Ralph_S

Thank you. I think I'm usually fairly conservative when it comes to techniques, preferring old-fashioned studs up building over fancy SNOT techniques. However, if a particular shape requires it I can get creative. I too have no idea what the box is for. I just model them Thanks. I'm not sure whether a minifig version of this would be all that interesting, really. I had a lot of fun building the tilting cab and the details on the underside, but on minifigscale (which I;d take to be about half the size of this one) I'm not sure I could do it justice. I built some minifig scale military vehicles a while ago, but I prefer this larger scale. It allows me to add far more detail and functionality. It's also the same scale as my Abrams tank, so that I can possibly put a few vehicles together in a diorama. Thanks. I'm happy with how it turned out, although it's hardly the biggest or most complicated MOC I've built. I enjoyed building it, but most of it is fairly basic stuff. Thank you. Cheers, Ralph

I know there are a lot of military builders who build for minifigs. I've built a few minifig scale military vehicles myself, but I prefer a larger scale. This is my latest effort: a US Army LMTV truck. In the mid-nineties the US Army started replacing a lot of their older trucks with a new 'Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles' or FMTV for short. The trucks were based on the Austrian Steyr 12M18 truck, but built in the US. FMTVs come in a large number of different versions, including 5t 6x6 cargo trucks, wrecker trucks and trucks with van bodies. The model I built represents the lightest version, the 4x4 M1078 LMTV 2.5t cargo/troop transporter, where LMTV stands for 'Light Medium Tactical Vehicle'. As usual with my large-scale models, I've added some functionality. The doors can be opened and the spare tyre, normally stowed behind the cab, can be lowered. Normally I don't spend a lot of time detailing the undersides of my vehicles, because they aren't visible anyway. However, because the real truck sits fairly high on its wheels a lot of the mechanical bits are visible, so I spent some time on making them look right on my model as well. One of the things I decided I wanted for this truck was a working tilt cab so that you can see the Caterpillar engine. Cheers, Ralph

Thanks. I generally don't build minifig scale military vehicles and it isn't easy to give you advice on this, but I'll try. I understand that the rarity of more realistic colours is why a lot of people go for grey, but I think that there are colours that are fairly widely available that make for a more realistic look. Old dark grey is already quite brown/ drab so it's not a bad colour to use. If you mix it with black and pay attention to making creating a proper camouflage pattern I think you'll end up with something nice. Building camouflage takes some getting used to, but I wrote some pointers a few months ago. I'm currently working on a few military vehicles (on a large scale). They have two different schemes. I'm building a tan truck and have opted for a woodland scheme on an APC, a mix of black, brown and dark green. The parts selection I have in dark green is pretty poor (mainly basic brick and some slopes, very few plates), but my combining it with the other two colours in which I have a much larger variety means I can use it. I'd rather use the limited amount of pieces I have in rarer colours to build one vehicle that looks really good than building a large number of MOCs that are a bit so-so. The trucks are too obviously based on the designs LEGO use for trucks in the city line and consequently they look too civilian to me. Real-world military trucks sometimes are based on civilian vehicles, but they'll usually have increased ground clearance and bigger wheels and tyres. I also think the black and yellow markings on one of them look very much out of place. Some of the details on the vehicles seem a bit random, such as the red transparent elements you've got here and there. The armoured vehicles could all do with more ground clearance as well. I know people rave about Halo, but to me the warthog doesn't look too convincing as a military vehicle. It's supposed to be some sort of fast attack/reconnaissance vehicle, but your models look too big for that, certainly compared to the other vehicles. Please don't get me wrong: these vehicles aren't bad, but I see a so many other minifig scale army vehicles on the flickr military group, including some by very experienced builders (Aleksander Stein and Magnus Lauglo for instance) that it takes a lot for a vehicle to stand out. Cheers, Ralph

Zeek asked me to be a judge for this particular competition and this was one of the five favourite entries I ended up picking. I also wrote a few comments on each. For this one I wrote " I like everything about it: the size, the fact that the mechanism for the loadbed works, the driveshaft leading to the rear wheels. It combines good looks and working features in a small package." All of that still applies Cheers, Ralph

No worries. I know you meant no offence and fully understand your enthusiasm for this one. Cheers, Ralph

This truck is really nice and I don't want to distract from that by posting other MOCs in this thread (so I won't), but your comment is a bit of a disservice to the many builders of fire engines who have posted their trucks on eurobricks in the past. I'm sure you don't see every single MOC that passes through here (who does?), but there have been plenty of American fire trucks on eurobricks including some really nice ones. European fire engines do look less elaborate than American ones. IMO they are more form over function. All the trinkets do make building American ones lots of fun. Cheers, Ralph

I'm not a fan of the colour, but the trailer looks pretty good -certainly with the missile being launched. Building the containers out of crates works well on this scale. I also like the folding down supports. It looks quite a lot like the real deal. I don't like the truck though. There's nothing really wrong with it except that it looks nothing like the trucks the US Army uses to pull these trailers. They use an 8-wheeled contraption with a very distinctive look, called the M983 HEMTT. If you search brickshelf for HEMTT you'll see a few quite nice ones. Cheers, Ralph

Military MOCs tend to not get all that much attention compared to certain other themes. That applies to some of my military MOCs as well. I did see these when you posted them, but if I don't think I have anything relevant or nice to write, I'd rather not write anything. It's not a bad collection of vehicles, but there isn't all that much that stands out to me. I know grey is a popular colour for military MOCs, but it's not a very common colour for real military vehicles and doesn't look very realistic to me. The mix of old and new dark grey doesn't really stand out enough IMO. I'd rather see proper camouflage. That the troops wear white or blue doesn't really help either. People have short memories and don't see everything. I've posted MOCs that ended up on the front page and still a few months later people see something similar and go 'wow original, never seen that done before'. There are so many posts, so many MOCs and so many new posters that it's impossible to keep up with. Of course, if somebody does do something similar, that doesn't necessarily mean that they copied it from you. Cheers, Ralph

I agree that the pump control panels could do with a few more bits and bobs and would love to see you add some side supports you can extend somewhere. The ladder pieces you used often look too short, certainly on vehicles built to a fairly large scale. I love how you've managed to circumvent that issue really nicely by attaching the pieces that slide out to the bottom and filling in the gap. The small ladder on the side is very nice too and overall it looks very neat. Cheers, Ralph

I'm no stranger to building yachts myself and used a similar construction for the hull. I took mine to a few public events and people who know more about yachts than I do pointed out an error on my sailing yacht at one of these. It's something hard to pick up from pictures of the real thing. Yours suffers from the same affliction (suggesting you may have taken a look at my yacht). The two spreaders on the mast aren't supposed to be angled up. On most yachts they're swept back. Looking at the construction, it'll be easier to fix on your than on mine Anyway, I wouldn't have noticed if it hadn't been pointed out to me. I like the sailing yacht more than the cabin cruiser, but all of them are nice. Cheers, Ralph

It's definitely bigger and I will indeed be involved. I'll be designing the aircraft. This is a practical idea if you build stand-alone MOCs, but if you start combining different things it's trickier. One of the few examples that I know is a wonderful Russian diorama built by Gambort The cars are built to a larger scale than the buildings, but not so much that it becomes an issue. The builders of the Miniland sections of the LEGOLand parks also do it. Cars and people are all roughly 1/20, but the buildings are often smaller, with only the street-level floors having a height that corresponds to 1/20. For my city stuff, I try to stick as close as I can to one and the same scale. Of course, scale is all relative. Most of my non-minifig scale models are actually larger, including most of my aircraft. If your collection is large enough, building reasonably big things to a big scale isn't really an issue. I'm not so much into airliners, but some of you may have seen my B-1 bomber. Scale 1/36 (IMO too big for minifigs) and a whopping 1.2 m long. Cheers, Ralph

Nice. It looks very realistic and well-proportioned. Clever construction too, and nice use us of the hose piece for the radiator. Cheers, Ralph

OK, somebody has spotted it (although did you go look for it after I wrote there was one set or did you notice it before? ) Of course, but we can each have different ways of having fun. Cheers, Ralph

Indeed. Minifigs can add a lot to a creation or a scene, but as I wrote before, if I really go for a scale model, I tend to do it without figures. LegoMonster's Hood indeed was awesome. He's currently working on something bigger! Cheers, Ralph

I completely agree that LEGO have started to muddle the waters by messing around with the scale themselves. Four-wides weren't particularly realistic, but they fit the roads and city buildings of the 'eighties and early nineties and I used to love them. The larger vehicles in current city sets are more realistic, but they do look big compared to the buildings, particularly in a set like City Corner. It's a lovely set, but the buildings are tiny. It's less of an issue with cafe corner sets, because those are a lot bigger too. However, none of that matters for what I myself do with my LEGO. I rarely build sets. My city layout consists of MOCs (with only one exception, and I doubt anybody has spotted it). I control the action. I set the size of the buildings (that all have stairs), the size of the cars and the train, and the widths of the roads, all whilst keeping an eye on making the relative sizes of everything reasonably consistent and on giving the vehicles realistic proportions. For those of you who feel 7 studs is too wide for a truck or bus, I have the following comment: as we all know, minifigures are much too wide for their length. The scale I use for my minifig cars (1/45) and which brings me to a width of 5-7 studs depending on the type of vehicle is based on the assumption that the figure is roughly 1.8m tall. If I were to base the size of my vehicles on the figure's width, I'd end up with something even larger. 7 studs wide for a truck is actually towards the lower end of the scale! Everybody is free to do as they please, of course, and while I too appreciate the nostalgia in a 4-wide vehicle and can understand that for some people realism doesn't matter much, I wouldn't want a four-wide truck in my LEGO city. Cheers, Ralph

I know a lot of people refer to LEGO's current trucks and SUVs such as the one pulling the horse trailer as six-wide, but including their mudguards and tyres they're actually 7 studs wide. It's only the body that is six studs wide. So, including the mudguards and wheels I use (as dennimator already mentioned) I use: 5 wide for normal cars 5-6 wide for vans and SUVs 6 wide for small trucks 6-7 wide for full-size trucks and buses This does mean that I can't seat two figures side by side in the cars, but all the vehicles are nicely proportioned relative to each other and they don't completely dwarf the figures that stand next to them. As an added note: I don't think 1/45 is perfect minifig scale because the perfect minifig scale doesn't exist. I do think that 1/45 works well as a guideline for city scenes in which you combine vehicles and pedestrians. I've written all of this in a thread I started a few weeks ago and that was front-paged, but ho hum, it's obviously a hot topic. Lightningtiger's memory hasn't failed him Peppermint_M, 4 wide for your milk float works well IMO, because they often are dinky little vehicles in real life. If I were to build a SMART car or an old mini for my minifigs, I'd probably make them four studs wide as well. Cheers, Ralph

The figures in that Agents robot set indeed were pretty good. I think the regular city sets aren't all that bad. The camper van, for instance, has some nice figures. Prateek mentioned the city minifigure collection, which I thought was quite good. I had no idea that it is rare, as I just bought one a few weeks ago from amazon. I also really like the figure that comes with the small car. I've also picked up a lot of really nice figures from events. This year and last year I went to Brighton modelworld (an event for model builders in the UK, where I displayed LEGo with other members of Brickish). The LEGO store also had a stand and they sold minifig bits, including some really nice torsos, faces and hair pieces that are useful for city MOCs. This year they had the Hawaiian shirt and the woman's top from the Agents set, for instance, as well as light blond hairpiece used for "Elsa Schneider" in the Venice canal chase set. You could combine them yourself. A minifig and two utensils cost something like £2.50 per three. I'm not sure how good the selection is at other LEGO stores, but it might be worth checking out if there's one not too far from where you live. Cheers, Ralph

I'm glad you like what I do, but you seem to get the meaning of what I wrote exactly wrong. I use 1/45 for my city stuff because I think that for the things I do the height of the figure is important. That is not always the case and it comes at a price. I'll show you two examples from a blog post I wrote about this very thing a few months ago after seeing a model of a Fairey Swordfish on MOCpages: (I used the thumbnail because the full size piture is too small and I obviously can't rescale somebody else's pictures. Clicking the picture ought to bring you to the page on MOCpages). In 2008 I built a Fairey Swordfish myself, but to a much smaller scale. So here's mine. In the first shot you can clearly see that the accommodation for the figures is really cramped. I only just managed to find enough room to squeeze them in there. That's an obvious drawback of the small scale. I chose the scale because it was supposed to match a ship (HMS Hood) built by a friend of mine. He chose 1/43 because on that scale the size of the sailors on the deck looks reasonable. Consequently, as you can see in the picture below, when the figures are stood next to my model they look fine The builder of the one on MOCpages writes he knows my model but doesn't like it and thinks it's too small. (I think he copied rather a lot from a model he doesn't like, but that's another matter entirely). I say that's a matter of personal choice. My scale is defined by the height of the figures, his seems defined by wanting enough room for the figures and (probably) by convenience, because building it to a larger scale in some respects is easier. Bottom line: the scale that is appropriate depends on what you do with your models. I want figures standing next to mine to look right (in which case height is the appropriate measure) but if I were to want a detailed interior with enough space for the figures I'd have to chose something bigger. Cheers, Ralph

If you want a proper scale model, you're probably better off not using minifigs in the first place, because they are just too awkward. However, I disagree that scale is out the window when using minifigs. I mainly use minifigs with town mocs combinating them with vehicles and buildings. I want my cars to look reasonably in size compared to the pedestrians. I want my trucks to look reasonably sized compared to my cars. I want my buildings to be reasonably sized compared to the lot. The way I do this is by choosing a scale and largely sticking to it. There always is a degree of fudge involved in the process, but I use the scale I chose to work out the rough dimensions of just about everything. The scale is not a goal as such, but a very helpful tool. I feel that the height of the figures in this sort of setting is a lot more important than their width. A compromise (trying to find a mid point between width and height) might work in some cases, but for my city stuff it would still look awkward. People tend to be a bit taller than regular cars and the height of a bus is such that a tall person can just about stand up inside it without their heads hitting the ceilings. That's why for my city MOCs I chose (roughly) 1/45, based on the assumption that figures are roughly 1.8 m tall. Because my cars tend to be five studs wide, the figures generally don't sit in the middle, which limits the awkwardness of there only being one figure in a car. I keep repeating this, but every attempt to define a standard scale for minifigs is utterly futile, because people use their minifigs in different ways, as blueandwhite also mentions. I use 1/45, but 1/45 isn't perfect minifig scale, because there is no such thing as perfect minifig scale. I just feel it happens to be the best scale for the things that I do. How exactly you calculate things is really a matter of what you are used to. Three studs per meter or one stud per foot might seem convenient, but both are too big for my tastes. I grew up using the metric system, use it all the time in my work (I'm a physicist), and it comes naturally to me. All this faffing about with non-decimal fractions seems terribly awkward to me and I work thing out using a calculator anyway. When I build a scale model of an airplane, I tend to use a three-view drawing. I look up the length of the real plane. I then work out how many studs that length corresponds to on the scale that I want to use (for planes, typically 1/36). I then measure how long the plane is in the three-view drawing (usually in cm) and then work out how many studs correspond to a cm in the drawing. This may sound complicated, but ultimately I end up with a single number and that's the conversion factor I use for everything else. Once that is done the rest is easy. I put the conversion factor into the memory of my calculator and I work out every other measure I'm interested in in studs from the three-view drawing. Cheers, Ralph

Thanks guys. You're welcome. They are. The majority of the roads was built with brick on its side. The footpaths/sidewalks on cafe corner buildings make using LEGO road plates awkward, IMO. It's fine if you have just a row of buildings and a road in front you can have the buildings sitting on top of the road plates. As soon as you have a side-street, however, this becomes awkward. I do. Click the pictures in the original post. That will take you to the flickr page with the picture. If you then click 'all sizes' (above the top left-hand corner) you can chose to see higher resolution pictures (and the limitations of the work I did with gimp to remove my living room from the background). the maximum resolution is 4Mpixels, simply because my camera doesn't allow more. Cheers, Ralph

The shape and proportions aren't perfect, but it's probably impossible to pull that off on this small scale. However, with your MOC you capture the essence of the shuttle and that is very impressive Cheers, Ralph

I'm no fan of Dr. Who myself, but Brickish tends to have at least one of those tucked away somewhere on our displays. Adding one to mine is an excellent suggestion. I agree completely. The reason why I haven't (yet) is that I couldn't find a sticker that even came close to looking right for the job. I suppose I could have added a yellow tile without any text instead, but it's something I intend to fix later. The photos in the original post are links to the flickr pages housing the photos, but what you get to see there is also 300x500 pixels. My default settings on flickr are such that the higher resolution images are only available to flickr members, as a measure for controlling who gets to see and copy my work. In the past (when I was still on MOCpages) I've had people copy pictures and pass them off as their own. That has made me very reluctant to share the original pictures (4MPixel, the highest resolution that my five-year old camera allows). However, because your post made me realise that this is the sort of thing where high resolution pictures are relevant in order to see the details, I've changed the license on the pictures of Brickston so that everybody can see the higher resolution images, irrespective of whether they are flickr members or not, by going to the flickr page and clicking the 'all sizes' link above the pictures. Cheers, Ralph

The modified version doesn't really look all that much more like a SMART car IMO. For the rearview mirrors, I'd suggest using a finger hinge with the 'finger' sticking out. I agree that the light clips look better without the cheese, but they still look awfully big to me. Cheers, Ralph

That may be the only decent use of the wheel holder part that I've seen so far. Ladder trucks are a bit of an issue on minifig scale if you ask me. What is typically lacking from the ladders is a decent railing. Cheers, Ralph

Birdie100 already mentioned them: The Brickish Association. They're very active with a lot of events annually. I've been an active member since 2007 and have been to loads of events (both public and private). If you're interested in LEGO events in England, they are the people to turn to. Cheers, Ralph