unbelievably large bulldozer, weighing in at 115 tons and just shy of 1000 horsepower, capable of crushing trucks with ease. This model excludes no detail, and is roughly twice minifig scale, giving it a whopping 22 inch length. Take time to carefully pore over the details, as many of the tiny greebles are hard to spot against the yellow body.

Transporting you to other worlds

I’m not sure whether these remind me more of our wildly popular microfighter contest, or are meant to foreshadow LEGO’s much anticipated Dimensions product line (JUST ONE MORE WEEK FOLKS). But French builder Eric Druon has assembled this adorable armada of TV and movie inspired miniature road vehicles, in a strict 4-stud-wide format.

Eric has even made instructions available for anyone who wants to build their own copies. And for the record, this is actually *not* the most builds that we’ve ever featured in a single post – but it’s close!

Just for kicks

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:

Remember the little red button? Push the little red button

“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.