Ralph_S

Thank you. Thanks for blogging it and congratulations for becoming the new blogger for classic town Thanks. I'm not complaining. It's being blogged all over the place . Cheers, Ralph

Thanks. I am glad you like the look of them all together. Regular LEGO road plates don't really lend themselves very well to being used with modular buildings, because they already have sidewalks. Putting the buildings on top of the road plates can work, but is still a bit awkward. In Brickish we tended to use road with brick on its side instead and I liked the look of it. It also means you get to add custom features, such as the markings for the bus stop. I enjoyed building the train because I am normally not a train builder. It was fun to do something a little different and I was pretty determined that it would look good. The HGV seems like a permanent fixture in British cities, although this one may be a little lost. There's certainly no way he make a turn! (Note the driver sitting on the left in the cab, he's probably Dutch!). Thanks. I too think that right now things look a bit too prim and proper in some respects and I considered adding graffiti to the viaduct. Like in real life, however, I felt that graffiti ruins things. There's an added issue in that all the LEGO-built graffiti that I've seen and that I feel looks decent tends to be very big. Here's a sampling of LEGO-built graffiti on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/groups/1093064@N23/d...57622641298734/ That means adding it to the buildings isn't an option as there's simply no space for it. The same applies to the train, with the added note that I don't recall ever seeing graffiti on a train operated by Southwest Trains. It's very well possible, however, that with further extensions in the future, I will add bits of viaduct with some graffiti. Thank you. This was all built spread out over a long time, with me building new parts for it now and then. I am no good at building something really large in one go. I prefer to break things up in smaller modules instead interspersed with building different unrelated things. That keeps a project like this interesting and I can spend the effort to make all the bits look decent by themselves. I am fairly certain that I will keep adding bits to this in the future. Feedback I've been given here and on flickr has already given me a lot of new ideas. Cheers, Ralph

I didn't recognise that the idea how to mount the fenders on version 1 came from Mr Zumbi's Beetle. I do remember browsing brickshelf briefly, but consciously decided not to take a closer look at minifig scale Beetles when building mine for the little VW Beetle build challenge we had a few weeks ago as I wanted my model to be original. However, I saw no problem with version 1 of Dennimator's Beetle being based on a combination of bits he liked from various other people's Beetles. I often use things that I know I've seen somewhere, but I can't put my finger on where they they came from. I'm picking up ideas all the time. However, if I do know where an idea came from, I generally will credit the builder of the original. With the pictures posted by Gambort it is clear that version 2 is very similar to Mr. Zumbi's and giving some credit would be in order. There's no shame in admitting that you looked at somebody else for ideas. Cheers, Ralph

Thanks to all of you. One of the things I didn't like too much about one of the collaborative displays I contributed to was that there was nothing but tables behind the row of buildings lined up alongside the road. Because a lot of trains going into London run over the top of viaducts/ Victorian arches, building one of those seemed like a nice idea, and if you've got a railway track, you've got to have a train, right? That's exactly what I was looking for too. I had a lot of fun working on collaborative displays, but I've seen other people build compact town displays somewhat like this one. The length of it is the equivalent of 6 32x32 baseplates. It's a bit more than 2 32-stud baseplates wide: 16 studs for the base of the viaduct, 32 for the modular buildings and roughly 20 studs for the road. Because the road was largely built with brick on its side it isn't attached to a baseplate. There actually is one in the Corner Store, but indeed, there are a few typical London things I can add without necessarily adding seediness. Thanks. When I built my first cafe corner compatible building, I also built two cars to go with it pretty much straight away. One of them (the black cab) is on the current layout. After that I went a bit overboard with the car building. We had so many of them for the collaborative display at STEAM (I built just about all the cars for it) that I ended up lending some to other Brickish members who had a large train display with a vacant parking lot. For this display I selected the ones that I felt seemed the most British. Thanks. I wanted a bit of green in there. For one of the collaborative displays a few years ago I had a park that was twice as large with a pond and a few trees, but for this city scene I wanted something a bit smaller (also because having a large park would mean building more roads.) Thank you. I looked at pictures of quite a few railway bridges before settling on red. It seemed like a nice bright colour to liven things up a bit. I will fiddle around with the traffic situation a bit more in the future. I'd love to have traffic islands with some trees in there too, but I completely ran out of old dark grey parts. I appreciate the comment. Cheers, Ralph

Thanks guys. Apart from the roads and the viaduct I already had all the MOCs. I had the intention of putting them all together, but I didn't have the parts for the viaduct until recently. When I put all of this stuff on the floor this morning, I hadn't seen it all together myself. I built the train a few months ago, with this project in mind, and did post it on eurobricks too with a few pictures. However, it was in the train tech forum, which may explain why die-hard city heads may have missed it For good measure, here's one: It's a British Class 158 DMU in Southwest Trains livery. There are obviously a few things missing that you would see in London: garbage in the street, pot-holes, police cameras and drunks and hoodies. I decided to go for a slightly cleaner version Cheers, Ralph

Layout In the last few months I've seen a few very nice collections of Cafe-Corner-Compatible buildings. Now it's my turn Since more than two years I've been steadily expanding my collection of British buildings. It all started with 'A Taste Of India', built for a competition organised by the Brickish Association and I kept adding more. You'll have seen a few here on Eurobricks in the past. I displayed several of these buildings at the Great Western LEGO show in Swindon in 2008 as part as a larger collaborative layout. Obviously, with my return to the Netherlands in mid-last year, collaborative British/Brickish displays have become much more difficult. This is why I decided to build everything I need for my own little layout, which I decided to call Brickston Borough (after the London neighbourhood of Brixton). To complete the layout I had to build roads and the viaduct. The buildings are, from left to right: The Chipshop, The Lion Pub, The Corner Store, A Taste Of India and the Georgian Houses. Not only the buildings are modular. They rest on modular bases (16x16 stud segments). The roads are modular too, as is the railway viaduct. The whole layout can be packed into a few not too large boxes, which should make it fairly easy to take to events. The modularity also means that it will be relatively easy to build additional bits. I already have a lot of ideas for that, if not the parts Anyway, I hope you like it so far! Cheers, Ralph

Sure, a bigger scale makes building certain things a lot easier. I build aircraft models out of LEGO (as you may know) and years ago I settled on a scale of 1/36 for those. I don't use minifigs with them, though, because they look too small next to them. Recently I have built minifig scale models of aircraft as well and build them to a scale of roughly 1/43. The difference might seem insignificant, but it is enough to make things harder. I tend to be fairly precise about scale, but one thing I think you ought to be aware of is that there is a limit to how accurate you can make things anyway, especially when building a small object. In realistic terms, you can't make steps that are much smaller than a 1x1 plate. If I use a scale of 1/45 I might find that a particular car ought to be 5.2 studs wide, but I have to round that down to 5 because 5.2 simply isn't practical. If you can get the dimensions of what you build to within a stud of the dimensions it ought to have according to the scale you've chosen you've already done really well IMO. Cheers, Ralph

Well, this topic keeps coming up! Pretty soon I'll start boring myself

Figures are the equivalent of five studs tall. One stud corresponds to roughly 0.8cm, so 5 studs equals 4 cm. Consequently, if I take a figure to be approximately 1.8 m tall, I find a scale of 1/(180/4) is 1/45. Conversion from metric to Imperial units is a pain in the behind, but a close equivalent would be: One stud corresponds to roughly 1/3 inch, so five studs is 5/3 inch. If i take a figure to be 6ft tall (=6x12inch) the scale becomes 1/(6x12x3/5) is approximately 1/43. Obviously with more precise conversions you;d find the same scale in both systems, but quite how you reach 1/40 is a mystery to me. I agree. It is mainly a personal preference that IMO very much depends on what you want to do with your figures. I chose my scale such that the height of figures looks reasonable next to my vehicles, which leads me to use approximately 1/45. Consequently I cannot have figures sitting side-by-side in most of my vehicles. If you want figures side-by-side you'll have to chose a larger scale. The 6 vs 8 wide train debate indeed is similar. If you want a realistic scale you end up with 8 studs wide. If you want it to actually fit on LEGO curves you'll have to go smaller. It all depends on what you want. Cheers, Ralph

I'm very impressed that you managed to cram all this functionality in there and yet, looking at it it isn't at all obvious. It's all very well hidden. I love American wrecker trucks anyway, so this ticks a lot of boxes. The majority of heavy duty wrecker trucks don't have a crane that rotates, but there are plenty that do. I built a wrecker truck a few years ago (albeit on a much smaller scale and with far less functionality) and it too has a rotating crane. I based that on pictures of a real truck from a book. Search images for "heavy duty wrecker" and you'll find plenty. Cheers, Ralph

I'm glad you liked it. The display was built by members of The Brickish association. I was there as well, but was mainly involved in the city layout you can see in the background in some of the pictures. I can shine a light on why it's mainly classic and neo-classic space. Peter Reid, who contributed some of his models to this display (even though he wasn't there in person) is one of the people behind neo-classic space. Most of the space-builders in the Brickish Association are in their thirties and they've had collaborative classic space displays at a lot of events in the past. Stuart Crawshaw, who built the other space models, also has a large Blacktron collection, space was only a part of the various things on display. We could have done with a bit more room. You seem to have missed a spacy MOC on the display though: the Carl Sagan, a near-future star ship built by Ed Diment and myself. Cheers, Ralph

Thanks guys. I'm back home after being away for about a week and really appreciate your comments. I too like this sort of vehicle. I remember that a cousin of mine had a toy truck that was similar to this when we were children and that I used to love it. I've built similar vehicles to a larger scale in the past, but this was my first attempt (as far as I remember) on minifig scale. One advantage of having built many vehicles on this scale is that when building a new vehicle you can combine various bits of vehicles you've already done. Much of the cab design of this one is directly based on my older airport shuttle van, for instance. It's the sort of thing you can build in a few hours; not particularly challenging but a lot of fun. The colour scheme was mainly driven by the parts that I had that weren't yet earmarked for other projects. I didn't want to build it in red overall because that would make it look too much like a fire engine in my mind. The challenge was building the excavator and I am glad that most of you seem to like it so much. This is probably about as small as I could make it and still fit a minifig in the cab. The upper part is nine studs wide and that gave me just enough space for a three-wide cab. In the last few years I've kept the majority of my models in one piece. I have been dismantling a few older ones in the last few months, because I need the pieces, don't like them any more and because I'm running out of space. I also build some of my models specifically with public displays in mind and those tend to go after a few months. Cheers, Ralph

I haven't noticed any problems with the motor overheating. I remember driving the space vehicle around for about half an hour at an event about a year ago without any problems. For the self centering steering you indeed need to line up everything nicely, otherwise the central position won't be a straight line, but if you've done it once is should stay in place. The motor and spring box is a far more compact set-up than one involving gears, but whether or not you can apply it obviously depends on the overall geometry. I've only applied power functions to fairly large vehicles and in both I had space to connect the motor and the spring box directly to the steering, without any gearing. The gearing on the first version took up a lot of space, which meant that there was a massive box inside the truck's cab to cover it all. One the new one, I was able to lower the steering set-up, as you can see in this picture by comparing how high the chassis is behind the wheels in comparison to the battery box (which stayed in the same place in the rebuild). This allowed me to fit a flat floor in the aft of the cab. You're welcome. Ultimately you'll have to experiment yourself. What works for my vehicle may not work for yours. I suppose that for something slow a worm gear works fine. I don't like slow though . Cheers, Ralph

Sorry I didn't reply sooner. I was away from home for a few days. Rather than replacing bricks I've used I tend to buy parts/ sets in advance with future projects in mind. The pictures I posted link to my flickr account (and it's in my signature). I also have an account on brickshelf. but I haven't updated it in months. http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?m=RalphS Cheers, Ralph

I built so many minifig scale vehicles last year that I basically swore it would be a very long time before I'd build another. However, in the last few days I got stuck working on a MOC and decided to build something small instead. Ultimately it did turn into a faily complicated little thing, but it was far more fun than what I had been building. It's very much my own MOC, but I did derive some inspiration from various flatbed trucks I've seen here in the last months and Piotr's excellent Caterpillar 320D excavator. Mine is considerably smaller and a lot simpler, though (and a 320C). The truck itself is 7 studs wide and the trailer 8. Unlike the excavator the truck isn't based on a particular brand or model. It was inspired by relatively modern US trucks such as the Kenworth T2000 and Mack Vision. Anyway, pictures: More pictures, as usual are on flickr. (I'm about to head to the airport to go on a trip so I may not be able to read responses for a few days, but wanted to share this model nonetheless.) Cheers, Ralph

I disagree. IMO what you need for a properly controllable vehicle is a self-centring steering mechanism. When I first built my FDNY fire engine, it had a combination of a worm gear and a clutch. It worked, but it was a complete bastard to drive. I fiddled with it for quite a while, but was never happy because it is very hard to find a compromise between the vehicle being able to change direction fairly quickly and it being able to drive in a straight line properly. I have since updated it with self centring steering, as explained in my previous post, and it's made a massive difference. The thing turns left if I push the controller to one side and right if I push it to the other. If I let go of the controller, the vehicle moves in a straight line. I realise that Darth Legolass mentions that in this sort of set-up the motor does get warm. I haven't noticed this issue myself, probably also because the motors are hidden deep inside the structure and because I don't drive the things around for very long. I suppose that in theory there's nothing stopping you from combining a clutch gear and a spring. I tried that when building the space tractor and ran into the problem that the torque exerted by the spring was enough to make the clutch gear slip. Cheers, Ralph

Thanks guys. It's much appreciated. Cheers, Ralph

The only difficulty with a set-up as described here (incl a clutch gear) is that it'll lead to a vehicle that is pretty hard to control. It'll be fine in corners, but getting it to go in a straight line or any fast manoeuvres will be difficult. I described an alternative system in another thread a while ago http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?...c=36045&hl= It uses a spring to self-center the steering. The mechanism that wasn't my idea, but I have applied it successfully to two models (a six-wheeled space vehicle and a model team fire engine). The motor simply stops when it can't go further, but since it is only in that condition for a very small amount of time I haven't experienced any problems so far. Cheers, Ralph

Thank you. In my book, a 'classic LEGO feel' is a good thing, so I appreciate your comment. I do keep most of my models together. I have been taking apart a few things in the last (mostly things I built years ago and that look a bit pedestrian compared to my newer stuff), but I've got about 40 aircraft and helicopter models. I don't have the space I'd need to put them all on display at home. In may 2008 I gather all the aircraft and helicopter models that I had at the time. The collection has grown a lot since then. I've also taken stuff to public displays. Here's a picture of part of my display at the Great Western LEGO show in Swindon (UK) in October 2008: (showing a few models that I didn't yet have in the first picture) It is great to see them all together. I've recently found a new job and will be moving in the next few months. One priority in house-hunting will be havinga decent-sized room where I can put up some more shelves, so that I don't have to keep my models stored away in boxes. Cheers, Ralph

I fire engine is a truck in my book and it fits very well with the other three. It's got a nice classic look to it, both in the design of the vehicle and in how you recreated it in LEGO. These are far better than a lot of the more modern creations I see all over the internet. Cheers, Ralph

Thank you. Not everybody likes stickers, but then again, not everybody builds military aircraft or helicopters. I'm glad you like the helicopter. I'm not too keen on the figures either, which is why I didn't post a picture of them here, but don't know what to do about it. They seemed to go down well on flickr, but I'm open to suggestions on how to build better figures on this scale. I have seen pictures of Lynx pilots wearing olive green overalls (no way to do that in LEGO), but as far as I know when they're flying over (cold) water, they still wear a survival suit in international orange, also known as a 'penenpak' in Dutch. Cheers, Ralph

These are very nice. If you'd have told me they were built last week rather than ten years ago, I probably would have believed you. I miss the front fenders on both conventional trucks a little, although on this scale adding them would probably lead to something bulky. Just out of curiosity, if you were to build similar trucks today, is there anything you'd do differently? With things such as google images it's almost hard to imagine that, say 15 years ago, if you did want some info about something you'd have to go to the library or go buy a book or magazine, but it's what I used to do too. Actually, I still like to have printed pictures as a reference when building with LEGO. Cheers, Ralph

You're right. That does look as though the skids are 10 wide. Still, I have my doubts it will look good, but perhaps you'll provide me with a positive surprise Cheers, Ralph

I have both the highway rig and the helicopter transport, although I took both of them apart about 20 years ago... They were among my favourite sets, however, and I too built a trailer for the highway rig. I remember that it was a white box trailer with a red and blue stripe to match the stripes on the front. I also remember hooking the trailer of 5590 to the highway rig and that it didn't look right to me. The trailer seemed a little small. I don't have the 'Black Thunder' helicopter, but looking at the box art the fuselage is 8 studs wide. Including the landing gear struts it is 12 wide. The trailer on 5590 is 12 studs wide, but it has an edge around it. That means that Black Thunder won't fit without some modifications to the trailer. Even if it were to fit, it would look awkward IMO. The colour schemes don't match (black trailer, black and yellow helicopter, red, white and blue truck). Yuck! Cheers, Ralph

Indeed it does. Thanks. Thank you. Building aircraft and helicopters offers fun on several levels. I enjoy building the shape, but I also enjoy fiddling around with details. Naval helicopters in particular tend to have all kinds of stuff mounted on the outside. Thank you. I appreciate your honesty. What I really wanted to use was a train window frame with a regular clear piece of 'glass', but sadly the frames don't exist in dark bley. Obviously what I did now is a compromise, but I felt it looked better with some transparent bricks than without. If I could have, i would have added glass to the front doors as well. Thanks. An excellent suggestion I agree that it would fit with my collection nicely and actually have already been collecting some pictures and digging out old issues of 'Onze Luchtmacht' to gather info. I used to have a model of a Bell 214 several years ago also built to this scale, so I know it can be done. The cockpit windows will be a bit tricky though. They're more curved than the ones on the Lynx, but it's definitely on my wish list I've also been eyeballing a Cougar. Cheers, Ralph