bruce n h

Hey all, Thanks for the comments. Yes, that is a dead white tree by the pool on the upper level. You'll have to read the book (or follow that Wikipedia link) for its importance. You'll also just have to imagine tunnels leading from each level to the next. They're on the sides, alternating left and right with each level, so you couldn't really see them anyway. On the color choices, my mental image was formed 20 years before Peter Jackson made his movies, so I never saw the city as being all white buildings. Bruce

Hi all, Here's a microscale project I've been working on for a while. Is something truly microscale if it covers six baseplates and is 40 bricks high? Anyway, here is my rendition of Minas Tirth I tried to make an effort to match this to my other Minas Tirth MOCs. Here is my full-scale Tower of Ecthelion Here are my full-scale city gates Bruce

That MOC is by Steve DeCraemer. It was exhibited at BrickFest 2005, where it won best in show. It's called POV3 because it had 3 points of view, this castle on one side, a city section, and this robot sculpture on the other side. More pics here: http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=141197 Discussion in this CC thread here: http://www.classic-castle.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5378 Bruce

Hey, Takeshi Itou (aka Hachi) (website, gallery) is probably the best fantasy castle builder out there. It's all but impossible to choose among his MOCs, but my favorite might be his Gorge Bridge or his South Inlet Fortress Bruce

Hi all, Classic-Castle is pleased to announce the Castle Contest LEGO has offered the upcoming 2007 Castle sets as prizes, and the contest will be administered by Classic-Castle. Go to the contest page for details and ask questions in this thread on CC for clarifications. Bruce CC Admin

Hey all, I've been thinking about doing this for a while. I've started a new blog as a companion to VignetteBricks. Please visit MicroBricks, highlighting microscale creations. Bruce

Hey, Those are by Dunechaser, aka Andrew Becraft. He's an active member of Classic-Castle and a less active member of various other forums. He's also the founder of the blogs The Brothers Brick and Pan-Pacific Bricks. Bruce

My thinking on the cow is that it would be very useful across several themes. I'm sure trainheads would love to have a bunch of cows to populate fields their trains go past. As a castle guy I'd love to have some more animal options. Also, a farm theme would be a great town sub-theme. That would be definitely cool. Living in southern California for several years I grew to really like the mission-style architecture. Is Zorro in the public domain, or does someone own the Zorro license? You've seen Jon Furman's Zorro MOC, right? Bruce

Hey, I've said this before, so if you've read a similar post by me, please disregard. IMO, the WW theme needed to go at least one more year, with a focus on civilian life. One new element would be needed for these sets - a molded cow. This could be a body like the minifig horse but with a different head, preferably with a clip so you could add the bull horns on some cows. A cow would be useful in other themes as well (castle, town, train), so it would be easy to justify the expense of a new mold, which is always TLC's argument why they won't produce this or that desired piece (and, heck, they made the molded Kaadu for one (!) set, a totally worthless element otherwise). Anyway: Small set: Cattle rustlers - includes sheriff, bandit, 2 cows, some bushes or something, a set along the lines of Sheriff's Showdown Next set: Pioneers - includes a covered wagon along the lines of the Weapons Wagon, a cow, and a family (Ma, Pa, and a kid or two) Medium sets, ranging in the US$20-40 range Farmstead - this one on a baseplate with a small house and/or barn, field, oxen (cow+horns) and plow, the family again Saloon - okay, perhaps LEGO wouldn't sell an actual saloon set, but a set that we would all recognize as the saloon. Includes some townspeople. Nathan wells has a great MOC along these lines. One-room-schoolhouse/church - again, LEGO might not want to sell a church set, but these little towns generally had a building that served as both church on Sunday and school during the week (see, for instance, episodes of Little House on the Prairie) Large set - Train station - this would include the station with an old style train, including a cattle car with a couple more cows. As with the Harry Potter Hogwarts Express, there could be a cheaper version and a motorized version. For "action" there could be train robbers. The western train could actually be a whole sub-line, with seperate sets for the station and various train cars so you could build smaller or larger trains, as in the My Own Train series. The above doesn't have any Native American sets. Unfortunately, as LEGO envisioned that half of the WW line there wasn't much else for them to do - basically smaller and larger villages with 1 or 2 or 3 teepees with slightly different settings. It would be neat if they would be a little more historically accurate and depict different tribes in addition to the sort of generic plains Indians they had. This website isn't so great but it does illustrate the wide variety of building styles of Native Americans from different areas. A cliff dwelling would certainly be a neat set, IMO (I've tried my hand at MOCing this). Of course different building styles should also come with different styles of dress. A nice small set would be a buffalo hunt. I have a MOC here along those lines - they could do a brick-built-buffalo as in my MOC or do a molded beast. Bruce

That's by Leo Vermeulen. He's been working on this over the past several years and has displayed it at various fests like LEGO World, I think maybe 1000SteineLand, and I think he even brought a piece of it across the Atlantic to Brickfest a couple of years ago. Here are some more pics from LW2006, but also check out Leo's Brickshelf gallery for more pics of his castle over the years. Notice that this is built at BELVILLE SCALE (!). Not a lot of builders able to commit to building full creations at that scale. Bruce

Hey, Some further torsos: Johnny Thunder, as just a random cowboy: Scarecrow (very usefull as . .. a scarecrow): Various women to occupy the town brothel: Some of the pirate torsos are generic enough that they would do fine: From SW, Han and Skiff Han are also pretty generic torsos, good for WW, as are Cloud City Luke and the Rebel Technician: John Furman used the Sandman as a bandito torso in a zorro layout, and you could also use the Jawa: and this guy from the Studios Monsters line: Bruce

Hey all, On Techwest, at one point I made a (now horribly out of date) link list of western themed MOCs, and if you scroll down to the bottom there is a subsection on Techwest creations. Bruce

Hey, Megan posts on Lugnet and Classic-Castle (and others?). Check out her gallery. She has a really great feel for using bright colors and unexpected parts to make fun MOCs. IIRC, her boyfriend (fiance? spouse?) is Mark Stafford, so between them they make one of the coolest MOCcing couples around. Bruce

That's Bill Vollbrecht's gallery. He used to work at Legoland California and now works freelance selling sculptures. He does really awesome stuff. His website is here. Bruce

Hey all, I'm not a huge sports fan so I haven't been playing close attention to the WC aside from watching a few minutes here and there, but I've certainly enjoyed Maciej Koszyka's series of vignette creations. It seems that he's documenting specific events from the various games in LEGO form. All of them can be seen in this Brickshelf gallery. Pirlo's goal: Smolarek's yellow card: and 9 others (so far).Bruce

Hey all, All credit to Nelson Yrizarry for the name "Da Vigci Code", which he coined in this post. He has since gone on to post his own MOC, but when I read that first post it inspired me to illustrate a couple of scenes from The Da Vinci Code: Vigtruvian Man: The truth about the grail: I haven't seen the movie yet, so these are inspired by the book. Here is the gallery upon moderation, when I have time to edit more pics. Bruce

Hey all, Troy has got the Classic-Castle forums working again! *knight* :D Thanks to him for all his work also to the Eurobricks mods for putting up with this CC chatter. Bruce

Hey Nathan, This one is outstanding! I've been slacking on updating VignetteBricks but I'll post on this tomorrow. Bruce

In the spirit of the thread: Congratulations on your 10th EB post... X-D ;-) God Bless, Nathan LOL. Admin duties take up most of my online time, so I rarely post in forums other than CC. However, I am a registered member of most of the major ones, and lurk about from time to time looking for cool MOCs. Bruce

Wowie wowie wow! As a castle guy I've just got to get this one. I had planned on Bricklinking the figs, but aside from the ambulance, everything is useful here. At least 9 arched windows, 3 of those high sloped roof/ninja wall pieces, HP roof in a better color, iron gate and curved fences, plus lots of bricks and plates. Bruce

Hey all, Just in case you always go straight to the Classic-Castle forums and don't check the front page, Troy has posted an update. The bulk of the site is back up, but Troy is still working on putting the forums back. He's trying to restore the forums from the old hard drive, which would get them back up where they were last week. The worst case scenario is that he has to go to the April 6 backup, which means that at most the last few weeks of posts would be lost, but nothing else. Again, thank you for your patience. And thank you to Troy who is working very hard to get things back. Bruce

Hello all, Classic-Castle.com is pleased to announce Colossal Castle Contest III, our third annual large contest. There are nine categories, ranging in size from customized minifigs to large castles covering multiple baseplates, so there are opportunities for all kinds of builders to win fabulous prizes. You do not need to be registered as a member of Classic-Castle to enter, so all interested members of the AFOL community are invited to participate. Please see the link above for rules, deadlines, categories, etc. Please feel free to share this announcement with any other LEGO-themed message board or LUG with which you are associated. Thank you, The C-C Admin Team

Hi all, As noted above, if you donate to the Red Cross through LEGO, they will match your donation. However, we also wanted to come up with a more personal way to help out. There are lots of families who have lost everything, and many of these have ended up in the Houston, Texas area, where our own Anthony Sava lives. Anthony has agreed to act as a collection point for a toy drive to give something to families with kids. Here's the idea--you go out and buy a LEGO set and mail it to Anthony (e-mail him for his postal address). He'll gather these sets up and deliver them to the Salvation Army, who are distributing supplies to families hit by the hurricane and flooding. If you are unable to send a set, you can also send him money via PayPal, and he will go on a shopping trip to add to the donated sets. We all probably buy a fair amount of LEGO through the year. Here's your chance to share a little of that happiness with some kids who are hurting. Who knows, in a couple of years they might be the new AFOLs joining our forums. :) Thanks, Bruce

Posted on behalf of Joe Meno: Hi all, We have all seen the devastation that Hurricane Katrina left in New Orleans, and with it the displaced families and children. They all have little or nothing from their homes and have been placed in shelters around the country. Companies and organizations from around the world are assisting in relief efforts, including The LEGO Group. LEGO employees around the world have been collecting money internally that is being matched dollar for dollar by the Edith and Godtfred Kirk Christiansen Foundation in the name of the Relief Fund and will be given to the Red Cross. The LEGO Group has invited the adult LEGO community to join this donation matching program. If you