Ralph_S

In one word: wonderful. Ralph

Thanks. When I posted a WIP picture of the pub a friend of mine remarked that it needed a sign and obviously the sign needed to represent the name of the pub somehow. A little mosaic like this seemed the best solution. I didn't explain that the point of the name of the pub and the restaurant was not so much to come up with something original that doesn't exist, but something that really could be in just about any city. There are plenty of pubs that are named the <something> lion and indeed, after I built 'A Taste of India' I passed a take-away curry place on my way to work to come to the shocking realisation that it was named 'Taste of India'. I apparently did pick this up, but couldn't consciously remember it. Cheers, Ralph

Many of the cars I build are based on real-world vehicles, but when I have to come up with brands or company names for my city models I tend to steer clear of ones that really exist. I think the trick is to come up with a name or logo that will immediately sound or look familiar, without being a direct copy of a real one. I still want to build a fast-food restaurant of a fictional chain called BigBurger, with a McDonalds 'M-logo' on its side as the BigBurger 'B-logo' and a bookstore called 'Borderstones'. I tend to think of the bus company in my LEGO version of a London Borough as the 'yellow arrow bus-company'. London Routemaster bus (8) by Mad physicist, on Flickr The sign posts on the bus-stops also have a tile with a yellow arrow on them. I also have a restaurant and a pub with intentionally generic names. curryhouse by Mad physicist, on Flickr The Lion Pub by Mad physicist, on Flickr Cheers, Ralph

Well, you have to keep in mind that back then I wasn't much younger than many of the people who post here (as AFOLs) are right now and had already been building for many years and built up a sizeable collection. The internet didn't exist when I was a child, so I was in the same boat. I developed a lot of the things I did pretty much in isolation. It also meant that whenever I wanted to build a scale model of something I had to rely on books and the library. I see that as one of the advantages today's children have. If they start out being poor builders, they've got many more resources at their disposal to improve dramatically than we had, such as all the great stuff that is being done by other builders. They don't have to develop everything themselves. Cheers, Ralph

Thanks man. It looks a bit clunky when I compare it to what's possible nowadays in terms of parts that are available and I reckon I picked up a few ideas and techniques I couldn't do back then, but I think it was a pretty decent effort. Lately I have been thinking about building a jet on a similar scale again, although probably not a Tomcat. Cheers, Ralph

Indeed, I know that there are many people who stop in their teens and pick it up again later, but I didn't. There were times when I didn't build much because I had too many other things to do (studying, social activities, dating, partying etcetera) and I didn't buy any LEGO for many years, but I never completely stopped building during holidays, for instance. I've been building pretty much all my life and I reckon the experience is part of the reason why I can build the sort of things that I do. Cheers, Ralph

That's a very nice and sleek looking car. It reminds me a bit of a 'sixties Corvette or perhaps a Dodge Viper. It does look enormous with the figure standing next to it, though, illustrating the limitations inherent in trying to build a car suitable for seating minifigs side-by-side. This is one of the reasons why I settle for building single seaters or don't use minifigs with my cars at all. Cheers, Ralph

There were no digital camera when I was a child either, but fortunately I do have a few scanned pictures of old models. This is me when i was about four years old. The Mad Physicist at age 4 by Mad physicist, on Flickr Now let's fast forward to when I was 17 and was already very much into building aircraft. This was an early attempt at building an F-14 Tomcat. F-14 Tomcat model (1992) by Mad physicist, on Flickr Good times! Cheers, Ralph

I don't really US style 'food trucks'. It's not very similar to your average burger van you;d see in the UK for instance. I love the amount of detail you managed to cram into the interior though. Cheers, Ralph

You're welcome guys. This sort of thing is best explained with a video. Cheers, Ralph

As nice as the designs may be, I'm mostly interested in the contents of the boxes. The boxes themselves go into recycling Cheers, Ralph

It's been a while since this thread had it's last message, but I have since made a video of the sliding door in action and this seemed the most suitable place to post it. Cheers, Ralph

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is a topic that shows up now and then. When I was a child I loved the city/town sets I had, with the open-backed buildings and the four wide cars, but as I grew a little older the lack of realism started bothering me and I actually put my minifigs away and started building at larger scales. I got back into building minifig scale stuff through building a restaurant for a competition that involved Cafe-Corner compatible buildings (even though I had none of the sets at the time). I also built some cars to go with it. LEGO have brought out cool new minifig parts in the intervening years and I also benefit from having a larger collection and more experience building more complicated stuff (such as five-wide cars), but the realism of these larger building was a major factor in making minifig scale things attractive again to me. There are people who put a lot of creativity into classic style buildings and I do get a sense of nostalgia when I see their cities, but it's not for me. Cheers, Ralph

I upset some people a while back when trying to explain that I don't really see the point of using a CAD programme as part of the design process for the sort of things I do. I tend to have an idea in my mind before I start building and perhaps a drawing or two and then go pretty much straight to finished build with relatively little fiddling. I do have a reasonably large collection, so I normally know in advance whether I can build what I have in mind. I also tend to buy parts based on the ideas for potential future MOCs. Because for most of the last 8 months I've been about 300 km away from my LEGO collection, but do want to get some building done, I had a go at designing a model on my computer a few months ago (using LDRAW/ MLCad rather than LDD). I wrote about the experience on EB. I didn't really have any difficulties with the software (I think it is quite nifty) and I do see some benefits -in particular if you don't actually have the parts for what you want to build- but if you do have the parts, I don't think CAD can really compete with building in real life, both in terms of the experience and in terms of the end result. The finishing touches, at least for me, are still best done in the real world. Cheers, Ralph

Even before I saw grindinggears' picture of a 'Technic Action man', I would have figured 8043 is about the right size for them. Their height makes them about scale 1/20, which is quite a bit smaller than most of the MOCs people seem to use them with. They were introduced as part of the Technic Arctic line in 1986. I still have about a dozen of the figures -which I bought when I was a child- and still quite like them. Cheers, Ralph

You;re welcome. I reckon that for a fictional engine on a Star Wars ship the gap indeed doesn't really matter. Cheers, Ralph

It does work quite nicely. I did something very similar a few years ago for an external fuel tank. However, I used technic half pins. The lips on those are thinner, so the gap between the cone and the cylinder is narrower. QF-4S Phantom II (5) by Mad physicist, on Flickr Cheers, Ralph

Even for a car it very much depends on what you want to do with it. If you put it in your city with pedestrians and cyclists around it, the height of the figure also is a pretty important measure. Cars that can seat two figures side-by side will be very tall compared to a standing minifig. Cheers, Ralph

This is always a contentious issue and I have debated it many times in different places. There’s a big difference between claiming an idea as your own and demanding credit if other people use it. I have plenty of MOCs incorporating ideas that I haven’t seen anywhere else before and I do claim that those are my ideas, quite simply because they actually are! It is possible that somebody else somewhere else may have had the same idea independently, but that doesn't make my idea any less my own. That obviously means that I cannot claim credit every single time somebody else does something similar. They may have come up with it independently, and even if they have picked it up from me without attributing it, it isn’t a big deal. I'm sure I have used ideas in my MOCs that I have seen elsewhere, but whose exact origin I can't remember. However, if I knowingly copy an idea from somebody else, I will give credit. I've got nothing to gain by claiming that something is mine when it isn't and nothing to loose by giving credit. It’s actually a nice thing to give credit where credit is due, quite simply because it’s also a nice thing to get credit. Fortunately that does seem to be the norm. What I don’t like is people explicitly claiming that something is their idea when it clearly isn’t. You can tell at times. Some people copy MOCs in as much detail as they can manage and go a bit further by then claiming that they came up with the ideas themselves. If somebody were to ask me where an idea I've used came from and I can't remember the source, I will be clear that it wasn't originally my idea. Case in point. Dishonesty pisses me off, even if it isn’t technically illegal. Cheers, Ralph

Thanks for your reply. It isn't my intention to be harsh. I love the Avenger and the more people that build them, the merrier and I can appreciate that it is difficult. It is a big beast and I didn't have a particularly easy time building mine. The canopy was a bastard! Can't you lower the canopy on your model even more? The space between the curves that make up the sides is four studs wide, so you could in theory lower the whole canopy to sit between the curved bricks. It would also reduce the difficulty of matching the canopy to the gun turret, because there is less of a difference in height between the two. Cheers, Ralph

I've got ambiguous feelings about this model. On the one hand I love the TBF and your model is a recognisable recreation of this classic and I really like the way you used the curved bricks for the fuselage sides. On the other hand, I do think the tail section (aft of the gun turret) should be more tapered. I'm also struggling with the scale a bit. The TBF is big -certainly for a carrier aircraft from that era. At a first glance, the size of your model struck me as rather big for minifigs. However, you mention the scale. One stud to one foot equates to a scale of about 1/37. I have my own TBF model and it is scaled as close as I could get it 1/40. I think this already fairly large for minifigs, but the difference with yours shouldn't be all that big. In terms of length and span they indeed are similar. So, what is going on? Yours looks so much bigger and I think it is cause by the size of the cockpit canopy and the cross-section of the fuselage on your plane are too big for the wings and length of the plane. It looks as though the fusleage belongs on a plane that is built to a bigger scale, except for the length. For a comparison, the fuselage on your model is almost 7 studs wide vs. 5 on my model. I suppose I could have made a mistake, but I've built my model working out most of the dimensions using blueprints, so I don't think so. You could lower the cockpit canopy somewhat, but there's not much you can do to reduce the width of the fuselage without giving up on the curved sides and I do like those. I think that the best way to get it into proportion would be to forget about using minifigs and going for a larger scale -making the wingspan a bit larger and lengthening the fuselage. Cheers, Ralph

I reckon that's because few people ever bother to look at the Model Team creations and many of those that do will have already seen this on The Brothers Brick. Cheers, Ralph

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

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

I got a kink in my neck from looking at the picture, but it does look nice. Please rotate your pictures. That's not an issue of your camera. I don't know whether you use windows, but the standard image viewer that comes with XP and newer can do it for you. There is plenty of other (free) software for other operating systems in which you can do it. Cheers, Ralph