Ralph_S

It indeed very much depends on what country or in case of the US what particular police force your car is supposed to represent. In the UK, The Netherlands and Germany they're always blue. The New York Police Department has red and white lights. The California Highway Patrol has red, white and blue lights. I don't really have a preference either way. Cheers, Ralph

Wow! That was quick. I agree. This looks nicer. Cheers, Ralph

Nice brush fire truck, Lightning tiger. The one thing I don't really like are the headlights. My suggestion would be to replace the trans orange cheese slopes with trans clear ones, and add white cheese slopes where you have the trans clear one now. The orange looks out of place somehow. Cheers, Ralph

Cool. I'm not really into sci-fi MOCs, and there isn't much of any use that I could say about the build so far, but the lack of a tail rotor bothered me somewhat. I look forward to seeing how you incorporate it. Cheers, Ralph

I know it's a 'sci-fi' helicopter, but have you thought about a tail rotor or some other system to counter the torque generated by the main rotor? Cheers, Ralph

I don't know where to start: the large size, the overall look, the level of detail and all the working functions!? Awesome work. :thumbup: Cheers, Ralph

What stands out about this MOC is the awesome interior detail, especially the part where you order your food. You've captured the look and feel of the place really well. Cheers, Ralph

Thank you. Every on-line community has a somewhat different focus and I definitely get the feeling that this site indeed is a bit more town and pirate-oriented. Not a problem though, since I've turned to building that sort of thing more and more in the last few years. I still think of myself first and foremost as a military builder though. I'm glad you like it. Thanks. I'm sure to build more military MOCs in the next months and when I do, I'm sure to share them with Eurobricks. Awesome. Thanks. The Kiowa always struck me as the evil mutant brother of the JetRanger. Obviously all the greebly bits help to give it that look, as does the mast mounted sight, but the much larger engine housing and way the engine exhaust is hidden also have a big impact in making it look so much meaner somehow. I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but whenever I build any scale model, I always spend quite a bit of time gathering pictures of the real thing. It's a big part of the fun. I'm glad that the effort shows. Cheers, Ralph

The buildings indeed need to be raised as well, but you can basically use any old parts you've got lying around to do it with, since they'll be covered by the buildings anyway. I used 16x16 stud frames built with technic bricks and some wedge plates, all studs up. The buildings are sturdy enough to not require support under their entire base. I can't say much about the respective cost. Excluding the side road it's 192 studs of road or the equivalent of 6 road plates. I rarely keep track of how much the things I build cost (I probably don't really want to know), but I already had all the old dark grey bricks and plates I used for this in my collection. In contrast, I own a single straight road plate. An old grey one. Cheers, Ralph

You are probably right. To me Eurobricks somehow is much more 'town friendly'. Thank you. The plastic was and always has been a compromise. If and when I feel I can use a purist option that will look at least as good as the plastic, I'll go for the purist option. The bulbous shape of the canopy and the chin bubbles would have made using plastic rather difficult as well. All in all this seemed like the nicest solution. I am glad you agree. The various bits and bobs that make this thing looks so alien -including the wire cutters- was part of what made this build fun. It;s nice to know such little details are spotted. Thank you. I appreciate it. Cheers, Ralph

I agree that what sort of road you want depends on the type of city you're building. If it's more old school (relatively small buildings) that you can build on the sides of the roadplates, roadplates are probably a good option. I didn't use road plates for my own city (well, city street) because I felt they had too many limitations. They are hard to combine with cafe-corner compatible buildings, because they already have a footpath. Having the road plates lie against the baseplates that the buildings sit on looks awkward. Putting the baseplates that the buildings sit on on top of the road plates causes all kinds of issues with side streets and at the edges of the display. Tiled roads offer more flexibility, but like Cagri I feel that the most attractive option is roads built with bricks on their side. It's something other members of the Brickish association have been doing and I always liked it, in particular because it means you can add your own road markings such as the 'Bus stop' written on the road in my street. It's not cheap though, but then again, very little in this hobby is. Cheers, Ralph

Thanks. I actually thought about doing it this time around, but figured that if the title of the topic were to read 'big military helicopter' people would be more likely to think it was rubbish than if I was specific about what it was. Perhaps. I think it's more the scale; many AFOLs don't care much for MOCs that don't fit figs. Obviously my sampling is limited, but many of my MOCs are much bigger than minifig scale (my cars) and are popular, while the minifig scale military MOCs I build often sink like a stone. Mind you, I'm not complaining. It's always nice to get responses, even if there aren't many. I just wonder whether it's a general thing or whether I'm doing something wrong. Cheers, Ralph

Thank you. The sphere was actually the first bit I built. I knew that if I couldn't get it right, I'd scrap the whole project or perhaps switch to building a civilian Jetranger. My next creation is very likely to be a minifig scale WW-II F4U Corsair fighter. BTW, military creations don't appear to be very popular around here. Cheers, Ralph

The Bell OH-58D Kiowa Warrior is an armed reconnaissance helicopter used by the US Army. I started building a Kiowa Warrior more than a year ago, on the scale I use for most of my helicopters and aircraft, 1/36. I didn't have much luck with it. The forward fuselage was only five studs wide, the canopy frame looked too thick, as did the landing gear. I scrapped it. Building my SH-14D Lynx a while ago to a scale of 1/22 as well as some of the US Army vehicles made me revisit the idea to build a Kiowa, but now built to this larger scale as well. The Kiowa is a military development of the famous Bell Jetranger, which is still evident from the shape of the fuselage. The Kiowa Warrior was developed to complement the AH-64A Apache. The mast-mounted sight enabled the helicopter to detect targets at a long distance, with the helicopter itself remaining hidden from view behind trees, for instance, and could guide Apaches or their Hellfire missiles to the targets it found. Operations with armed versions of the Kiowa developed for use in the 'tanker war' against the Iranian Navy in the Persian Gulf in 1988 were so successful that the army decided to upgrade all Kiowa Warriors, allowing them to carry their own weapons on two stub pylons. My model is fitted with two Hellfires and a missile pod One of the most difficult issues I faced when building this helicopter was getting the shape of the cockpit windows and the chin bubbles right. I have often used transparent non-LEGO plastic for this sort of thing, but I wanted a purist solution. Unfortunately LEGO don't make windscreens that fit, so instead I decided to sculpt the shape using transparent slopes, plates, tiles and jumper plates. Expensive and difficult, but well worth it IMO. Another tricky bit was the mast-mounted sight. At first I looked at using a 'Bram sphere'. Looking at various spheres with 2x2x2 stud centres I realised that I might be able to use interlocking slopes instead of plates. The sphere is held together by a 2x4 plate on the front, the 2x2 round plate at the bottom and a few T-pieces that hold together the Daleks/ Travis bricks inside. I'm happy that after more than a year I finally have my Kiowa. I hope you'll like it too. Cheers, Ralph

That does look a lot better . I too hate how the wheels on most LEGO cars stick out. I hadn't though of replacing wheels on sets with these and didn't realise how nicely they fill those mudguards, but I'm pretty sure I've seen these tyres on those rims in a LEGO racers set from last year. I also have used them myself on an old-timer car. Cheers, Ralph

Thank you. My written German is pretty lousy, but fortunately I can read and understand it without too much difficult. I saw that the closing date is in September. By that time I should know whether I can come or not. (It depends on what classes I'll be teaching). Cheers, Ralph

That sounds interesting. I'm not sure whether I can make it November, but I'm not all that far away from Cologne. It would be great if I could display something there and get together with some German AFOLs. Cheers, Ralph

Nice. I used to live not very far away from one of the DAF truck factory in The Netherlands. A lot of parts for the trucks were built elsewhere to be assembled there. It wasn't at all uncommon to see trucks there carrying DAF cabins in different colours, so this looks very familiar Cheers, Ralph

Thanks. I am glad you like it. We haven't decided yet whether we will have stickers on all of them. Brick-built stars-and-bars don't look right to me. They would normally only carry them on one wing, by the way. We hope to finish by October so that the carrier and the air wing can go on display at an event in Swindon in the UK. It is an ambitious project. My intention is to finish the designs for the various planes in the next two months or so (I've started work on the F4U Corsair). After that either I or a friend of mine will put the designs in LDRAW and make instructions for them. Then there'll be a frantic scramble to but the parts we still need (we've already bought a lot, but there are bound to be some bits that we haven't thought about yet) and we'll probably get together for a few days, perhaps with a few more people, to start series production. Cheers, Ralph

Thanks guys. I wasn't really familiar with the real car either until I started looking into Le Mans cars about two weeks ago and remember the toy car I had as a child. It was a fun build. Cheers, Ralph

Thank you. It wouldn't be a proper racecar without a big engine. Thanks. I also looked at alternative schemes, but this seemed the most doable for this car. I liked the two blue tones together. The orange stripe used to be red at first, but I decided to change it midway during the build when I saw more pictures of the real car. It's nothing that can't be fixed with a 1x1 and 1x2 tile. I just did and I have to say that although I normally don't care too much about studs showing, it does look better. The reason why I didn't at first was indeed because my 911 model has studs there too. When I built that there weren't any orange 1x1 tiles, but thanks to LUGbulk I've got some of those now. I did briefly look at Ferraris, but I liked the look of this one more. Thanks, Ralph

It looks a lot more serious than the one from the set. Nice. Can I suggest that you add a tile to the sides of the caterpillar tracks somehow? Sticking it to Technic half pins stuck into the wheels might already do the trick. Right now those wheels look a bit out of place. Cheers, Ralph

Thanks for all the great comments. Some of you are exaggerating a bit, but I am glad you like it. I built this for a build challenge on flickr called Lemons or Le Mans. I looked at a few lemons first (like the Tucker Torpedo or Chevrolet Corvair), but I didn't feel they were different enough from many of the other cars I've built over the years. I normally don't really care about race cars, but I started looking into Le Mans racers. I don't really like the prototype cars used in those races, but I also came across Porsches like this. I liked the colour schemes and the shape. They're obviously racers, but they still look somewhat like a normal car. I also remembered having a toy car of a Porsche 935 when I was a child. I had a hard time choosing the exact version. I finally chose this one because it's colour scheme is relatively uncomplicated. It was fun to do something a bit different and I put a lot of effort into it. The jump in width from an odd number of studs to an even number is something I've done a few times. The connection indeed uses jumper plates -probably about 10 in all. The arrangement inside is a bit complicated because to get sufficient strength the rear and front interlock in a number of places and all of it pretty much hidden from view. I built a Ferrari Testarossa a few years ago for which I did something similar and for which it is a bit more visible. What made the Porsche a bit harder is that the windscreen isn't attached to the roof. Because I built the windscreen of the Testarossa using trans clear plates I was able to attach the windscreen to the roof, which made it easier to get the connection between the front and rear of the car sufficiently sturdy. It wasn't the trickiest part of the construction, however. That honour was reserved for the SNOT work on the front of the car. I always try to have something that looks vaguely like an engine in my cars, but it often isn't very visible or I don't have a lot of space. The engine cover on this thing is pretty big, however and there aren't any steering components taking up valuable space in the engine compartment. That gave me room to add a bit more detail to the engine that I normally do. Cheers, Ralph

I wasn't sure whether this belongs in the Racers theme or in Model Team, but hey, whatever. The Porsche 935 was a development of the famous Porsche 911. Over the years Porsche developed more powerful versions with much improved aerodynamics, but they were reluctant to sell them to customers. Instead different companies started developing their own versions. One of these was Kremer racing from Cologne in Germany. The 935 K3 was their third version. The roof of the model is based on that of my older Porsche 911 model. That is 10 studs wide. The race version is obviously wider: 11 studs wide at the front and 12 at the rear. Phat Like the Porsche 911, the 935 was powered by a rear-mounted 6-cylinder boxer engine. Using two turbo-chargers and a host of other modifications the race versions produced as much as 740-800 BHP! Being a race-car it doesn't have much of an interior, but I spent some time on adding bits of a roll-cage, the gear change mechanism and a bucket seat. The sponsor names and logos are very important for the look of most racecars, so I spent a lot of time making them look good. There are more than 40 individual stickers on the model! Cheers, Ralph

Thanks for the reply. I'm not much of a technic builder, so it impresses the hell out of me that you can start with all the functioning bits and wrap a convincing looking body around this. I look forward to seeing how you'll continue. Cheers, Ralph