Ralph_S

Flickr actually does have that, but I'm pretty sure the default setting for it is that only people who are on the contacts list of the owner of the picture can add notes. Cheers, Ralph

Those of you who hang out on flickr may know that currently the flickr LEGO military group is hosting a build contest. It has a number of categories, including one for WW-II aircraft models. Since I have recently developed a bit of an interest in planes from that time period, I felt I had to build something for it. So, here it is: Slow Starter, a B-26B Marauder bomber used by the US Army Air Force in Europe. Pictures are links. more pictures I'm quite happy with the end result and felt like sharing it with the Eurobricks community. I hope you'll like it. Cheers, Ralph

I'm a very happy flickr user, but I too know that it's very awkward to use if you don't actually have an account. It works an awful lot better if you do. There are so many ways of customising it that I rarely get to see anything that I don't want to see and I now consider the fact that flickr is also used by people who don't build with LEGO an advantage, because my pictures are seen by people who would never stumble across them on brickshelf and they often have very interesting comments. My pictures have also ended up being blogged on a number of non-LEGO websites, such as autoblog. Cheers, Ralph

Gus, there's a category in the contest called "Walkers vs. Wartracks" that this could be suitable for. You will, however, have to build more stuff to go with it. There's also a modern armour category, but that is for models of existing vehicles and is what I am building my M1 for. You can find the rules here. Your tank ticks multiple boxes, tracked, large and it has a turret with a gun in it. Apart from the details it reminds me quite a bit of an M60 Patton. I like your use of teeth for the end of the gun Barrel. I'm not sure about the dark blue. It's not a very common colour for tanks (although the Dutch military police use YPR IFVs in blue!). If you want to make any changes to it, I'd suggest getting rid of it altogether rather than adding more. I love your pictures by the way, especially the one where it crushes a car Cheers, Ralph

Typical. You can't look at a technic construction without immediately thinking of ways to 'amp it up'. I like that. Cheers, Ralph

Perhaps I'm old-fashioned.

Well, now that you mention it, I am actually working on a tank In all seriousness, there are a few things that I expect to see when I think of a tank: it is tracked, it is armored, it is big, has multiple crew members and it has at least one gun usually mounted in a turret. Your vehicle is tracked, but is small, has a single person sitting on it rather than in it and doesn't seem to have a gun anywhere let alone a turret, so in my mind it really doesn't look like a tank at all. When I saw this thread and then saw the pictures I could not help being a bit disappointed. I had something very similar in the staff restaurant at work a few days ago. They were serving something they called Beef Stroganoff. Now, I've had Beef Stroganoff before and have some idea of what it's supposed to taste like and this dish didn't taste like Beef Stroganoff at all. It was quite nice, but for a Beef Stroganoff it was terrible. If they would only have called it 'Beef with mushrooms', it would have been fine. I'm not trying to be nasty here, but offer some advice. There's nothing wrong with your MOC per se, but you should probably think about what it is that you are actually building a bit more. If you want to build a tank, think about what sort of things anybody who you want to show it to will expect to see on a tank and give it those features. Instead it looks like you are going for some type of futuristic type tracked vehicle instead. So, why not call it a 'futuristic reconnaissance vehicle' or something like that? It would make a lot more sense. Cheers, Ralph

I'm afraid I haven't, but I know somebody who works there and she posted a message about it on the brickish website . I can ask her what they do with the figures, but I suspect they may sell the figures separately. I remember people from the shop in Brighton selling minifigures from a stand they had at Brighton model world earlier this year at £6 per four, which was actually pretty cheap considering that they had some really good and rare parts and that you were allowed to give each fig two tools in its hands. Cheers, Ralph

Been to the Milton Keynes Lego shop, have you? Sounds like a pretty good deal to me, especially if it includes Indiana Jones stuff. Those sets have some nice parts. Cheers, Ralph

Guggenheim is the name of the founder of the museum. The architect was the famous Frank Lloyd Wright. 21004 does seem to be an actual set in the LEGO architecture series. Cheers, Ralph

Wouldn't the forum on bricklink itself be a better place for this? After all, that's where many of the other sellers are hanging out. My activity on bricklink is limited to buying stuff and my experience as a buyer has been 100% good. However, running a store sounds like a lot of hassle to me. Cheers, Ralph

I suppose that most people who build trains also like town, because a train layout without any buildings is a bit dull. I like to travel on the train and I can understand why they have some appeal to builders, but I've never really felt the desire to build any. Steam trains are kind of neat, but they have no business being in a modern town and modern trains utterly fail to interest me. In fact, when I bought the Hobby train and Holiday train sets last year (when both were on sale on shop@home) I parted them out and sold the train bits (couplings, wheels) to another Brickish member. IMO the Power functions car chassis is too big for minifigs by about a factor two and in most minifig town layouts would look ridiculous. Cheers, Ralph

Well, I do. For me flickr is the main site, although I realise that the site is somewhat hard to navigate for people who aren't members. Because of that I also post lower resolution pictures to brickshelf. I've given up on MOCpages. Cheers, Ralph

The moderating team don't seem to work in weekends. The latest uploaded creation that I can see at the moment is from Saturday. Indeed, the news message is gone, which is odd. I don't quite understand why they would do that. By the way, LEGO sent me a message telling me that they didn't get my list because the e-mail system used by customer services doesn't allow attachments. Anyway, they also provided another address and I sent them the list again. We'll see what happens. Cheers, Ralph

Thank you, Kobe. It's not so much your mind I read, you managed to capture the look of the vehicle so well that I recognised it for what it was. Cheers, Ralph

Ouch. That is quite steep. I'm not quite sure whether I'd be willing to pay that much for it. I rarely buy LEGO at full price anyway, since I see sets mainly as parts packs. If Toys R Us do another 'three for the price of two' deal sometime this year, this one will be attractive. Cheers, Ralph

I got into building minifig scale vehicles not all that long ago and I enjoy seeing other people building similar things. The Octan truck could do with mudguards. You've put antennas on the cab, but if you were to use light sabre blades instead, added a clip to the top to attach them to the roof, and then add a 1x1 tile with clip to both of them you'd have excellent rear-view mirrors. It often takes only little things to make an ordinary MOC into something special. The ambulance is my favourite among these vehicles. Its level of detail and the overall finish seems to be higher than that of all the other vehicles. The only things I don't like is that there are a few holes in it. For instance, for some of the flashing lights on the side you've used 1x4 technic bricks, which means that there's a hole between them. Two 1x2 technic bricks side by side each holding a single light would be an obvious solution. I like how you've incorporated diagonal lines in the colour scheme, but there's an ugly hole in the pattern on the left side of the vehicle. It could easily be filled with a 45 degree 1x2 slope in black and a 45 degree 1x2 inverted slope in blue. This seems so obvious that I'm guessing you simply don't have the parts. I'm not sold on the helicopter. Once again there seem to be holes in the fuselage and there are too many random bits sticking out. It also doesn't seem to have a tail rotor. I know that there are helicopters that don't have tail rotors, but it doesn't look like any of those either. I have to admit that I don't know the Spoon Sports Honda S2000, but it looks a little rough. I'm pretty sure the real car won't be wider at the front than at the rear. Perhaps you are being a bit too ambitious. The Honda Fit (which I know as the Honda Jazz) is nice, although it too looks a little rough. I do like the colour scheme and the way you made the rear side windows in particular. There's one final issue: scale. I know some people prefer classic 4-wide vehicles over the larger ones that LEGO produces nowadays and other people prefer to build vehicles large enough to sit two minifigs side-by-side. This is mainly a matter of personal preference and depends on what you intend to use the vehicle for. If you want playability and lots of detail, large is good. If you want you cars to fit in your LEGO city and have pedestrians and cyclists around them, a somewhat smaller scale is a good idea. For my minifigs I tend to build 5-wide cars and 7-wide trucks. No matter what your preference is, it's a good idea to at least be consistent. Your Honda Fit is wider and has larger wheels than your Octan truck. The helicopter looks much too small next to the ambulance. On their own they might look OK but as part of the same layout they look awkward. Please don't take this the wrong way. Since I myself mainly build cars and helicopters and the like, I tend to look at MOCs like these much more critically than I would look at, say, a pirate ship or some sci-fi model. There is a lot to like here, but I think it shows that you're having a bit of trouble focusing on one thing, because all of them look as though they could be truly great if you were to spend a bit more time and effort on refining them. Cheers, Ralph

Damn! I realise you asked me for my opinion on these a while back and I completely forgot to reply Sorry. Anyway, it's nice to see you building more vehicles that are an odd number of studs wide. Both of them look nicely built, but I'm not so sure I like the small one. On its own it looks fine, but next to the other one its front looks a bit too narrow. I really do like the bigger vehicle. The transition from six studs wide to the seven studs wide turned out really well. With the sides closed in particular it reminds me of the sort of vehicles breweries use to deliver beer, such as this one: I realise this could simply be because I wouldn't mind having a beer now Cheers, Ralph

Nice review and as far as I am concerned, the picture size is fine. I like it. I much prefer 6-wide (7-wide including the mudguards) trucks over the classic 4-wide vehicles. They look much better proportioned and are much more realistic. Orange may remind all of us of the Coast guard sets, but it's a fairly normal colour for a recovery vehicle and there's nothing to stop you from building a yellow one yourself. I do agree that the lights ought to be yellow or orange and while there's nothing wrong with the minifig's head it would be nice to see more variety. I realise that there are many fans here of car doors and it's nice to see the part return, but when opened it's clear that they really are too small and if you want to remove the driver from the cab you'll still have to remove the roof. Cheers. Ralph

I haven't been updating you all about my communication with LEGO, but I got an e-mail from them last week in which they asked whether I'd send them the list of copied pictures that I had made. I spent a bit more time browsing the site and found more than 30 pictures that I recognised as belonging to somebody other than the person who posted them and for which I was able to find the original. These were mainly pictures of cars and aircraft, because those are the types of things that I build myself and because of that they're also the kind of things that I am most likely to remember. I've seen more things that are suspect (castle type MOCs, for instance), but I don't actually recognise who did build them and wouldn't know how to find them either. I sent the list to LEGO on Monday. I haven't checked whether those pictures are already gone, but I suspect they are. I am very happy with this new development. It's great that they have actually posted it as news, because it's the first thing you see when you go to LEGO Universe and hard to miss. The message is also very clear. What I like the most is their advice of writing a comment if you suspect something has been plagiarised. LEGO really seem to be taking this seriously. Cheers, Ralph

Perhaps we've been spoiled with the quality of the vehicles in recent years and don't quite appreciate that this is light years ahead of what LEGO used to do until five years ago. I rather like this. The red truck is very nice, the blue pickup truck is OK as well and the tow truck is truly excellent. You could put that in a city display at a public event without changes. What they could make of the garage has probably been limited by wanting to keep the price down, but there's a lot of useful stuff in it. The door, obviously, but take a closer look at that work bench and the office. It's all very neat. I'm not at all fussed about there not being any car doors in the trucks. I don't know how much it is going to cost in the UK, but if the price is right I want one. Cheers, Ralph

I joined Brickish about two years ago. It's a very active association. I haven't been at any of the days at Windsor, but I have twice displayed models at STEAM and the Petersfield LEGO show, attended a science-fiction weekend at the National Space Centre in Leicester and was at Brighton Modelworld this year. It's always a lot of fun and while something inevitably gets broken, I've never actually lost a single piece of any of my MOCs. I've been told that the Windsor event gets very busy and the public there sometimes don't seem to realise that the models displayed by Brickish are people's private property and unlike the other models at Windsor aren't glued! That's a bit scary. Anyway, Brickish have a list of events on their website. If you can make it to only one, I reckon STEAM is the one to go to. It is massive, with about 60 members displaying their models and more than 10000 paying visitors. Cheers, Ralph

The situations are rather different. I can imagine a reason why somebody on a chatroom would pretend to be younger tha they are, but on LEGO universe that would make less sense. It doesn't really matter either. Ralph

Thanks Man. I appreciate it. You raise an important point in that besides jumper plates these things tend to eat up a lot of parts : small plate and tile mostly. Building anything an odd number of studs wide takes some getting used to and on an old-timer car in particular there'll probably be quite a few half-stud offsets. That takes some getting used to as well. I've recently been discussing a new project with a LEGO-building friend of mine and it would involve minifig scale 'thirties cars and I actually preferred building them six wide. That leaves enough width to have a body that is four studs wide with running boards and mudguards that stick out by one stud one each side. That's probably a lot easier than having running boards and mudguards sticking out just half a stud. Cheers, Ralph

I've been building 5-wide cars for about two years now, and I have to agree with the people who commented that you'll need lots of jumper plates. Most of my cars are loosely based on fairly recent cars. The only one that I've done that comes anywhere near an old-timer is a London black cab. I haven't got any instructions and the model is actually on the other side of the English channel at the moment, but I have made detail pictures of the construction of some of my other cars. Since there are rather a lot of them, I'll simply give you the link to the photoset that contains them. http://www.flickr.com/photos/madphysicist/...57605248635277/ I hope that some of my ideas and solutions can be of use to you. Cheers, Ralph