Some say he wears gloves on his feet instead of socks. And that he once teepee’d Cher’s house. All we know is that he’s called Tim Inman, and that he is a bit of a petrol head. With his latest build, Tim has totally nailed the distinctive lines of the ultra-rare, ultra-classic 1957 Jaguar XK-SS. Why the Mini Cooper was a LEGO set and this Jaaaag wasn’t, we’ll never know. LEGO cars don’t get much more “swooshable” than this (or is it “vroomable”?).
According to builder Karwik, this type of Polish Television truck was the first such vehicle to be designed and built in then-Communist Poland, and helped facilitate the first color TV broadcast in Poland in 1971: a program of Communist Party government proceedings.
Karwik has done a stellar job adding details on this model, from the myriad cables and wires that always accompany broadcast trucks to building nifty minifig-scale cameras. My favorites are the tiny stepstools by the truck doors.
At The Brothers Brick we aim to present some of the best fan-built LEGO models. We’re not necessarily used to our own models exploding all over the internet or on the occasions when they do, it is usually because we ourselves have posted them here first. In the last few days, this normal order of things was turned upside down. I went on a little trip visiting family for a few days, but before leaving I posted a few pictures of my latest model, Optimus Prime, on flickr. These were picked up by a number of other LEGO blogs (the LEGO Car Blog and Bricknerd among others) and subsequently pretty much went viral. I was going to write something here eventually, but hadn’t gotten around to making the video that I wanted to include and, because of this, I got scooped.
I have finally completed the video and I will use this post to add more info about the build, that I know people have been wondering about, such as why I built a so-called Bayformer rather than a G1 Optimus Prime or whether this model will make its way to LEGO Ideas, so that other fans may eventually buy one. I’ll start with the biggest question, though: is it actually fully transformable or am I a big cheater, who has built two different models to separately represent the robot and the truck mode?
As you can see, the model can indeed go from truck to robot by sliding and rotating various parts. The only exception is that the fuel tanks are separate parts that are pinned to the truck. This is similar to how the toy that I used as the basis for the transformation sequence works. The sequence is complicated and some stuff usually breaks in the process, but having seen videos of people transforming their toy versions, I get the impression that this is normal.
I’m hardly the first person to build a working Transformer in LEGO. We’ve blogged Transformers on many different occasions and, as a child, I myself used to build the original G1 models from the cartoon. The designs from the recent movies by Michael Bay, also known as Bayformers, are rather more complicated than the older models, though, and this is exactly what makes them more interesting to me. I also think that a long-nose Peterbilt looks more attractive than the red and blue cab-over-engine truck used for the G1 Optimus Prime and happen to like building flame patterns. To my surprise, some die-hard Transformers fans hate Bayformers with an almost scary passion and consequently they hate mine. I recommend they go look at Alex Jones’ version from a few years ago or perhaps at some kittens instead.
My Optimus Prime will not be making it onto LEGO Ideas. Even if I could drum up enough support for the project by plastering it all over social media, LEGO wouldn’t touch this with a stick. The Transformers toy line is owned by their competitor Hasbro, who produce rather poor-looking Transformers sets in their own Kre-O range of LEGO compatible construction toys. If you want your own LEGO Optimus Prime, you’ll probably have to build it yourself. This should be easy enough. After all, to quote one commenter on my model, “my nine-year-old can do better”. You have got to love the internet.
Jordan Schwartz built the vehicle driven by Immortan Joe from the latest Mad Max movie. It features the stacked 1959 Cadillac Coupe de Villes along with the powerful engine and front plow. Surely getting a ride in this bad boy will take you straight to the gates of Valhalla!
LEGO has just announced the next large Creator vehicle, a Ferrari F40. This supercar follows in the line of popular models such as the still-currently available Volkswagen Camper Van and Mini Cooper, and the now-retired Volkswagen Beetle. 10248 Ferrari F40 has 1,158 pieces, and will retail for USD 89.99, EUR 89.99, GBP 69.99, and DKK 799.00, and will be available starting August 1. The official press release is below the jump.
Usually here on TBB, we feature beautifully built cars: shiny, in their prime. The Latvian LEGO User Group has posted this positively adorable VW Bug. Beautifully built, but clearly with tales to tell.
How cute is this?! Rust, peeling paint, and personality with a full interior. If you’re interested, you can also see what’s likely this Beetle before time took it’s toll.
This gorgeous piece of machinery is a Gräf & Stift 1911 double phaeton, built by Karwik. Besides being a mightily fine looking automobile, its significance lies in the fact that this car was owned by the late Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, whose assassination in this vehicle sparked the Great War.
Well, it’s no surprise that we’re seeing a lot of groovy Mad Max Colon Fury Road builds popping up on our radar this week. Here is the “gigahorse”, excellently rendered in LEGO by alex & milo. I wish I could tell you more about the gigahorse, but I haven’t seen the movie yet and wanna avoid running into any spoilers (…and I suspect the longer I put if off, the harder that’s gonna be!)
When, back in 1960, race car driver Paul Frère asked Enzo Ferrari what limited the top speed of his Ferrari 250TR at Le Mans, probably wondering whether the rather large and ungainly windscreen on said car had anything to do with this, Enzo replied that aerodynamics are for people who can’t build engines.
More than 40 years later, the company Ferrari built the Enzo, named after its founder. This car’s shape was undoubtedly designed to be reminiscent of a Formula 1 car, with its V-shaped hood and front air intakes resembling a front wing, but I’m sure the designers spent a lot of time fiddling to get the aerodynamics right. A lot of things have changed since the sixties. Getting the shape of his car right has taken Nathanael L. a fair bit of fiddling too. This is his fourth attempt at building an Enzo and it just keeps getting better. I’m glad he stuck with it. I also think it’s particularly neat that, despite the complexity of its shape, just about everything on the model opens and the engine looks good too.
Joe Perez (mortalswordsman) works for Bright Bricks in the UK, where he builds LEGO models for a living. He is also a bit of a petrolhead; a British term for people who are crazy about internal combustion engines.
This made him the perfect choice for a recent Bright Bricks project that involved building miniland scale (1/20) vehicles, including a fair few motorcycles. Despite building with LEGO for a living, he still finds the time and interest to build just for fun. He has obviously caught the bug of building motorcycles, as shown by his groovy chopper.
Talking of petrolheads from the UK who are also professional LEGO builders, Carl Greatrix (bricktrix) launched a Lego Ideas project for a Caterham Seven model several months ago, which has now passed 10,000 votes. Let’s keep our fingers crossed for the design review.
Until now, all of the pictures Davy Linden (Davekuhh) posted of his awesome Volvo excavator were of it sitting either on his building table or on display at LowLUG events in the Netherlands, with lots of clutter and legs in the background. I’ve been following his progress and have been waiting for decent pictures to appear for months, which makes it all the more frustrating that, now that they have and I finally get around to writing about it, other blogs have already beaten me to it.
In any case, this is just the sort of model I like and that I know many of you will appreciate too. I had the pleasure of being able to take in all the model’s details at one of the events a few months ago and I also got to see Davy use a dustbuster to vacuum up the ‘LEGO dirt’ from the base on which he displayed it. This is undoubtedly an effective method, but it makes a sound that fans of LEGO normally do not like to hear!
Somewhat to my shame, in my time as a contributor to this blog, I have not been a particularly prolific writer. This was particularly true at times when I was also busy writing things for work or dealing with a lot of deadlines, as I have been for a while now. I think all of us at TBB have been struggling with similar issues lately, as you may have gathered from the reduced frequency of posts. Even our lemur isn’t safe, although, to his credit, the kitchen tiles in the compound are now shinier than ever. Since for me stress-relief is a big reason for building, perhaps surprisingly, the upshot of being busy at work is that I do build lots of new models. This is far easier and also more relaxing than writing.
I’ve been working on a collection of famous vehicles from movies and TV series for about two years now, but by October last year I felt I was about done. However, enthusiastic reactions and suggestions for new ones that I got when I displayed them at the Great Western LEGO show in Swindon (UK) made me decide to continue and to diversify a bit more, by including helicopters. The vehicles in the picture are most of the ones I built since. I already wrote about Blue Thunder and Airwolf, in the back row, but you may not have seen any of the others. The third helicopter is the UH-1H “Huey” that serves as the personal transport for the surf-obsessed and completely insane Lt.Col. Kilgore, from Apocalypse Now. The other vehicles are Korben Dallas’ flying taxy from The 5th Element, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Capt. Nemo’s car from The League of extraordinary gentlemen, the Munster Koach from The Munsters, the GM Ultralite police car from Demolition Man, the AMC Pacer from Wayne’s world and, last but not least, the motorcycle with sidecar from Indiana Jones: the last crusade, all built to the same scale.
To be continued…
