PaulC

Excellent tumbler, Exobuilder! This is one of my all-time favourite Batman vehicles, and hopefully the official Lego version will be much better than the rather lame Batmobile we got in 2006. There are a lot of tumbler MOCs out there on the internet, and if you want some tips on how to improve your own, I'd have a look at what other people have come up with. I like different parts of each of the MOCs I've seen. My favourite overall is the one built by BaronSat, but even he doesn't have as many cool side details as yours, like your triple exhausts which I love. He uses two of these pieces for the front windscreens: (Click on the image for Peeron list of what sets it can be found in) and he uses these wheels for the front: But his MOC is larger than yours, so I would maybe try this wheel: I hope these comments are helpful, and good luck with your building!

Not quite. The Speed Racer truck is 8 studs wide, whereas the truck cab here is at least 12 wide, if not more!

I'm quite excited by the new movie, and I love these sets! I'm probably just going to get the two smaller sets so that I've got one each of the main cars. There are whole load of new parts which show some excellent MOC potential, as mentioned before: New curved windscreen New mudguards New engine pipes And also there appears to be a new curved slope, like this piece only 4 long instead of 3.

Excellent finds chaps, and great reviews. Thanks Dr. Sinister and Vader. I'm happy to report that Ipswich TRU also has all these sets. My wife has allowed me to buy a 7622, but I've been told to wrap it up and put it under the Christmas tree, so I have to wait. Doh! Man, I'm looking forward to Christmas now!

I've taken loads of pics, so I'm going to divide the review into two parts. 8146 Bullet Run review: Part 1 I was quite excited when I saw the preliminary pics for this set. There has never been so many Tiny Turbo vehicles available in one set before, and I prefer it to ending up with tons of those useless plastic containers. It also gives the opportunity to produce some excellent larger vehicles. I think this set must be selling well, since the first I heard of it being available in the UK was a big space in Tesco's toy aisle marked "8147 Bullet Run: Temporarily out of stock". Fortunately within a couple of days they had some more in, so I was able to grab one. The front of the 56 page A4 instruction booklet has the same illustration as the box front: I like the way that the most recent sets I've got have images from the back of the box in the instruction booklet, as I don't have enough space to keep a lot of my boxes. No matter how hard I slam my slammer I cannot get the stretch limo to fly as high as in this picture! At

For younger builders who don't own a real house, so can't devote an entire room to build a permanent Lego layout, I think CaseWindu's advice is the best so far. Find a small area like the top of a dresser that you can build a small layout on. Small is beautiful! You'll find with careful planning, you can fit quite a lot into a very small space like this layout of mine from a few years back. If fact, I had a large part of this layout permanently built inside a sliding drawer under my bed for many years (which meant I had to leave out taller buildings like the police station here): Plan view. In this part of the layout alone I have managed to fit 4 houses, a church, garage, bike shop, goods yard, Statue of Liberty, police station, hospital, fire station, snack bar, pizzaria, post office, football pitch, runway and space shuttle launch pad: Of course it helps that the buildings are all in the classic Lego town style which makes them much smaller than the modern ones: For older builders JoeBot's plan has worked well for me! *y*

Darn! Asuka, you guessed right at the first attempt. It's the yellow and black road cones that we saw waaaaaay too many of on our last trip to Canada. The joke goes: they are only two seasons on Canadian roads. Winter and Construction. 30 and 55 are the only roadsigns I've got, hence the strange speed limits. The idea with the roadworks is there is another guy with a stop/go board out of sight at the other end of the works and they take it in turns to stop the traffic in their direction so the others can get through. Usually in Canada the guys with the stop/go boards are bored-looking university students on a summer vacation job! :-/

Layout A while back I posted these pics from the beginings of my New Block City project: Now I've embarked on phase 2; a more modern high-rise part of the city which includes a hospital, apartment block, office building and CN-style tower with a revolving (motorised!) restaurant on top. This is still a work in progress so there still some odd-coloured bricks I need to get replacements for. Enjoy the pics!

Layout Thanks for all the kind comments Guys. Because Highland Cattle asked for it, I've spent the past couple of weeks putting together a layout combining phase 1 and 2. Because I have such a busy life, progress has been very slow, but here it is: Full layout. Close-up. A busy street corner. Residents were worried when the sign on the theatre first went up, but then the theatre manager went and got some "v"s. Vader and Yoda are first in the queue for tickets. Another busy street scene. The intersection of Brick Street and East 40th Street, showing off my NYC style police cars. The inevitable road construction going on (I wonder if anyone can spot what makes this scene a bit Canadian, other than my CN tower homage)! ;-) A wedding at the City Hall. A police surveillance helicopter parked on top of the hospital. Captian Green Hair asked how many phases will there be? Well, as many as I have the time and space to build! My New Block City project is infinitely expandable as you can see in this layout plan I made. I'm currently working on phases 3 and 4 which are a fire station and construction site respectively. X-D

That's a beautiful layout. I'm particularly impressed with your 8-wide trains and the mix of Lego landscaping (I love the pond) and non-Lego landscaping (the hill and tunnel with the house on top). Can I ask, is the green mat something you can buy for model railways or just a piece of carpet that matches the grass on the tunnel?

Your town is absolutely fantastic Simon. There's so many details about that I love: The multi-level layout, the road and rail tunnels, your wonderful trees... *wub* It has a classic town feel, and at the same time a very European feel too. Plus, the night lighting gives it even more atmosphere. Well done on such a detailed and character-filled layout in such a small space.

I didn't spot this great review earlier. Thanks for the effort of posting all those pics and videos, they helped me decide that this set is worth getting.

Thanks! Hey, nice idea. Maybe it's accomodation for the hospital staff. It's tricky at the moment as I don't have a lot of space to set up a layout, but I'll see what I can do... Actually I'm really please with how the the black office building turned out, but as usual, large areas of black Lego do not photograph well. |-/ Heh heh, my wife is from Ontario, so I've got a real fondness for the CN Tower. Here are some more tower pics: The tower is fully 90cm tall and is the tallest Lego structure I've ever built. Blurry close of of the restaurant which seats 8. The chef peers out of kitchen which is midway up the tower. The tower doesn't actually have any interior at all as the space is taken up with motor, gears and axles! A prototype tower containing my first attempt at powering the revolving restaurant. The micro motor was nowhere near powerfull enough and produced very jerky rotation under load. The final design contains a large 9v motor and lots and lots of gears! The idea for the tower came when I saw next year's Creator 4995 Sky-Crane Helicopter. Once I get it, I can recreate this scene: X-D

Thanks for the compliments and the correction. I have to admit that my impression of the back story was just from looking at the box illustrations. I didn't go and check the real story on the official website. My bad. :-$

Nice designs HC, especially the passenger wagon. I'm jealous that you found that tanker set at half price. I've always wanted to find one so I could make a train wagon out of it too.

Spotted this one in Woolworths recently reduced by 25%. I wasn't going to bother with Mars Mission, as I have some issues with it. Firstly, why do the aliens have to be the bad guys. It looks as if typically the humans have just rolled up to another planet and are sucking out it's mineral and imprisoning the locals if they get in the way. The green translucent residents are understandably peeved at this and mobilise their forces to oust the aggressors. Another questionable premise from Lego. Secondly, some of the designs are pretty lousy. I like the white and orange colour scheme and the orange canopies are way cool but as has been pointed out above, you would you get an awful lot of dust in the cabin with that big gap, plus the alien flies out of the back and the rear suspension relies on bending the technic beams. Anyway, I bought two MT-31s and put them together in order to try and fix the design flaws, and here is my Hazardous Materials Transport Truck: The front and rear suspension use the rubber widget used in the original kit. The centre wheels can just pivot freely and bump over the terrain. The tubes are now vertical so that the cargo doesn't fall out. The tubes also pivot so you can unload the cargo. They'll carry quite a lot of different stuff, round 1x1 plates, jewels etc.

I kind of like the design of this, but more importantly I really want to get my hands on the power functions motors and IR control system. I'd prefer the 8275 Technic Bulldozer, but there's no way I can stretch to the

I love *wub* the new helicopter, with a motorised winch as well *wub* It's just like a Sikorsky Skycrane (now known as an Erickson Air Crane) Helicopter. Now all I have to do is build a really big tower for my town so I can recreate a scene like this, where the helecopter lifts in the final sections of the tower (you have to look real close to see the helicopter):

Like many, I'm sad to see 9v go. The beauty of the 9v system was the total compatability between all it's components. You could use the light and sound bricks found in the smaller town sets on your trains. The ultra small 9v battery box (only 8x4 studs) shaped like a lego brick could easily be hidden in very small models. You could swap stuff around too, the battery box could power the train motor and the train transformer could run the lights in a building. However, I'm quite looking forward to see what Lego do with Power Functions trains. I can understand that they don't want to produce the expensive metal track any more, the plastic track must be much cheaper to produce. One thing I would really like to know is, since the Power Functions system is also 9v (6x 1.5v batteries in the battery box = 9v) why have they felt the need to change the connectors? The new Power Functions shape battery box is still available with the old 9v connnector on top in 8287 Motor Box and 4895 Motion Power. Why not keep the old connectors and make it truely backwards compatible?

*Guilt* *Shame* I didn't mean to sound down on you Chuck. Sorry. That'll teach me to post in a tearing hurry before I rush out to work. Props to Chuck and Yoda for being so positive about it, EB style.

It's not just 7666 on a baseplate. Although you've used a lot of unmodified props from various Star Wars sets, there are some cool mods here. I really like the expanded control console. Also, it takes time and creativity to set it all up in a cool action pose. My favourite picture is the overhead view of the whole battle - there's so much going on! Great job Darth Andrew. Do you mind if I add a link to your moc on my Hoth Base Topic?

blub hub glub bloop *fights his head above water* I'm sure the doors will kick in in just a moment, sometimes they take a minute or two to work...

Your mocs are really neat Chuck. I like small scale stuff that's built to go with really big spaceships. It demands a lot of creativity, working with so few pieces. They remind me of some JSFs and a droid tri-fighter that I made a while back (I hope you don't mind if I add my pics to your topic). These were made to match the scale of Lego's own 6967 Mini Arc-170 Starfighter: Rear view:

*Sound of running footsteps approaching. Enter Jack Tupp, mechanic, moocher, and all-round cowardly guy.* Shouts: It's all rather confusing really! Ewwww! Now there's an image I really could have done without.*Disappears out of the cabin door, sound of running footsteps receding.*