Ralph_S

It is a very nice set. For real fun, you really ought to have two! A friend of mine and myself had our own little version of Robot Wars in my living room about a year ago. More fun than two thirty-something guys are supposed to have with a toy Cheers, Ralph

My understanding is that this is for members of LUGs, who can buy parts from LEGO for their own use through the LUG from LEGO. I don't know about LUGs that have a collection that is jointly owned. As far as I know, the only things the LUG I'm a member of owns are some mugs (for sale to members), some banners, and a colour printer. Of course LEGO hope to make money out of this, but this is an excellent opportunity for members of LUGs to buy large numbers of parts that they'd normally only get in small numbers or at high cost (from bricklink) or to simply buy fairly large numbers of fairly basic bricks at relatively low cost (hopefully). I'm one of a number of people in my LUG currently working on a number of MOCs for a public display in October and this deal seems to be excellent way to get the parts I'd need. I don't know how they want to check whether or not you start selling the parts, but that's hardly my problem. Cheers, Ralph

I'd say this is excellent. It might be the only way of getting certain pieces in quantities in which you'll never be able to get them simply through buying sets (think lots of cheese slopes, for instance). I'm sure Brickish (one of the LUGs that I am a member of) meets all the requirements. Hopefully it will be cheaper per part than on-line PaB! Edit: I just realised that 200DK is only about €30. Not a lot. However, imagine being the member to order on behalf of 200 members who are ordering without a spending limit! Is your garage large enough! Cheers, Ralph

Nice work. I added a message to the thread you started about it. I don't think 7734 looks all that much like a Hercules, but I am very picky when it comes to aircraft. It would make a nice starting point for a Coast Guard patrol aircraft. Thank you. I always have a lot of fun adding working features and I'm glad to see they're appreciated. The picture of a US Coast Guard 'defender' that Danim posted in the thread about his boat looks like a pretty interesting design and I wouldn't mind having a go at building something similar, but I don't have any firm plans. I am, however, working on some other boat designs. I've already built a cabin cruiser (which may appear on eurobricks sometime in the future) and plan to build a sailing yacht. I'm also working on a flying boat. I've obviously got a bit of a nautical theme going at the moment! Thank you. Building models of real aircraft for years means I've got a few tricks up my sleeve. Thanks. Obviously LEGO deserve credit for the colour scheme. I just stuck to it on order to be able to use the stickers from the set! Thank you. It's much appreciated. I am obviously really enjoying these mini-fig scale things! There'll be more. Cheers, Ralph

I too have one of those bases and didn't really know what to do with it. When I saw the first pictures of the MOC I wasn't too convinced that this was a good idea. However, the photograph of the real boat made it clear that you've actually done a pretty good job and the improved version is even better. Nice. Cheers, Ralph

I am going to tell you what I think, but you're probably not going to like it much. I'm very fussy when it comes to helicopters. I quite like the original set. It really is a bit small -but that applies to pretty much any helicopter or aircraft LEGO used to do at the time- but it is nicely proportioned. I understand you want more space, but making it longer without making it any wider or increasing the rotor diameter makes the whole thing look more like a flying sausage than like a helicopter. While some special forces might use helicopters in civilian colour schemes, because in some cases that is less conspicuous than a military one, yellow, white and red doesn't really look all that convincing to me. I don't know how large your collection is, but if you want a larger helicopter for your special forces, perhaps building one from scratch is a better idea than modifying this set. LEGO themselves sell the coast guard helicopter and, provided that you have the parts to substitute grey ones for the large orange bits on the fuselage, it makes an excellent starting point for a military transport helicopter IMO. Perhaps worth considering. Cheers, Ralph

There are plenty of police forces that have planes, usually for surveillance, and I liked the shape of it, but it was perhaps a missed opportunity. A C-130 on anything even close to minifig scale would be massive. Still, the large aircraft pieces would lend themselves well to making a patrol plane. Anyway, this does leave a nice hole for somebody to fill with a MOC :-) Cheers, Ralph

Thanks guys. Perhaps there aren't a lot of coast guard MOCs because LEGO themselves have pretty much covered all the bases. the only thing I can thik of they haven't got is a patrol plane. Cheers, Ralph

Thanks guys. It is much appreciated. I too would buy it if it were a set, if only to get my hands on more 1x3 orange plates Cheers, Ralph

This is already very nice. I agree that the tyres are a bit fat, but most LEGO Tyres tend to be that way. I like MOCs that combine good looks with functionality and I'm curious to see where you go from here. Have you considered moving the IR receiver into the cab? It'll not be as visible as having it sit in the roof, for instance, but it'll more likely pick up the signal from the IR remote than now. Cheers, Ralph

You might indeed give raising the cab a try. That front bumper is very low. Anyway, it was just a minor comment and would have stayed minor if it hadn't been misunderstood. Cheers, Ralph

These sort bricks do look very similar and the wind-up motor one only comes in a few sets, so I am not surprised about somebody not recognising it. The Dolphin is a lovely helicopter indeed. A few years ago, I built a large scale (1/22) model of one. I try to build my minifig scale models as close to 1/45 as possible, so a minifig scale Dolphin would have to be roughly half the size of my older model. I don't think I could do that with enough room inside for minifigs and with all the working features, so I went for my own design instead. Cheers, Ralph

They are flush with the mudguards, but that's not what I meant, as should be clear by the solution that I suggested. I was talking about the vertical space between the top of the tyre and the mudguard. If you want to refer to LEGO sets anyway, check this out: On the set the wheels are mounted one plate lower / the mudguards are mounted one plate higher such that there is a bigger gap between the top of the tyre and the mudguard, and in my opinion that is look that fits a truck better. Cheers, Ralph

Very nice truck. I like the SNOT work on the rear. I have one minor point of criticism: there's very little room between the wheels and the mudguards. I think that mounting the wheels one plate lower would probably make it look better. Cheers, Ralph

I just love doing landing gears and working doors, so even though this is on a smaller scale than most of my other helicopters, I felt it too should have them. I suspect that it would be too expensive as a set and probably a bit too fragile for your average eight-year old to play with. It's not a sound brick, actually. It's a wind-up motor. In the Coast Guard helicopter set it is used to power the rescue winch. By pulling out the cable you basically wind up the motor and subsequently pressing the orange button reels in the cable. It's one of the features I really liked in the set and I decided to include a similar system on mine. The real world Dolphin helicopter was one of the sources of inspiration or this one, certainly in terms of the colour scheme. The main difference is that I used orange rather than red so that my helicopter fits within LEGO's Coast Guard colour scheme and so that I could use some of the stickers from the set. Cheers, Ralph

The way you mounted the steering wheel is clever. At first I couldn't figure out how you did it, but I now realise you used one of the 'guns' from the Agents sets. Cheers, Ralph

I'm not sure whether 'Coast Guard' is seen as part of the city theme or whether it ought to go under 'other themes'. If the latter is the case, I;d like to ask one of the admins to move it there. Anyway, I'm a big fan of LEGO's Coast Guard helicopter. In my opinion it is the most realistic minifig scale helicopter they have made so far. However, the theme can do with an AFOL's touch and I haven't seen many Lego Coast Guard MOCs so far. So here is my take on a Coast Guard helicopter: the HH-78 'Gannet'. For once it's not based on any particular real helicopter, although it shares design features with a number of real ones (most notably the HH-65 Dolphin) and has ended up looking quite a bit like an AW 139. I started with a list of requirements and some ideas on how to build the front and designed my own helicopter based on those. I wanted room for two pilots side-by side, a fairly large cabin with sliding doors and winch and I wanted a retractable landing gear. Overall the helicopter ought to be smaller than the set and a bit more elegant. It is seven studs wide, has working sliding doors, working doors to the cockpit, a retractable undercarriage and a spring-driven winch mechanism -like the set. As usual the pictures are links to the flickr pages and I made more pictures. Cheers, Ralph

It's an ambitious idea, but I think you are setting yourself up for failure by using those hinges. They just look much to clunky to use as A-pillars. Using a standard LEGO windshield (such as this one) might be a better option. I'm also not sure whether it really is feasible in this scale to build a car that is as low as Ferrari's normally are and still have enough room for a figure inside, unless you build a convertible. I know it's generally considered bad form to show your own MOCs in a thread about somebody else's, but I wonder whether you've seen my five wide Ferrari (loosely based on a 348TB)? I haven't commented on your ghost car yet. It's an interesting -if expensive- idea. I wouldn't mind having the parts you used! Cheers, Ralph

Although I am about to move to The Netherlands in a few days time, I've been living in Hampshire for the last three years and I happen to know quite a few other LEGO builders in the area. Most of them aren't members of Eurobricks, so you're unlikely to get in touch with them here. I don't know how Eurobricks staff feels about members promoting other organisations, but I'm a member of The Brickish Association and that's how I got in touch with others in the area. You might want to check it out. Dr. S. lives in Hampshire too, BTW. I've been to his lair Cheers, Ralph Edit: Fixed the URL for you.

1 set 709, the police boat. Oddly enough I remember mine as having a red technic bush rather than a grey one and mine came with two of the earlier mini figures that didn't have separate arms. Edit: Correction. the differences arise because it's actually another set: set 314! 2 set 5580, the Model Team Highway rig. It started a long love affair with building American trucks. 3 Chew, definitely chew. I'm still phasing out old parts with toothmarks! 4 I even found the topic. It wasn't a single MOC, but my whole brickshelf gallery. 5 Set 6379, riding stable. I loved it when it came out, but somehow never got round to buying one. A big shame, because it's still a lovely set that wouldn't look out of place in a newer LEGO city. 6 My B-1B Lancer. Time for a picture: I chose it because it certainly is the most complicated MOC I ever built, if not the most visually pleasing. Ask me tomorrow and you'd get a different answer. 7 They never make it onto the internet, so no pictures here. I couldn't tell you which I think is the worst of the ones I do have on the internet (although there are a few that I feel could do with a rebuild). I tried building a Jeep Grand Cherokee around Christmas. It just wouldn't come together and every single version I built was crap. I took it apart within hours after finishing it. 8 There is no single answer, because I keep seeing things I like. Ed Diment's Hood is certainly one of my favourites.

Thanks. The school bus is definitely one of my favourites too. I had a lot of fun building it and was very happy with the result. The airport shuttle bus became a far more complicated build than I had planned. I really had no intention of spending as much time on it as I did, but as I was tinkering with it I got a little carried away. Thanks. I was unsure whether I could do justice to a classic American car on this scale. I think that part of what makes it work is that I was able to do it in medium blue -thanks to a few 1x1 tiles in medium blue. I had the idea for the sliding doors ages ago and first used it on a helicopter. I was very happy to realise that it works as well on these small vehicles. It works even better because the overall size of the door is smaller. The techniques and ideas I developed whilst building airplanes and helicopters come in very handy with this sort of stuff. What I've been trying to do with all of my minifig scale cars is to raise the bar a bit by increasing the level of detail beyond that which LEGO achieves in their sets. Cheers, Ralph

Thank you. I collection of American vehicles just wouldn't be complete without one IMO. I've produced a few more in the last few days: an airport Shuttle bus (the type of vehicle often used to travel from the airport to a hotel and back) a 'fifties convertible -a bit of an experiment to see whether I could pull off the look of one of these in a five-wide- and, finally, a picture of the entire collection (including a few that I haven't posted separately) Cheers, Ralph

I too thought that I was going to be facing another ho-hum four wide car that really doesn't look like anything much. I'm pleasantly surprised, although I wouldn't call it a four wide really, because including the wheels it's closer to six wide. It reminds me very much of a Citroen Traction Avant which is from the thirties, BTW. Black is an excellent colour for this type of vehicle. Very nice It makes me want to build a classic car too. Cheers, Ralph

I've been keeping a list of sets in the last three years (since I moved to the UK) That reaches a total of 79,980 Parts, 177 Minifigs. However, I've also bought stuff in bulk (LEGOLand Windsor was selling bags leftover from production two years ago, for instance), from bricklink, from PaP, and 2nd hand lots and it excludes all the LEGO I bought in the first 30 years of my life. The grand total is probably around 200,000 parts. Compared to some people I know, I've got a small collection.... Cheers, Ralph

when you describe colours in terms of the colours of LEGO elements that come closest ('it's sort of between Maersk blue and medium blue') Cheers, Ralph