Ralph_S

I didn't respond to this any sooner, although I should have! Very nice model. It's very hard to actually judge the scale from a first glance at the pictures. To me it looked much larger at first than eight studs wide, which tells you how nicely proportioned and detailed it is! Cheers, Ralph

Thanks for all the comments. I hope you guys don't mind if I don't reply to each of you individually. Minifig scale is always a compromise, but I really like 7-wide for this sort of vehicle. The construction takes some getting used to, but once you've got the hang of it it's not really all that hard. LEGO had a set of a London bus many years ago: http://www.brickset.com/detail/?Set=760-1 I'd probably buy it if they were to still sell something similar. My bus wouldn't be suited as a set. It may look nice, but is much too flimsy to be sold to eight-year olds. It would make for a nice parts pack though One of the reasons I built the model now and the reason for presenting it in this fashion was a build challenge on LUGNuts, a group for LEGO car builders on flickr. We have a new challenge every month and this month's challenge involved building something in the style of another builder or building a car that you know they'd like. For a long time wanted to build a Routemaster too. A few days ago I came across some pictures of a Routemaster in a magazine and was instantly reminded of Firas' picture. It seemed like a good idea for the challenge. I already had the taxi -it was built two years ago- so all I had to do was build the bus. Firas' Routemaster is very nice, but I wanted my model to be a bit smaller than his to fit with my other minifig scale models. I could also use some of the ideas I came up with for other vehicles in the construction. For instance, the upper front windows were built in very much the same fashion as the windows on my American rescue pumper. The model came together quite quickly in around ten hours. Fortunately I had all the parts I needed. Cheers, Ralph

Thanks you. The road is built with brick on its side, so not too many tiles. Cheers. Perhaps I'm overdoing the London theme a bit, but the pillarbox seemed too obvious an idea not to add. The figures fit very nicely on both decks, because the upper red row below the windows on both decks is largely built using panels, so there is plenty of room for their arms. You can see some of it here. Cheers, Ralph

Nice ambulance. The interior looks really good and your solution for making the doors fit the odd width of the back is something I'm definitely going to try on one of my vehicles in the future. Cheers, Ralph

Thanks for all the comments. Cheers, Ralph

Nice truck. It's nicely proportioned and you managed to get the headlights to look just right. Cheers, Ralph

Since two years I've been steadily expanding my British High Street. One thing that was still missing was a typical London Routemaster bus. Time to make amends. I am very fussy when it comes to the scale of my modes and I tried to make this as close to 1/45 as I could. This means it ended up being seven studs wide. Obviously this complicates some things of the build, but it also means that I have seating for two rows of figures side-by-side without too much trouble. Most of the construction is straightforward studs-up, although there are some bits of pretty fancy SNOT work here and there (if I say so myself). It was a fun build and I am happy with the result. I hope you'll agree. The presentation was inspired by a picture by Firas Abu-Jaber (best known for his models of supercars). Cheers, Ralph

Well, I'm back home, so despite the poor lighting conditions (solid overcast) I made some pictures I promised. First of all my buildings together with Green Grocer. And a better picture of the skip and the wheelbarrow. I have also made a few more pictures of the construction of the skip. Cheers, Ralph

Like the ones you based it on it looks rather big compared to the size of the minifigs, but that's a personal preference I suppose. I love the level of detail and the way you've recessed the doors on the armament carrier version. I do have a few suggestions. The sloped rear on the armament carrier looks too steep to me. I think it would look better if it were just a bit flatter, either using stepped plate or a 20 degree slope with cheese slopes at the aft end instead of the 33 degree slopes. Mike Yoder's 75 degree slope mounted at 90 degrees also works better IMO. All of these including the armament carrier would benefit from having the lower tailgate built into the back as well. I look forward to seeing the brick-built versions. Cheers, Ralph

Not a problem. I'm away from home for a few days at the moment, but I'll take a picture when I get back. Thank you. Much appreciated. Cheers, Ralph

Really nice. It's small, but it's got everything. I am really digging that little Grumman post van. It's just about perfect. Cheers, Ralph

Nice truck Milan. I don't build to this large scale, but this is one of the things I do like to see. I love how you've captured the shapes of the cab. The only thing that I can see that you perhaps could do differently, although it may be because of the pictures, is making it a bit taller. It seems taller ion the reference picture. Cheers, Ralph

They are nice, but I have to disagree about the width. I agree that your 8-wide one looks better than your 6-wide one, but a convincing 6-wide one can be done albeit at the expense of being able to fit four figures inside http://www.flickr.com/photos/madphysicist/2583546077/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/channaher/3339893266/ It is a matter of personal preference to a large extent, but I like my minifig stuff to be smaller. That includes Hummers. I like the various types of shield you built around the armament stations. They look very much like the sort of things used on HumVees used in Iraq. Cheers, Ralph

I'm with you. When I first got my hands on some pink about a year ago, I immediately knew that I wanted to build a Cadillac out of it, even though I was sure it would take me ages to get enough parts to be able to do it. It seems like the colour for the car and the car for the colour. I'm glad you like it. Cheers, Ralph

Thanks. I wouldn't mine having a whole row of them, but I could just manage to scrape together parts for two of them! This cafe-corner stuff is parts intensive. Thank you! I'm afraid I don't have Cafe Corner built up any more, but I do have Green Grocer and the Fire Brigade set in one piece. I could take a picture of these together if you like. In fact, that's how they're currently sitting on a shelf. Cheers, Ralph

Thank you. I tend to use technic parts in a supporting role. They are more model team than proper technic. I do get asked quite regularly why I don't build studless, but I've always felt that it is fine for people to be able to see that something is made out of LEGO and the studs have never bothered me. It's always nice to know that there are more people who feel that way I know the contents of your brickshelf folders reasonably well (the Thunderbird is probably my favourite among your models), but I'd forgotten about the Cadillac. I love the horns on the hood. Working with the somewhat limited range of parts did make things a bit more difficult in some respects. I could really have done with jumper plates. I like how you used them to round off the tops of the doors and the fenders. Thank you. Much appreciated. As I mentioned to Simon Willems in another thread a while back, the LEGOland cars in the 'Ultimate LEGO book' where a major influence on my own cars, as they were for his. The LEGOland model makers tend to go for fairly basic elements but use them to their maximum effect. I have been building car models for a long time and when I was a child, I also used to play with them quite a lot and I always used to add working features. That I still add things like opening doors nowadays is probably a consequence of that. Cheers, Ralph

The cockpit canopy does present a major issue on a larger scale. I built a larger Defender quite a while back roughly to model team scale and used transparent plastic for the windows. It also used the 5-bladed hub design It would be fun to rebuild that using a bubble sculpted out of transparent pieces, but I'm not sure it's feasible. Damn. I obviously wasn't thinking straight when I was writing that. I do have a Sea Knight as well, but this was a Sea King. As you can see from my picture, the five-bladed hub works reasonably well on my Defender, but I agree that it would probably look too big on a helicopter about twice as small. You're welcome. As a compromise, you could also try black minifig heads. Their diameter is between that of a 1x1 and a 2x2 round. Cheers, Ralph

Thanks. I think I catch your drift. I suppose that the fewer details there are, the more the ones that you do add have to be just right. I fiddled with it a long time, adding bits until I liked it. I have made some pictures that show both the wheelbarrow and the skip a bit better, but let me know if you want some more. I'm away from home at the moment and will be until mid next week, but I can easily take some pictures when I get back. Thanks. It's nice to know my MOCs give you some ideas. I really like building interiors and I did make a few more pictures of the interior of this building, including these two showing the upstairs bedroom and bathroom and a child's bedroom and a small office a floor above that. A few more, including some of some other buildings are on flickr) Cheers, Ralph

For me the set that I've had the longest is probably a Sopwith Camel I bought in 2003. That's still more-or-less in one piece, although currently stored in a box. My oldest MOC goes back at least 14 years, although I too have kept updating it (the last time is about one-and-a-half years ago ) I have several other MOCs that are close to ten years old. Cheers, Ralph

I'm a big fan of military helicopters and have built many of them. A little bird, however, is something I'd only do on a much larger scale. You;ve done a pretty good job, however. It's a nice little helicopter. These things are really quite small, so it is probably wise not to try to fit two crew-members side by side in the front. I also like how you used triple wedges for the sides of the aft fuselage. It really does look like an H-6. One thing that bugs me, though, is the four-bladed rotor. There are ways of making five-bladed ones, although the rotor hub may end up looking a bit big.Still, it might be worth a try. One possible design is the one I used for my Sea Knight http://www.flickr.com/photos/madphysicist/...57605248635277/ For the missiles you could use something similar to what LEGO monster has done (and I have done many times), but using 1x1 round bricks. You can see a 7-round missile pod on my AH-1W model. http://www.flickr.com/photos/madphysicist/2428159238/ Cheers, Ralph

Thanks for your comments. I'll try to explain a bit more and add a few pictures showing a few things. Getting the look right is always the main priority, but I indeed always try to have some functionality and there's little fun in building an interior if you can't get into it somehow. On the Cadillac the interior was obviously in full view, so I had to make it look good. Getting the boot and bonnet (trunk and hood for Americans) to open was a bit tricky because there aren't any hinges in pink (or if there are, I certainly don't have any!). Also, in spite of the width (11 studs) there was little room under the bonnet to add something that looks convincingly like an engine, although I did try. The picture also shows how I solved the hinge problem. I used old-fashioned finger hinges, but mounted such that the bonnet and the hinges first slide forward a bit (using door rail in this case), creating a gap that allows me to open it. On the SUV things were a bit simpler and I also had more room in the front for the engine Its interior can be reached by opening all the doors and the boot The front doors use plate hinges (which does mean that you force then a bit to open them) and the aft doors simply rotate around the studs they're connected with. This is all fairly simple, although it does mean that since the model doesn't get much strength from the sides, the chassis needs to be fairly sturdy. I tend to do that by adding a fair few longish plates in the lengthwise direction. The cars don't have really working steering mechanisms, in the sense that the steering wheel isn't connected to the wheels. On this scale there's just not enough room to make that work and look good at the same time. The wheels themselves, however, are interconnected. LEGO used to make fairly compact steering mechanisms using technic elements, but the parts are getting a bit rare and they are hard to build with widths that are an odd number of studs, so instead I normally use a brick-built solution. I don't have any pictures of those on these two cars, but I do have a picture on brickshelf of an earlier version of the Yukon where you can see the mechanism from below. Cheers, Ralph

It's been a while since I last presented a new large scale car on Eurobricks, so to make up for that, here are two The first is a completely rebuilt new version of a car I built several years ago, a GMC Yukon SUV. I decided to build it as an unmarked police car. A closer look will reveal discrete red and blue lights and a few non-standard antennae on the roof. For about a year I've been gathering paradisa pink parts with the intention of building a pink Cadillac -the match of colour and car IMO. Recently I finally got my hands on a substantial quantity of parts, so it was time to start putting bricks together. This is the result, a 1959 series 62 convertible. Building it was a bit of a challenge, mainly because of the limited selection of parts I had available in pink: 1x1, 1x2,1x3 and 1x6 plates and 1x1,1x2 and 2x2 tiles. No jumper plates, slopes or headlight bricks. Despite the limitations, I'm very happy with the end result. I hope you'll agree. Cheers, Ralph

Even though those 8-wide parts turned out to be better than I thought they would be, overall I'm not a fan of big premolded parts. While some of the parts that have already been mentioned are undoubtedly useful for building a more-or-less tube-like fuselage, the difficulties you're likely going to run into when building a plane with a six-wide fuselage are the nose section and the tapering aft body. IMO the cockpit parts suggested by Legostein will end up looking ugly. I've built aircraft fuselages of many different widths and I tend to use SNOT work, half-stud offsets or a combination of both to make things work. Recently I have also used hinged sections. None of this is particularly easy when you do it the first time, but ultimately well worth the effort. If you want some examples, I can refer you to my B-26 Marauder and Hawkeye. Both have fuselages that are 7 studs wide, but six should really only be easier. A truly wonderful 6-wide plane is Gambort's An-28. Cheers, Ralph

I saw this a couple of days ago and didn't respond back then. Let me start by saying that you've captured the overall look of the vehicles from the movie with great attention to detail. The front of the camper in particular looks really nice and I like the interior (including the buink beds). However, there are a couple of things that bug me bit and that could probably be done much nicer without too much effort. I don't like the fact that the wheels on the SUV are bigger than the wheels on the camper, especially since the latter look rather small for a vehicle that is eight studs wide (nine including the mudguards). I realise that the wheels on RVs tend to be somewhat on the small size for the size of the vehicles, certainly if you compare them to a proper truck. Still, IMO this one would really benefit from having wheels that are a tad larger. My biggest bugbear is the camouflage. I feel the colours aren't distributed evenly enough. There is too much green and black compared to the brown and the demarcation lines between the colours are much too long -in particular the one at the lower edge of the roof. It would look for more convincing if you were to break that up a bit by adding some green plate to the construction of the roof as well. The camouflage on the SUV looks a bit too random. It is hard to do camouflage on a small vehicle, but regrouping some of the parts to make the patches of each colour a bit larger would do much for the look. Cheers, Ralph

Thank you. I hope to continue with these in the next few months and once I've got a more-or-less completed scene, I'm sure to post it on Eurobricks as well. The idea came to me when I realised that I had to build at least two houses since these tend to come in rows. I didn't imagine having enough parts (or perhaps wanting to use the large number of parts) required to build two 32-wide buildings. 16 Studs seems too narrow. I've done it before, but it just doesn't go well with this type of building. 24 Seemed like a suitable compromise. No offence to the British, but the colour of the sofas I used to have in my own furnished apartment back in the UK and the interior colours you see in British TV shows tend to make my eyes water. I could have made them in sand blue -which would probably have looked somewhat decent- but bright green seemed more fitting somehow. I'm sure Ezechielle realises that the scaffolding is supposed to be metal, but the tubes are a bit thick, really. That's a great compliment. On trips to London I'd regularly spend a few hours in the British Museum and the area around it was a source of inspiration for these buildings. I did consider making one of these two a solicitor's office, but it seemed a bit dull. Thanks for all the comments. Cheers, Ralph