Ralph_S

True. People certainly started modding cars earlier than WW-II, but the scene only really grew when servicemen came back from the warand the economy was booming. Anyway, I just put it on the same shelf as the dark blue aircraft and indeed it doesn't look out of place. Thank you. There are a lot of other builders who have built hot rods that were far more intricate and clever than mine. I think the only thing that might set mine apart from some other minifig scale ones is that it is small (only five studs wide) and yet can seat a fig. I have tried different front mudguards. I started with a 'Brick, Modified 1 x 2 x 1 1/3 with Curved Top' instead of the 45 degree inverted slope, which made the top rounder. Ultimately I like my current solution better. I like the design that SuperKalle used on his modified versions. I didn't think of using that part myself (although I do have some in yellow). I just tried fitting it one mine and unfortunately, it doesn't fit because it interferes with the diagonally mounted panels (with the flame job) -an issue Kalle avoided by using wedge plates and bricks to get the taper at the expense of the flame job. It's a compromise. Cheers, Ralph

The famous Mad Physicist? William asked me whether I was OK with him publishing the instructions on flickr. If I wouldn't have liked people to build copies or create their own interpretations of the model, I wouldn't have agreed. So, I am also perfectly fine with you doing this. I like your models. I don't have LDD installed in my computer though, so the LDD file isn't of much use to me. Thanks. I don't know. I think that the whole hot-rod scene really emerged after WW-II and that a yellow with flames is a much more modern look than they would have had in the 'forties, even though the car is old enough. I will probably buy some more of these wheels and perhaps some of the doors in black and then build the 'original' non hot rod version of this to go with my planes sometime in the future. Thank you. I am glad you like it. I was quite shocked to find it uses 110 pieces! Cheers, Ralph

Thank you. If HMS Hood was anything to go by, you can count on Intrepid being absolutely stunning. Since Ed lives in the the UK, that is not very likely. We have talked about taking it to Cologne in November, but it all depends on whether it'll be done in time and whether Ed and I can get the time off work. For me it'll be easier to get to, obviously, but for him it would mean renting a van and driving it to Germany. We'll see. Cheers, Ralph

Very nice. I've thought about adding an underground station to my Brickston Borough project, but never got around to it. I wouldn't mind having this one. Cheers, Ralph

Thanks. I don't have many of them myself, but fortunately they are available in quite a few colours and are currently in production. Admittedly, I normally don't make instructions. William got very excited about this model and made the instructions for it, reverse engineering the design from the pictures I posted on flickr. There's a small difference between how I built the chassis and his version, but when sitting on their wheels they look exactly the same. I certainly don't mind you copying the design and playing around with it some. It's really neat to see what other people can do with this idea. The right one in particular looks pretty radical. Cheers, Ralph

Thanks guys. I'm glad you like it. They are attached with jumper plates and slightly rotated, as you can see in the instructions . I suspect it has something to do with this month's build challenge on LUGNuts (a group for LEGO car builders on flickr). Several cars that were posted here have also been submitted to the challenge. It is all about building cars from before 1950. I prefer to have space for a minifig in all my minifig scale cars, even if that does mean they end up a bit taller than they perhaps should be. Cheers, Ralph

I normally do a fair bit of planning before building a model. This one was different. A few days ago I intended to started building a 'thirties pickup truck to go with the WW-II aircraft I've been building in the last few months. However, I soon realised that I didn't have enough of the tyres I wanted to use for it (I used all but two of them on my aircraft models). The only way to save the idea was to use different tyres for the front than for the rear and the idea to turn it into hot rod was born. Initially it was all yellow, which was a bit dull. I fiddled around with some stickers, but that didn't really work. Instead I went for a little rebuild, adding a flame job built with small plates. At first the doors were hinged under the windscreen, but this meant that the flame job stopped one plate width further forward than where it does now. I swapped the doors round, giving the vehicle suicide doors and giving me a bit room for the flames. The construction of the rear does leave two awkward gaps that I haven't been able to close. I had some ideas, but they all ended up with parts rubbing the wheels or with the rear of the car being considerably longer. I considered neither acceptable options. I think it turned out pretty cute all in all. Fellow brickish member William Howard liked it so much, he made instructions for it, so if you like it too, you can have your own! Cheers, Ralph

Thanks for the comments guys. Ed is making good progress. We hope to have this finished by October (so that we can take it to the great Western LEGO show in Swindon). It'll be hard work to get everything done by then! Cheers, Ralph

Indeed, nice helicopter. I know there are a lot of people who don't like the big aircraft pieces, but some of them do look pretty good. Have you tried making the sliding doors work? There isn't a lot of space inside, but there are ways of doing it that could work. Cheers, Ralph

Quite simply a lovely little MOC. Cheers, Ralph

This is the fourth and (probably final) aircraft design for Ed Diment's project Intrepid. In early 1945 USS Intrepid already operated F4U Corsairs, but also still a handful of older Grumman F6F Hellcats. The F6F Hellcat was a larger and improved development of the <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/madphysicist/tags/wildcat">Grumman Wildcat</a>, the US Navy's main fighter at the start of WW-2. The F6F was faster, more manoeuvrable and had a longer range. No other aircraft in US service shot down more Japanese aircraft than the Hellcat. This model was more-or-less complete yesterday a few days ago. I pride myself on thinking out the difficult bits before I start building, but this model had problems: when folded the wings sat too far from the fuselage, the landing gear struts were too long, there were awkward gaps where the wings met the fuselage, the wings were swept back a bit too far and worst of all, the undercarriage had a tendency to collapse. I am enough of a perfectionist for this to bug me, so I rebuilt the complete centre section of the wing. It took me about four hours, but I solved all the issues in one go and am finally happy with it. It is not immediately obvious from most of the other photographs, but both wings on my model are swept back slightly to ensure that both the leading and trailing edges sit at the proper angle. So, I've got four designs. The next step will be to build more models of each design. Ed and I already have six Avengers. We will probably build a similar number of Hellcats, about 9 Helldivers and an even larger number of Corsairs. I am about to start a new job and will be away from my LEGO collection for a while. What I will be doing, however, is making instructions for the Corsair. Cheers, Ralph

The technical functionality is very impressive, but I also like the look of the vehicle. There are a lot of Hummers out there, but this one strikes me as particularly well-proportioned. Cheers, Ralph

Thank you. The cockpits were the trickiest parts. I wanted to have the option of having them both open or closed. Whenever the aircraft were simply stored on the deck they'd normally be closed, but when taxiing or being towed across the deck there'd normally be a crewman in the cockpit with the canopy open. There wasn't enough space to use an arrangement like on my Corsair (and the trans clear 2x3 plates for that are expensive), so I used an alternative method using trans clear planels. Unfortunately I cannot close them with the figures inside. Cheers, Ralph

Thanks guys. The folding wings were an essential part of this build because the aircraft needs to go onto a model of an aircraft carrier and if you look at pictures of real aircraft carries you'll see that only very few aircraft on their decks will not have their wings folded. I'm glad you like it. Cheers, Ralph

As some of you may know, as part of Project Intrepid, a collaborative project between me and my friend Lego Monster, I am building a series of WW-II naval aircraft. After a TBF Avenger, F4U Corsair, A6M 'Zero-sen' I've now cranked out a classic dive-bomber, the Curtiss SB2C Helldiver. The Helldiver had two crew-members: a pilot and a bombardier/gunner. The latter sat in a separate cockpit in the aft fuselage and operated two .30 inch machine guns in a somewhat odd arrangement. The upper fuselage section between the tail and the canopy could fold down, freeing the guns, as you can see in a photograph of the real aircraft. I didn't even try to make that work on my model. Like many carrier-based aircraft, the Helldiver has folding wings. When Helldivers first entered service they were universally unpopular. Compared to the Douglas Dauntless that they replaced, the Helldiver was bigger, more complicated, unstable, difficult to fly, less reliable and only carried the same weapons load over a similar distance. The only advantage the Helldiver had was that it was considerably faster. The aircraft received a number of unflattering nicknames, such as 'The Beast' and 'Son-of-female canine 2nd Class' (an obvious play on the SB2C designation). In later versions many of the aircraft's shortcomings were fixed, but the aircraft was never popular. Grumman and Curtiss used completely different ways of folding the aircrafts' wings for stowage aboard carriers. The Avenger used the unique Grumman 'sto-wing' in which the wings of the plane were stored parallel to the fuselage. Curtiss used a more conventional approach for their Helldiver, with the outer wing panels folding up. You can see the results: the footprint of the Avenger is much smaller than the Helldiver's This was the most difficult build so far and one that I wasn't looking forward to, but I am happy with how my version of the Beast turned out. Next: a Grumman F6F Hellcat. Cheers, Ralph

Thank you. Thanks. There were a number of parts/features of the aircraft that I knew would be difficult and had to figure out before building it: the camouflage, the radar antennae, the engine cowl and the cockpit, specifically. The cockpit was one of the first parts I built and it took several hours to find a construction that gave me enough space for the figures and the landing gear. Thanks. From most angles the strut is practically invisible. I would have preferred a solution where the aircraft would have been balanced on its own, but this was the compromise I disliked the least. Thank you. I am glad you like it. Cheers, Ralph

Thank you. Compared to, say, a Messerschmitt Bf-109 or an FW-190 this isn't a particularly famous aircraft, but I liked the look of it from the moment I first saw a picture of one. It's a bit of an odd-ball with that cranked up tail and the weird 'antler' antennae. Cheers. Night fighters were a bit of a special category. Most of the ones used by the Germans were modifications of existing designs (Ju-88 and Me-110 in particular). The Uhu was designed specifically for the role, but still enormous compared to regular fighters or some bombers, in fact. I've made a picture showing the Uhu and one of the bombers it was supposed to counter. Both models were built to the same scale and they were equally far away from the camera. Thanks. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks. Unfortunately there is only a single surviving Uhu in the world, in the Smithsonian annex at Washington Dulles Airport. Cheers, Ralph

Thanks for the comments, guys. I'm glad you like it. Thank you. The advantage of WW-II aircraft is that they tend to have fairly thick wings. They are five plates thick in some places, so there is plenty of space to have fairly long plates inside. Also, because of the wing profile many of the smaller plates partially overlap smaller plates in the layer below. I can lift the model by the wingtips. The difficulty with the camouflage was mainly limited to the nose section and to working out how to make a sufficiently fine-grained pattern. I made a few drawings on graph paper, figuring out a few basic rules that I felt I should stick to. Once I had that worked out, actually building it was fairly straightforward. On the real aircraft the aircraft engines undoubtedly play a large role in the weight distribution. What also helps is that the tail is largely hollow and relatively light, while mine requires a fair bit of internal structure to give it strength. I currently have concrete plans for two more WW-II aircraft (for Lego Monster's Intrepid), a Curtiss SB2C Helldiver and a Grumman F6F Hellcat. There are a few more that I am interested in building in the longer run (a B-17 Flying Fortress and a PBY Catalina, for instance) but I have no concrete plans at the moment. Cheers, Ralph

Thank you. The canopy on the real aircraft is more curved, but I had to compromise to find enough space to fit the crew, to have the cockpit open and to have the landing gear retract. I wasn't too happy about the size of the camouflage patches on the side, but couldn't make them smaller because I had to use panels fitted sideways to find enough space for the crew. It was all a bit of a bugbear, but as part of the overall aircraft it turned out to look OK. I'm glad you like it. Thanks. I think I've done decent-looking camouflage before, but it used far larger patches (and was on a far larger aircraft). The camouflage on these aircraft is very fine-grained and it took a lot of small plates to get this effect. Thank you. They were the first bits I designed for it based on the designof my F4U Corsair. Thanks for putting it on the front page. I have higher resolution pics, but in my default setting they are only available to flickr users. I've changed the setting for these so that everyone can look at the high resolution versions by clicking the 'all sizes' link above the photograph. I also have a few close-ups of the difficult bits (engine nacelles and cockpit) in my photostream. Thank you. I've been building aircraft for years, but until about two years ago mostly stuck to larger scale models of more modern aircraft. For my WW-II models whether I think I can built a particular model is at least as important as whether or not I like a particular model. There's a whole list of aircraft that I wouldn't mind building, but that I feel that right now aren't feasible. I could compromise by not having minifigs inside, not having an opening cockpit canopy or not having a retractable undercarriage, but I'd rather chose a model where I can do those things or a model of an aircraft that doesn't actually have a retractable undercarriage or cockpit canopy Thanks. There were a few things that kept me from building one of these more than a year ago, including the camouflage. Cheers, Ralph

Those of you who are into military aircraft may have noticed that I've been building a fair few WW-II aircraft lately. Most of the ones I've built lately are intended for Lego Monster's Intrepid aircraft carrier. However, more than a year ago I started looking at German night fighters, aircraft intended to intercept (British) bombers at night and specifically at the Heinkel He-219 Uhu (Eagle Owl). Many German night-fighters wore 'dappled' patterns with relatively small dark spots against a lighter background on the upper surfaces. I wanted to recreate a similar effect on my LEGO model, using (old) dark grey and light blueish grey. When building the model the length and weight of the tail caused problems with the balance. Despite building two heavy weights into the fuselage just aft of the cockpit it would still tip on its tail. Ultimately I decided to get rid of the weights and to instead use a little strut built out of transparent parts to prop up the tail. In order to detect its targets at night, many night-fighters were fitted with a radar system. My model represents an Uhu fitted with the Lichtenstein SN-2 radar. Unlike more modern radar systems and many airborne radars used by the Allies at the time, which used parabolic dish antennae, the Lichtenstein used externally-mounted dipole antennae; the 'antlers' mounted on the nose. Some Uhus were also fitted with a tail radar, with a similar dipole antenna attached to the tail. The Uhu was one of the most advanced designs to enter service with the Luftwaffe during WW-II, with a tricycle undercarriage and a pressurised cockpit with a bubble canopy and ejection sets for the crew. When I first started thinking about building a Uhu I wouldn't be able to resolve a few difficulties with it. When reading about German night-fighters I came across the British DeHavilland Mosquito, and built one of those instead. However, I never completely gave up and now have finally pulled it off. Cheers, Ralph

These are complicated machines and you've done a great job capturing all the important bits. Really nice. I wouldn't mind having something similar for my town. Cheers, Ralph

I don't have a sig-fig in the form of a minifig. However, the avatar picture I use both here and on flickr shows a brick-built figure. I built it to accompany a car: Those of you who grew up in the 'eighties might recognise Sonny Crockett and his Ferrari from the TV series Miami Vice. Sonny Crockett is an under-cover cop posing as a drug dealer who wears linen suits and pastel colours and loafers without socks. He likes guns and he lives in Miami on a yacht, together with his pet alligator. Back in the day he was considered a bit of a sex-symbol. It won't be a big surprise that we have little in common Cheers, Ralph

This project has been in the works since ta least 20 years. The 'star' is essentially just a tiny little pellet and the fusion reaction will be over in the blink of an eye. That's also the problem with this project: in order to turn it into a viable energy source, you'd need to be able to run it almost constantly rather than in just a flash and they are nowhere near that point. Cheers, Ralph

I don't think Toys R Us has them, but they are definitely available in the LEGO stores. I saw the whole range in Brighton a few months ago. I haven't seen them anywhere else (but have been in the UK only a few times in the last months and haven't been looking for Space Police myself). They're definitely available via Lego's own on-line shop. Cheers, Ralph

Thanks. The opening parts were what made this fun to build. At first I wasn't going to do the opening engine bay. I did plan to have the inspection hatch, but that was it. However, as I was building the engine I felt it was a shame to go to all that trouble if it was only going to be visible through a small hatch. Making the whole bay open meant a fairly comprehensive rebuild of the front of the vehicle, but it actually ended up looking better because of it, even with the hatches closed. Thank you. In some respects I am a failed plastic model builder. I never was any good at painting them, so instead I turned to LEGO to build the planes and vehicles I like. Cheers, Ralph