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).

Starfighter really earns its stripes

Novvember, the annual month of starfighter building, continues apace. And here’s a belter of a build from Flavio. The golden cockpit is a nice touch, and the striping brings a 90s-era gaming glow to my heart – it’s very F-Zero or Wipeout. But it’s the level of detailing, particularly around the engines, which really makes this model for me.

Textured bricks break up the surfaces and add depth and intricacy, and along with the use of minifig accessories, like claws and ice skates, these touches make the model look much bigger than it really is. I’d like to swoosh this around the room making rocket thruster and pew-pew blaster noises.

Flavio’s Flickr photostream is a treasure trove of spaceships and cute little mechs. I might have found a new favourite builder…

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This car belongs to Bond... James Bond

The Aston Martin DB5 is famous for being the most recognised cinematic James Bond car, and builder Peter Blackert has released his latest creation, the DB5 Volante, from the garage just in time for the new Bond film.

The Aston Martin DB5 is a luxury grand tourer released in 1963, made by Aston Martin and designed by the Italian coachbuilder Carrozzeria Touring Superleggera. The DB5 was first used as Bond’s car in Goldfinger in 1964 and was destroyed in Skyfall in 2012. I haven’t seen the new Bond film Spectre yet so I don’t know if Bond’s DB5 has recovered to make an appearance, though it is confirmed that Bond will drive a brand-new DB10 which was designed specifically for Agent 007 by Aston Martin.

At first sight Peter’s DB5 appears luxurious with chrome detailing, a soft tan leather interior and maroon bodywork. Look closely and you will see ingenious use of minifigure accessories such as ice-skates used as door handles and registration plate holder, or binoculars for the exhaust.

Mercedes-Benz 180 Ponton – recreated down to the wheel jack

We’ve been featuring quite a few cars on The Brothers Brick lately; hot rods, mini hot rods, trucks and even… tire robots? Anyway, since so many great motors are being made, we want to show them off, and this Mercedes-Benz from nameless_member does the German car in excruciating detail. The model only gets better when you look inside and see a fully fleshed out interior, engine, and, yes, even the tools you need to fix the thing.

Capturing the queen in Novvember

We’re less than a week into Novvember and already flickr is awash with vic vipers. David Roberts has started the event off strong with this stunning viper. It’s packed full of interesting details while still maintaining an overall clean appearance. But the real standout features of this build are the dramatic blue and yellow checkerboard-patterned tail and wings which evoke the art of Chris Foss. (If you’re unfamiliar with Foss’s work, check it out here for a some inspiration while you’re working on your own vic vipers this month.)

And if you, like myself, are new to Novvember be sure to read the late nnenn’s instructions on how to build the standard vic viper.

Just a trucking good recreation

Spaceships, mechs and Akira-esque bikes are all very well and good, but sometimes simply recreating a real vehicle is a pleasure unto itself. Adam Glowacki has brought us trucks before, but this model of a Kenworth K108 is superb. Check out a picture of the real thing to see just how close this version gets. The only aspect really missing is shiny chrome. We miss the days of shiny bricks…

I’d like to personally apologize for the title.

Go small or go home

Looking like the miniature twin of Devid VII’s hot rod, this nifty little road machine by Grantmasters proves that even a few pieces are enough. Look closely, and you can spy some unusual parts in play, namely a minifig book and bucket handles.

Get in, sit down, shut up, hold on

Devid VII’s photostream is a delight. There seems to be something for everyone in his catalogue: exo-suits, fun dioramas and even Japanese anime icons. Now he’s giving something to the gear heads with his newest hot rod called Hell Brown.

We don’t know if the brown on this is its actual colour or it’s flying the flag of rusty rat rods erywhere, but Devid has also produced two more hot rods in both yellow and grey. None of the them are just fragile models, though. All three can fit a full minifig inside, are playable and the motors are removable.

1915 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, Lenin Style

This 1915 Rolls-Royce 40/50 Silver Ghost was modified to carry the first Premier of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin. A magnificent example of artistry in auto-making to begin with, the heavy modifications turned this Silver Ghost into a terrifyingly capable machine perfectly suited for the far northern reaches and harsh winters of the Russian homeland. The model here by Karwik well captures that capability by placing it in a diorama climbing a snow-covered hill beneath a gnarled tree.

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.

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.