Ralph_S

The only idiot in this would be the person who actually buys a used Chrysler 300C for that sort of money if you can buy another of the same vintage for less than $16000. Cheers, Ralph

Thanks

I stand corrected. It's an unusual configuration for a fighter though. I can only think of one at the top of my head: the F-101 Voodoo I suppose it makes a bit more sense as a post-apoc model, because if it's bodged together like something on scrapheap challenge/ junkyard wars you would expect it to look somewhat weird. Ralph

I agree that the radial engine looks great, but I'm not really convinced by the rest of it. It's very oddly proportioned. The tail is too short, you don't have a horizontal tailplane and the wings are set too far back. I imagine that with the cheese slopes along the forward part you were trying to replicate exhaust pipes like on a Spitfire or P-51 Mustang, which is a decent idea, but completely clashes with the radial engine. It has wings, but it doesn't look like any fighter plane that I know (from whatever era) and doesn't actually look like something that can fly. Sorry. If I may offer a suggestion, I'd say it might be a good idea to look at a few real aircraft before building one. Cheers, Ralph

Thanks for your comments guys. I'm glad you like it. It was a fun build. That is more-or-less what I aim for. I think LEGO has done a great job with its trucks (the garbage truck and the cement truck, for instance) in the city line. I really like them, but they are models that are designed such that they can be built by and played with by children. As an AFOL I'm not restrained by those criteria and can take the detail and the construction just a bit further. The minifig can indeed sit in the cab. The SUV is something I built a few months ago as part of a series of cars that I built to go with a car transporter. I just needed something to hang behind the wrecker with a bit of ground clearance, but I am glad you like that too. LEGO did have some pretty nifty 6-wide vehicles in the 'sixties. I haven't looked at any of them when building this, but I was constantly reminded of the Model Team highway rig from 1986 when building this. It is actually 7 studs wide and I think that gives just enough room to do a few things I couldn't have done otherwise. Part of what gives is the look of largeness, I suppose, is that there are quite a few sections with different width. The radiator is four studs wide, the cab five, the sleeping cab six and the wrecker body and the front mudguards seven. This gives it some volume. I'm not really known for being on the cutting edge of building techniques, but I sure love half-stud offsets and there's also a bit more SNOT-work in there than might be obvious at a first glance. Cheers, Ralph

V-LC-09E Several years ago I bought 'The ultimate LEGO book', a book full of pictures of the wonderful models built by professional model builders for LEGOLand parks, including some fantastic cars. They have had a large influence on my own building style. Probably my favourite model in the book is a 1/20 scale model of a US wrecker truck. I've built a few large scale models of similar trucks, but in the last few days I've been having some fun building a minifig scale model of the truck in the book: Cheers, Ralph

Thanks to all of you. I felt really happy that I had enough lime green to be able to do this and the Miura is one of the few cars that I know that actually look good in this colour. I am glad you like it. Cheers, Ralph

I'd consider it a good thing that it wasn't at Christmas, since for me Christmas means traveling from the UK to The Netherlands to be with my relatives. I've been living on the South Coast of the UK for about three years now and it's the first time we had snow since. it was a mess. The airport was closed, buses were not driving and there were endless traffic jams due to numerous accidents. This part of the country obviously isn't used to dealing with snow at all and the thought of having to travel under these circumstances fills me with horror. Cheers, Ralph

Very nice. It's well proportioned, detailed -I love the horn, and I like London Pride ;-) Cheers, Ralph

The way you do it is pretty close to how I've been building five bladed rotors for years (long before brickshelf, eurobricks or flickr existed) and it's not unlikely that the Hind you saw is mine. Pretty good that managed to figure it out by looking at a photo, but there are a few tricks to it that you're probably not aware of. Because I get asked how I do it quite often, I took a picture of the rotor hub on my Sea King The trick to keep them from flapping all over the place is tu use black technic pins. They have more friction -especially old ones without a slit in the middle. In order to keep the blade attached to the central axis from flapping about, it's attached to a technic connector with axlehole rather than a technic angle connector #1. That they do have some freedom of movement is very handy in this case, because it allows me to fold the blades. The hub on the Hind works slightly differently, because I used 1x6 technic plates with holes to attach the blades. In this case the blade that is connected to the central axis is held in place by the top wheel, which is rotated 90 degrees relative to the bottom one. Cheers, Ralph

Very nice. I've been thinking about building something similar for a while now and this gives me some ideas. Cheers, Ralph

I too think it's pretty good. I don't think it's any blockier than most real buses. After all, a real bus is often little more than a box on wheels and quite a few American buses don't actually have rear windows. Cheers, Ralph

I've been collecting lime green LEGO for quite a while now, but until recently I never had a sufficient quantity to use it for anything other than a small detail here and there. Then, in December last year I visited the LEGO store at LEGOLand Windsor and found loads of lime green plates in their PaB wall. I knew there and then what I was going to build. One of the few cars that look good in lime green: The Lamborghini Miura. For those of you who don't know it, it was the first sportscar built by Lamborghini and was first unveiled in 1966. I built it spread out over a period of a week or two, with an hour now and then in the evenings. About half the time was spent in getting the opening engine compartment and front to work. all pictures I'm really happy with how it turned out, and I hope you'll like it too. Cheers, Ralph

The second one certainly has more going for it than the first one, but neither of the two cars really looks convincingly like a car of any kind. I've been a member of a LEGO car group on flickr for quite a while (LUGNuts) and started a discussion on how you go about building a car?. My idea was pretty much confirmed by the responses in the discussion. People who build the more realistic cars tend to be people who plan. By realistic I don't necessarily mean a model of an actual car. It could still your own design. I don't let 'my bricks take me' anywhere. I have a design in my mind before I start. Don't build 'a car or an SUV'. Decide whether you want a car or an SUV in advance, because otherwise you may end up with a hopelessly mangled mess. Cheers, Ralph

I didn't actually build the roads, but looking at them I'd say they're a bit wider than the roads you'd normally find on LEGO roadplates. Their overall width is probably not a lot less than 32 studs. Quite where Doug got the bricks for them I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if his shopping would have single-handedly increased the price on dark bley brick on bricklink in the UK. As Johnnhiszippy3 mentions, brick built roads look much nicer than roadplates. Of course, it's a pretty expensive way to build your town, but as a general principle, I'd say it's better to have a small city with nice roads and decent buildings than a large one that is little more than a combination of built up sets. Cheers, Ralph

I don't actually have any roads with my collection of Cafe-corner compatible buildings, as you can see, I don't have a permanent layout. In this case they were temporarily set-up on my kitchen table. I have given a bit of thought to the scale of the vehicles if you want to combine them with pedestrians and buildings. When I built my first cafe-corner compatible building, I also built two cars: a Ferrari and a taxi, both visible in this picture. I chose to make them five studs wide. They go well with the buildings and also with LEGO's current range of city trucks that are technically 7 studs wide albeit with 6-wide cabs. Cars and trucks that come in most current sets are nicely proportioned and I prefer them over the older 4-wide vehicles. For public displays with the Brickish association we combine our buildings with brick-built roads built by Doug Idle) It looks a lot better than standard roadplates, but indeed uses a lot of parts. That said, I think it's worth it. You can see it here when displayed at an event in October last year. I supplied most of the vehicles for this layout and for this too my trucks were 7-wide and cars 5. BTW, LEGO standard roadplates/baseplates might be thinner than normal plates, but if they rest on top of studs, they're about as thick as a plate. No problems there. Cheers, Ralph

I'm pretty sure there isn't a LEGO store in Maastricht. There certainly wasn't one in the city centre when I was there last about a year ago, I've never seen one mentioned on lowlug and I'm pretty sure my sister -who lives there- would have told me about it if one had been opened. As badboytje88 mentiones, Intertoys is probably the best you're going to find and that's just a toystore that normally doesn't have exclusives. The closest LEGO brand store to Maastricht will be about 100 km away in Cologne (Germany). Cheers, Ralph

No problem. I get it. You appreciate the design more now that you've built and seen your own model. Cheers, Ralph

I don't mind the topic being brought forward again. I am glad you like the ambulance. I have built quite a few minifig scale vehicles in the last year or so, but it is my personal favourite. I assuming that by having seen it in real life, you mean that you've seen a real UK ambulance or have we actually met at some event somewhere? The front end of the policevan is definitely a copy of the front of the ambulance. I figured that I shouldn't mess with something that works. I agree that the fence does look a bit out of place, but then again, they look a bit dodgy on the real vans as well. It has a sliding door rather than a door that swings out as on the ambulance. I'm glad you like them. I hadn't built any minifig scale things for at least 10 years before building a restaurant for a competition organised by Brickish little more than a year ago. I had so much fun doing that and building a few cars to go with it that I've kept building more cars and buildings. I'm pretty sure there'll be more in the non-too-distant future. Until I started building these city things again, I used to mainly build military aircraft that are really too big for minifigs and larger scale cars. When building those I always want to have working features (retractable landing gears, doors and cockpits that can open etc.) and I want to have some of that in my minfig scale vehicles as well. The five-wide cars are really too small, but trucks, vans and ambulances, as well as the trauma helicopter are big enough for me to add a few working features. The Swordfish was built to accompany the minifig scale HMS Hood built by Ed Diment, a good friend of mine. It's easier to build planes on a larger scale, which is exactly why my models usually are too big for minifigs, but this one obviously had to be minifig scale as well. I also don't remember ever building a biplane before. It was a fun build and I was very happy with the result and the response that it got. Thanks. I think LEGO themselves showed us the way forward with the new trucks they introduced in 2005. They're big enough to have a lot of detail but not so large that they make minifigs and minifig buildings look too small. As a child I used to like the old four-wide vehicles, but it always struck me as a bit odd that trucks and normal cars all had the same width. Cheers, Ralph

It's not very often that a MOc leaves me pretty much speechless. This is great. It looks a lot like the real thing, which is no mean feat by itself, but it's the functionality that is really jaw-dropping. Cheers, Ralph

As I wrote before, I started with Duplo. Well, I'm with my dad right now, for Christmas, and we've found and scanned a picture taken when I was four holding a windmill I built. I'm pretty sure it wasn't my first MOC, but it does seem to be one of the first of which I have a picture. Cheers, Ralph

Thanks. I don't think I could build a helicopter or jet together with anybody else, but when it comes to the more 'freestyle' stuff it can help to have a creative person around who knows his way around bricks. Lego monster and I do have some tricks to teach each other. Before we built the limo I had built a few five-wide cars and Ed and I decided one afternoon when I was over at his place that a stretched limo would be fun. We later realised that it would be just the sort of vehicle that Dr. Sinister would use: hence the name and, consequently, a guest episode of the Grunts comic. I don't think that either of us thought about the Kennedy assasination. In the last week or so we've been collaborating on another project -the biggest to date. When Lego Monster has taken pictures, I'll let you know. Cheers, Ralph

When I was a child I used to often build together with a friend of mine. We'd get together almost every day after school and do a bit of building or we'd play with whatever we'd built. Nowadays I do most of my building on my own. Lately I have been doing a bit of collaborative building with Lego Monster-a fellow brickish member who lives not too far away. We seem to work well together: our minifig scale coach, The Plymouth Rock hot rod and The Sinister limo. It's fun to build something together with an other builder who knows what he's doing and I think that either of us could not have produced these without the other. The minifig coach is an example. If I would have built a coach it wouldn't have had such a nice front window and if Ed would have built it, it wouldn't have curved stripes down its flanks. I think both features add to making it a MOC we can be proud of. Cheers, Ralph

Thanks guys. It's only a year ago that I started building minifig scale things again, after not having bothered with minifigs for about 15 years. I think that LEGO has done us all a big favour by bringing out sets such as the cement truck and the garbage truck that are six studs wide (7 including the mudguards). They're not quite so big that they dwarf the figures or look too big next to the buildings -certainly not Cafe-corner style models-, but they're big enough to have a lot detail and functionality. I've been having a lot of fun building my own. Technically this is 7-wide by the way. The cab is 6-wide, but the mudgards and rear body are 7-wide. Cheers, Ralph

V-LF-2E A few months ago I got my hands on the LEGO city fire station (set 7945). One of the reasons why I wanted to have it was the wonderful ladder truck that comes with it, but I didn't actually get around to opening the box until last weekend. When I did finally get my hands on the parts, rather than building the truck that comes with the set, I decided to build my own version, more in line with British aerial ladder trucks and with a more realistic boom. After more than a day of tinkering, this is the result: Here it is next to my slightly older pumper truck more pictures I hope you'll like it. Cheers, Ralph