Ideas for building a 6-wide jet airplane?

[jonwil]

LEGO has the perfect pieces for building a 4-wide plane and an 8-wide plane but does anyone have any ideas how to build one at 6-wide without the need to wait until next year for the new 6-wide parts?

[Tereglith]

I would suggest messing around with a bunch of curved bricks and windshields until you get something you like. Or you could just wait the two months until the 2010 sets come out, it's not that long from now.

[peterab]

LEGO has the perfect pieces for building a 4-wide plane and an 8-wide plane but does anyone have any ideas how to build one at 6-wide without the need to wait until next year for the new 6-wide parts?

You could take a look at the roof and nose pieces used in the last couple of passanger trains, they're six wide and might get you started.

[Legostein]

Hello Jon!

An interesting question! I love airplanes and when I was younger I always cruised through the house with them. You're right the newer ones are 8-wide, having many otherwise unuseful large prefabricated pieces. The older ones were 4-wide not having that amount of large pieces and were more brick-built. I have two suggestions now.

First, there exists a 6-wide plane. Okay, it's not the most beautiful one, but maybe some of the pieces can be useful or be good for inspiration. I guess it ha s a similar amount of prefabricated shapes like the new planes.

Second, I could imagine building a plane with the following pieces:

Passenger tube bottom:

Passenger tube top: or

Cockpit bottom: or or

Cockpit screen:

Cockpit roof:

Passenger tube ending and leading to tail: same as cockpit bottom

Passenger tube roof end towards tail: You'll find some nice wede brick solution for that, leving a gap for attaching the tail.

Hope this helps!

Have a good week-end and enjoy building!

~ Christopher

[Ralph_S]

Even though those 8-wide parts turned out to be better than I thought they would be, overall I'm not a fan of big premolded parts. While some of the parts that have already been mentioned are undoubtedly useful for building a more-or-less tube-like fuselage, the difficulties you're likely going to run into when building a plane with a six-wide fuselage are the nose section and the tapering aft body. IMO the cockpit parts suggested by Legostein will end up looking ugly.

I've built aircraft fuselages of many different widths and I tend to use SNOT work, half-stud offsets or a combination of both to make things work. Recently I have also used hinged sections. None of this is particularly easy when you do it the first time, but ultimately well worth the effort.

If you want some examples, I can refer you to my B-26 Marauder and Hawkeye. Both have fuselages that are 7 studs wide, but six should really only be easier. A truly wonderful 6-wide plane is Gambort's An-28.

Cheers,

Ralph