fastlindyrick

Nice work! In the first pic, where did you get the woman’s vest and dress, and the kid’s wooden sword?

The clutch power of the side holes on technic bricks is greater than the clutch power between two plates. This is useful when removing plates from places where you can’t attach a brick separator without taking the build apart. For example, if you have a large tiled floor with occasional 1x1 plates, you can remove the plates by placing a sideways technic brick on the 1x1 plate and then lifting it straight up. This will work for any 1xN plate, though not as well for NxM plates. Credit: I think I saw this in a post by Chris McVeigh.

Try the store CapeMadness on Bricklink. He makes custom lego cloth elements that feel just like lego capes and sails. I’ve bought a bunch of stuff from there, including trench coats. I’ve been looking into the cloth to use myself, since I’m trying to do this using a Cricut cutting machine. A couple options are canvas paper or poly-cotton broadcloth. For the broadcloth, you will need to apply a fabric stiffener to stiffen it and to reduce fraying of the edges.

Even digital UV printing will be around $5 to $8 for front-only torso printing. Try Bricksanity, minifigs.me, or minifigFX. Those three will supply the torso and print it, and for a significant extra fee they can do design work too. Every other company I’ve found that does any sort of custom printing is waaay more expensive.

Lilly pad (palet) from Ninjago city: 93551 $0.64 USD Big curved window from Ninjago city: 2572 $2.00 USD Orange scarf: 25376 $0.24 USD 32x32 baseplate: 3811 $7.32 USD 16x32 baseplate (including blue!): 2748 $3.83 USD Curved technic tube: 25214 $0.22 USD Printed clock from mini Big Ben: 29810 $0.48 USD New elves leaf piece (3 leaves on 1x1 round plate): 32607 $0.10 USD Beehive: 35574 $0.76 USD

The TRU city figs are available for direct purchase from TRU's website, though if you are outside the US I don't know what availability is like.

For the cables, there is a tool in LDraw called Lsynth that lets you add curved elements like hoses; I think that would be your best bet.

I received 3 copies of the POGO Evil Lyn fig yesterday. The printing was the worst I’ve ever seen. You could see the underlying blue color of the legs through the yellow ink, and there were stray bits of ink everywhere.

The torso of the girl in blue and the face of the guy she’s talking to in this image were printed by BrickSanity. I send them files at 600 DPI and can still make out features from that resolution in the final print. Same for minifigs.me, but the prints I’ve gotten back from MinifigFX look like they’ve been blurred to about 300 DPI. Printers can print onto heads, so slightly curved slopes shouldn’t be a problem, though they might not have printed on those before and might not offer it as a standard service.

If you really want some characters from the Dresden Files books, I have some 600 dpi head and torso designs suitable for custom printing or decals on my webpage (near the bottom). My dream theme would be fleshie minifig diversity packs. Four minifigs each; with each kit featuring light flesh, flesh, medium flesh, or reddish brown; including fleshie heads, arms, and hands; with 2 each of male and female figs.

Pad printing, which is what lego uses, requires large batches, but digital UV printing does not. I'm pretty sure BrickSanity's website says they print onto tiles for 1 pound per tile, and I can't recall offhand but I'm guessing MinifigFX and minifigs.me might print on tiles. All three of those companies offer printing in very small batches.

I’ve used both minifigs.me and BrickSanity. Both are in the UK (I think Sheffield and a bit outside London, respectively). Both appear to use digital UV printing, which is almost as good quality as pad printing but much cheaper for small production runs. I personally prefer BrickSanity since they are more flexible and I’ve had a few things misprinted by minifigs.me (one item misaligned, one missing part of the print, and one printed in purple instead of black for some reason). However, minifigs.me has a more robust webpage and most of what they’ve done for me has been good, so I wouldn’t rule them out, though their custom print service was turned off for the holidays and might not be back up yet.

Looks like you have a lot of Enlighten figs in there. I thought those elves only came printed in light flesh; how did you get them printed in yellow? Also, your paint jobs look flawless, what brand of paint and primer do you use?

That's great! I've been looking forward to this.

I use Pinterest. I have a board for MOCs I like, a board for techniques, and a board for my own MOCs.

I often use a 47457 (maybe with a 2x2 plate underneath) when I need a skirt in sitting position.

I'm sure that cost is a significant factor, as those 2x2x2 slopes are probably much cheaper to mold and print on than something curvier. I often use a 2x2x1 slope brick topped with one or two 2x1 plates to get the right height, but it doesn't look as nice without printing.

In the past few years, B&P shut down from about Dec 13 to Feb 1 so they could focus on providing replacement parts for the large volume of holiday sales. Thus, if you are planning on an important B&P order, I advise you to get it in soon.

I usually create designs at 600 dpi. At that resolution, lines consistent with official lego minifigs tend to be 3 to 6 pixels wide. At that resolution, you shouldn't need to do any half-toning; also, some custom printers dislike color gradients for some reason so it is probably best to not blend pixel edges. I'd start by just making some designs and printing them onto regular paper to see how they look, then try waterslide decals, and then eventually try having them printed directly onto the parts. The printers I've used are minifigfx, minifigs.me, and bricksanity. Heads tend to be $3-$4 each, and single-sided torsos tend to be $5-$7 each, so I really only do this when decals look inadequate. If you plan to start your own company, be advised that the printers themselves are ridiculously expensive, like $30k (USD). The cheaper option is digital UV printing, which allows for small print runs. The higher-end option is pad printing; that is what lego uses, and also some of the other customizers such as Citizen Brick. Digital UV is mostly almost as good, but in order to print lighter colors on a dark base it has to first print a layer of white, and if the colored ink on top is misaligned even a bit with the white layer, the edges look imperfect.

Cool! Would you be willing to share how that goes? I've thought about having my instructions printed, but places like FedEx office cost close to $1/page and the quality isn't great. Have you found a way to make glossy prints like official lego instructions?

Thanks, Philo! I had tried installing a few unofficial parts one at a time but managed to screw up my parts folder badly enough to have to reinstall. I'll try the mass install and if that doesn't work, I can wait for the next release. Thank you (and the other volunteers) for keeping LDraw running!

It looks like the LDraw official parts library doesn't contain any of the Mixels-type parts that contain a towball socket (e.g. 14418, 14419, 14704) even though unofficial parts have been in there for close to 4 years now. Has anyone done any MOCs in LDraw using these unofficial parts? Any problems? I ask because the one time I tried installing unofficial parts I somehow messed up my parts library so badly that I had to reinstall LDraw entirely, so I am wary. Also, looking at the review comments for the unofficial parts, it looks like the part editors reeeally hate these sockets for some reason. Anyone know why that might be? These parts are dead useful.

I just discovered that minifig hands are individually available on B&P. Design number 3820, currently 9 colors in stock, average $0.06 USD per hand. That's half the cheapest available price for the hand colors I checked on Bricklink.