Xyver

That's a nice little van LT. Are they really full yellow? at least RACQ has a bit of white and blue in their colour scheme to break it up a bit.

I finally received my confirmation email, but only by requesting it again. Sadly my old CUUSOO account details didn't come across. Does this mean I can vote for my favourite ideas again?

I do love a big City layout, yours just keeps getting better and better. I especially like the central park/tennis court area, the beach is pretty cool too. I think the car poking out of the building looks better than when it is stuck to the side, it looks too big like that and just doesn't look right. Keep on building.

I MODded my two cinemas to 32x32, but 40x40 is better. The extra dark tan arch section over the theater windows makes a better impression than my single one. When I next get around to rearranging my City, I think I will increase the Cinema size again and put it onto a 48x48. Some of the modular series just work so much better when they are just that much bigger, mainly the GE and PC.

I have raised all my modulars by 1 plate and then built tiled footpaths as seen here: http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=88508&hl= It is parts intensive, and I have used a lot of 2x4 tiles, but it does look good. The reason for the extra plate height is so that I can use the 2x cheese slopes piece at my crossings. You could also build the modulars at the edge of the baseplate rather than the standard 8 in, then just use the footpath on the roadplate to save on parts. You will come unstuck on corners using this method though. Brick built, or even plate built roads do look good, and give you more options, but are very parts intensive and not within budget if you want to do a decent layout.

I do like the 1 year limit. I occasionally browse through what is on CUUSOO to see if there is anything that I would like. But there is so much junk on there, I give up after 20 pages (from either end) I think 1000 votes in a year is a bit to low a target to have it reset. I would say 5,000 gives you an extra 6 months, then if you're at 7,500 by that 6 months, then you get another 6 months. This would weed out those who would take 10 years to reach 10,000 (@ 1,000 a year) but give those who are at least half way there a bit extra time. If you get to 5,000 votes, it is obvious that your idea is well liked and has the potential for a viable set, it just needs to get its transaction, which a lot of sets do once they get higher votes. Of course, if it does turn out the LEGO starts advertising Ideas, and the page gets a lot more traffic, then 1 year should be more than enough time for a viable project to succeed.

The only way that could possibly have been a better present Artanis is if the jars were full of Lego pieces. A very inspired and thoughtful gift.

This is looking great. It must have taken hours to put all those 1x1 round tiles down! I look forward to seeing more.

I am now finding it necessary to put interiors in some of my buildings. I have made my Pet Shop 32 wide, and with the increased frontage, and the amount of light now getting inside, you can see that it is empty inside and has a green baseplate which takes some of the charm away from it. My latest build (currently WIP) is mainly windows, so I will have to produce some form of interior to make it look better. Either that, or I need to convince LEGO to produce a mirrored window, so that you can't see inside. This would be particularly helpful considering a lot of current office buildings are mainly mirrored glass exteriors. I guess I better find some interior decorating skills.

That does look good LegoSjaak, if S@H had allowed me to buy two sets, I would have done something similar. After building the (all but) standard PR this week, it is definitely their best one yet. I own FB, GE, PS and PC and have built a custom CC from parts, but the detail in this set was so much better. It was an absolute pleasure to build, and not repetitive like FB&GE are at the front. I'm a sucker for dark blue too, which helps, though I'm not sure about the green. One MOD I do make to all my buildings is to raise them up 1 plate to get a better footpath. This has created an unexpected bonus on the inside as I kept the ground the same height and it means that the brown (wood?) platform just inside the front door is now 1 plate higher than the floor, making a nice little raised entryway. Most people will never see this, but it is a nice extra feature. Now I just have to find a space in my layout for this, it may have to go in the suburbs rather than the City centre though.

Honestly, I didn't check that link you put up, and I really didn't expect it would be mine! Mine was totally rebuilt from scratch as well. The rear section with the arch was a bit of a pain to work out the right size for. By extending the sides, it didn't work as well as the original plan. Did you just leave that bit out altogether and extend the building? I also redid the change rooms to make better use of the space. How are you going with parts usage? are you having to dig into your spares or only using those from the two sets?

I took a chance and bought some four 4-ring binders on the weekend. I only managed to fit the larger instruction booklets into them though, sorted as follows: 1 - Modulars 2 - Creator (houses) 3 - Creator (other), Winter Village and other specials (eg Haunted House) 4 - Star Wars & sundries This will make it a lot easier to find what I am after now, rather than having to dig through drawers to find the one that always seems to be on the bottom. This has also freed up a lot of space in my drawers for the smaller instructions. If I ever find A4 size sheet protectors the have two A5 pockets in them I will be able to put everything into the binders and keep it all neatly ordered.

The GE does look a lot better at 48x48 rather than standard 32x32, I did the same to mine (http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=76794&hl=) The main difference I can see is that I kept my escalators together rather than at opposite ends of the store. I look forward to seeing your completed build to see what you do with the increased size.

I would agree with the Police Stations, and the Fire Stations too, as they both contain plenty of doors/windows which are a great place to start when building City. Then, to get more basic bricks, the Creator houses and multiples of the Modular series so you can have one in your city and another for parts. I have a second Town Square in transit at the moment, it's a great addition and/or parts pack for any City. If you wanted to add a bit of colour, much of the Friends line is built in a similar style to City buildings. It just depends on what style you are building in. If you want to keep it open backed in the style of Lego City, the 6x5 panels are great, so any set that has lots of them is going to be good. If you want bigger buildings, more like the Modulars, then the Creator buildings are the best way to go. The Tower Bridge is a pretty good parts pack as well, plenty of smaller windows and tan bricks.

Not real happy, finally got around to ordering my Parisian Restaurant from S@H and they are limiting it to 1 per customer. I realise they want to stop people hoarding the set, and supplies may be low at the moment, but surely they must realise that many AFOLs buy 2 of those to MOD into a bigger building, like I always do. Am I going to have to wait 6-12 months before they become available in local stores before I can build my extensions?

I'll be around somewhere, madly rushing about trying to keep everything running smoothly. I'm the one that looks like my sig fig (red hair and beard with glasses) and I will be wearing a black polo shirt with Brick Events on it. Just ask any of the exhibitors or other helpers (those with lanyards and nametags) for Adrian, they'll point you in the right direction.

I can't wait to see you there Brickus, make sure you introduce yourself, there are a few members of QLUG that live on the Sunshine Coast, though most of us are based around Brisbane/Redlands.

After reading through these, I think I might give ring binders a try, with the instructions in individual plastic sleeves. I will use 4 D ring binders rather than lever arch as the extra rings should stop them from falling and getting crumpled on the bottom edges. A thick card as badbob001 suggested sounds like a good idea for the thinner instruction booklets, and I will try to find some 2 pocket protectors for the smaller size ones.

Very nice, I am a wee bit jealous.

I keep all my boxes. I undo each end and fold them flat. I keep them in the off chance that I may one day want to sell my sets and this way I can sell them complete. The small-medium sized ones are stored in a S@H large shipping box, but the ones two big for that (ie modulars and UCS sets) are sitting on top of my storage cupboard.

Considering this set was designed by an Aussie, what are the chances of it having a general release in Australia the same time as the rest of the world, rather than having to wait the standard 6-12 months for it show up in shops.

I can't wait to see this next weekend, excellent work as always.

I have removed the back and some side wall of some of my modulars in order to save bricks. Because I have them set up in a city layout, which is often on display, there is no need for full walls as they are never seen. You do need to worry about stability issues though, and I still have a full roof, so I either use 6x5 panels instead of bricks, or keep 2 rows of bricks at the top and bottom, with long plates underneath the top row for extra strength. This tends to give the building enough strength to stay together even when moving them around. I had an empty spot on my redesigned layout, so I just made a building facade and use 6x5 panels and X beam pieces at the back to put the roof on, it is a full 32x32 building but in the middle of a layout, you can't tell. If I were to have them open backed for play purposes, I would most likely MOD them to be 8 deep, so that they would sit on a 16x32 baseplate, and keep the current frontage and modular standard footpath. Otherwise, you could MOD them to be a full 16 deep and build the footpath onto the road plate. If/when I choose not to do a full City layout, I think I will MOD all of my buildings to be open-backed, 16 deep. You could get the frontal look of the buildings, but without the parts intensive buildings. This would be even better suited to those who like to do interiors (I don't) as the front would be a street seen, and the back would be the interiors of all of the buildings. I'm actually really starting to like this idea.

I really like it. The colour scheme is simple, but effective. Most modular builds seem to be older style buildings, but it would be great to see a more modern city scape arise.

I currently have three drawers full of my instructions, with each drawer covering different theme types (so City in the top one, Creator/Modulars/Winter Village in the next and all others in the bottom) sets that have more than one instruction booklet are place inside clear plastic sleeves to keep them together. But this system is no longer working for me as my drawers are now full and the varying sizes of the booklets make them not stack very well. I am trying to work out a better system, most likely leaning towards a filing cabinet. A lever arch binder system would be best for accessing the booklets, but the plastic sleeves won't sit well in that as they'll tend to fall down. Now, if only they were all the same size, or at least only 1-2 different sizes, storing would be so much easier.