Vehicle building tips

[AwesomeTaylor]

I'm getting back into Lego after about 15 years thanks to an awesome Christmas gift from my girlfriend, and am working on my first real models in a long time thanks to BrickLink. But I am a little stuck when it cones to cars for my rapidly expanding Lego world. I got a copy of the city transit, and while 6studs wide cars looked big at first, I noticed that 4 studs wide looks really odd. The sports car for example looks way too thin in the middle with the wheels sticking out.

I then started noticing that the small car set, and sone other smaller vehicles are 4 studs wide.

How does everyone else make their vehicles? Do you reserve 6 studs for larger cars and vans, and 4 studs for everything else, or do you mod the cars to be 6 studs wide? I also noticed that the little 2x4 plate with wheels on that ALL my cars had as a kid seems to have totally disappeared now.

As I start to flesh out my town plans, the cars are becoming a headache!

[dr_spock]

For my town, I am old school 4wide vehicles. For fun, I MOC 6 wide trucks but I don't mix them with my town.

Pick a size you like and stick with it.

[tppytel]

If you search the forum a bit, you'll find some threads on 5-wide cars, which are intended to solve exactly the scale problem you're describing. A number of folks use those for typical passenger cars, 6-wide for trucks and larger vehicles, and 4-wide only for very small cars. I think that's the way I'm going with my town setup, though I have a long way to go.

5-wide also provides the added fun of trying to deal with the odd width.

[lightningtiger]

Personally, it all depends on the theme I'm rolling with.....if it's classic town....4 wide, city....4 and 6 wide, my own MOC designs i.e. for my town.....6 wide cars, small trucks & vans, with 8 wide for heavy vehicles with larger wheels of course.

Brick On !

[CptMugwash]

Hi, I like to keep it the same as the Lego sets so 4 wide for cars and 6 wide for trucks. If I had a 6 wide car on the road with some 4 wide cars it would just look odd.

[Ralph_S]

Welcome to Eurobricks, AwesomeTaylor. I know the problem as I struggled with it a few years ago. I never had a dark age as such, but for a long time I didn't use minifigs because they are so awkwardly shaped. When I got back into minifig scale building (through a competition run by the Lego users group that I joined), I decided to once again look into building cars for my minifigs.

I like the size of the larger vehicles LEGO sells in their city sets nowadays (although I don't like how the wheels always stick out), but not so much the regular cars (four wide bodies, five wide including the mudguards, six including the tyres). As a compromise I decided to make the body of most of my regular cars five wide and use smaller tyres for them. Here's an example showing the size comparison between a truck (fairly closely based on the trucks you can get in sets) with one of my first five-wide cars next to it.

Eurotrans truck (5) by Mad physicist, on Flickr

I wrote a fairly lengthy post about the choices I made about a year ago here on EB. Perhaps it'll be of use to you. The small city car fits into my car collection nicely by the way.

Cheers,

Ralph

[AwesomeTaylor]

Thanks so much! I hadn't considered 5 wide - but just your own little red car gives me lots of ideas! I think I might just try that, and take a look at some stuff online that is 5 wide for inspiration. Also, your wheels are gorgeous! You said they come from the racer sets?

Thanks a lot, this post and your previous one you linked to was very helpful! I will have to do more research. I think I have plenty of time before I can afford to buy more Lego after this weeks BrickLink binge, so that lots of time to try some new techniques out on LDD! :D

[Ricecracker]

Also, your wheels are gorgeous! You said they come from the racer sets?

They're these wheels. They're great for cars.

My suggestion would be to try building the same car in a number of different sizes, to see which one looks best to you. Maybe try 4, 5 and 6 studs wide?

I'd consider all my vehicles to be of a similar scale. I have vehicles in 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 wide, so it really does depend on the vehicle in question.

Edited February 5, 2011 by Ricecracker

[Ralph_S]

Thanks Awesometaylor,

Ricecreacker tends to build his vehicles marginally larger than mine, but the exact scale largely is a personal preference. I like this scale because I think it goes well together with cafe-corner compatible builings -which is what the competition that got me back into using minifigs had to do with- and in collaborative displays the cars go well together with many of the vehicles from the sets -even the ones I don't particularly like . The overall size of the red car isn't all that different from the size of the LEGO city sports car, but IMO it looks much more like a real car.

There obviously are drawbacks. There are some things you can do as an AFOL that simply aren't suitable for sets. The odd-wide construction makes them more complicated and also means that they consume rather a lot of parts for their size, such as jumper plates, 1x1, 1x2, and 1x3 plates and 1x1 tiles. I made several pictures showing some of the construction. Feel free to copy parts you like. Some of the first five-wides I built weren't pretty and it took me a fair bit of fiddling to really get the hang of it .

Cheers,

Ralph

Edited February 5, 2011 by Ralph_S

[bricked one]

Depends if you want to make vehicles that are realistic, functional, swooshable, or detailed.

4 wide- swooshable

5 wide- realistic, detailed, swooshable(some of them)

6 wide- detailed, functional, swooshable

I like 6 wide(7 with wheel wells) cars because their easy to make and you can play with them, however they are on the large side so I ended up making the trucks 8 wide. But in the end, it depends on your style of building and the reason you're building. You can see some of my stuff in my sig.