Ralph_S

Thanks. Congratulations on your 100th post, by the way! On MOCpages somebody commented on my chip shop telling me that it was too cramped and suggesting that I make it bigger. My first thought was that he must be an American. No offense to Americans, but English Chip Shops tend to be tiny (and chips are the name the English use instead of 'fries'). The same applies to pubs. Sure, some pubs are massive, but I've been to places where you literally couldn't reach the loo to get rid of an excess of beer in your bladder because they were too cramped and full of people. Small pubs have a certain charm. I couldn't figure out what to do with the upper floors. The apartment above the Corner Shop/Store is relatively spacious and tidy, but above the pub the stairs take up too much space to turn it into a proper apartment. I'm not a student anymore (haven't been for a while) but when I moved to the UK to work for a university, I spent a week living in a guest block in their halls of residence. That brought back unpleasant memories of student houses back in The Netherlands. All these things combined made me decide that only students (and perhaps illegal immigrants) would be willing put op with such cramped living quarters. Since I wasn't trying to make a political statement, student apartments it was. Cheers, Ralph

No worries. I understand that if people prefer one configuration that doesn't mean that they dislike the other one, and you were right. These century old buildings do tend to have a degree of repetition in their design and it was deliberate in mine. I'm glad you picked up on that. In principle the street could be in one of the London Burroughs or smaller towns such as Guildford. I live in Southampton. The actual city centre was largely destroyed in the second World War and many of the buildings that survived were wrecked in a post-war development frenzy of glass and concrete. Since it was (and still is) a fairly large port and a regional centre, it used to have many buildings like these in and around the city centre. It still has in some of it's busier suburbs. The black cab and the red bus were indeed inspired by London, although you do see cabs like this in Southampton as well. Busses in the UK seem to come in all colours of the rainbow. As for carpets in pubs, it has a certain charm, although with the smoking ban in place, rather than smelling disgusting cigarette smoke you know smell decades old stale beer. Yummie! Cheers, Ralph

I don't think I'll tire of compliments like this anytime soon :D Initially the wall between the windows was just flat, but I soon realised that it looked very plain. Cafe Corner type buildings tend to be rather elaborately styled and quite a few buildings in this style do have recessed panels with a little ornament under the windows. Cheers, Ralph

I actually am the younger sibling. My sister, who is about three years older than I am, generally used to get along very well, even when we both were children. I don't remember many conflicts surrounding our respective LEGO collections, although I once did accidentally pull the tail off her favorite stuffed animal (by swinging it around the room). She grew out of LEGO and actually donated her collection to me when she was around 11 years old! Cheers, Ralph

Thanks. That British look was what I was going for, although a British friend of mine, who saw the Curry house and the Chip Shop together a few weeks ago thought they looked a little bit Dutch somehow -perhaps not surprising considering that I am actually a Dutchman. Opinions on which looks better (full height or with a floor removed) are a bit divided. Side-by-side I like the buildings better when they are tall -certainly next to Cafe Corner. Individually they look better when they're low. Of course, one more floor also gave me the opportunity to build more interior! Cheers, Ralph

I wouldn't really consider myself a town builder, to be frank. I'm still more of a military modeler, although I am enjoying this minifig scale town stuff a lot more than I thought I would. It is a bit grey, perhaps, but in my opinion LEGO's modular buildings are perhaps a bit too colourful. I like the colour combinations in Cafe Corner, but Market Street is a bit too gaudy for a British street and I'm not completely sold on the sand green on the Green Grocer set either. Thanks. The sets are expensive, but the two that I have (Market Street and Cafe Corner) are worth every penny. Their overall design is great and the parts selection is just fantastic. I put all my Cafe Corner compatible buildings together earlier this afternoon and made a few pictures. Cheers, Ralph

Right. I already couldn't figure out why there wasn't a Douglas in North Carolina -didn't realise you were actually referring to a Douglas in the British Isles (the capital of the Isle of Man ?). Cheers, Ralph

Thanks. Indeed, in your typical British highstreet there will be nondescript banks, Boots, some clothes shops and charity shops, usually in buildings with completely ruined facades. I have a book on the town that I currently live in, with pictures from roughly a hundred years ago and recent pictures taken at the same locations. The city suffered heavily in the Blitz, but seemingly the worst damage was done by post-war developers who tore down lovely old buildings and replaced them with ugly concrete. The old pictures were a major inspiration for my new buildings. I am glad you like them. Certainly when side-by side, I agree that they look better at their full height, although the Corner Store on it's own has some charm when I do take a floor out. I've mainly built these for my own enjoyment, but I also intend to take them to Brickish Assocation events. There are several more people who build CC-compatible buildings and in the past we have combined them into fairly long streets. The modularity is, of course, great, but a bit of flexibility in how they look and in how these two can be set-up relative to each other is also handy. Cheers, Ralph

Thanks for all the comments. I'm glad all of you like it. With a bit of luck I'll finish the pub sometime this weekend. The outside is completely finished and I have started on the interior. Once that's done, I'll put all of them together and take a few pictures. I think it's interesting to see that Cartoondude and Commanderbly42 (from Canada and North Carolina) both think that it wouldn't look out of place in towns they know. This building was inspired by buildings that around a century old in the town where I live in Southern England (the few that haven't been demolished), but I suppose some of the architectural features are pretty common among buildings of that age. Cafe Corner is a bit of Chameleon like that as well, that could easily fit in the old city centre of an American town, but that could also be overlooking the Seine in Paris. Cheers. Ralph

Actually, it's the British who named it Van Diemen's land. Abel Tasman chose to call it Anthoonij van Diemenslandt, which was a bit much for the Brits. Later they changed the name to Tasmania. It's not the Dutch mate. As a Dutchman (I live in the UK, but that's just part of our secret plot to take over the world) I really look forward to seeing how this ship will turn out. My first impressions are very good. Cheers, Ralph

There are a couple of issues. If you don't have a lot of light, the camera's shutter is open longer which makes it more likely that you'll move the camera whilst it is actually taking in the light. More light and a small tripod (or even a thick book) to support the camera do wonders. Then there's the focus. You;ve got the background in focus, but not the object that you're interested in, which is close to the camera. You'll need to find the macro option on the camera. That should be in the manual somewhere. I think that will help. Once a picture is this blurred, there are limitations to what software can do to fix it. There's something called a deconvolution algorithm that may fix things, but they're not always very reliable. That said, I just googled this http://www.focusmagic.com/ I'm not the world's best photographer and I've got quite a few blurry pictures of MOCs that I took apart that I wouldn't mind finding a fix for this problem. You can only use the free copy a few times, but I've just tried it on a few of my old pictures and it's pretty good. There probably are free programs that can do something similar. Cheers, Ralph

Thanks, everyone. I was never really into town/city building, but ever since I bought a Cafe Corner set myself and have built a few other buildings, I find that I'm really enjoying this. It's not just the building either. When I walk around in my neighbourhood, I find myself looking around a bit more and thinking "hey, I can build that!". It makes walking to work all that much more fun. BTW, welcome to Eurobricks, Jessica. Cheers, Ralph

Thanks. I am currently building a pub in the same style and once that's finished I'll take a few pictures will all of my CC-style buildings together. The interior was a lot of fun to build. BTW, I'm not sure LEGO could afford me, in more way than one. I think that if this were to be turned into a set it would be ridiculously expensive and I've heard salaries at LEGO aren't all that great They're the new fangled windows as used in the Creator Beach House and in the Green Grocer sets. I was lucky enough to get my hands on a fairly large number of these Cheers, Ralph

What do you get if you mix Cafe Corner with influences from the Green Grocers set? A Corner Store of course. Shops like this can be found all throughout the UK and I felt that my English high street wasn't complete without one of these. The ground floor and the two floors above it have detailed interiors. Ed Diment (aka Lego Monster) suggested that I make it one story taller than my other buildings, which gives it a more urban look that goes well together with the actual Cafe Corner set. This also allowed me to take the modularity of the building a step further. I can remove a floor and make it look more like a village store. More pictures can be found on flickr. Cheers, Ralph

I have read the book and I think it is actually fairly well-known. It has certainly won a lot of literary prizes. It's written from the perspective of an autistic boy who finds his neighbour's dog dead. Since he is supected of having killed it he decides to clear his name -a quest not helped by his handicap. It's a very clever and touching book. The vignette is a pretty good rendition of a crucial scene -certainly the improved version. Cheers, Ralph

In fairness, you weren't moaning. I see your point, but not being a technic builder I don't have that same experience. I haven't built a technic set in at least 15 years. I think for most people it really doesn't matter all that much whether they actually know what they're building, knowing that as long as they doggedly follow the steps, it will work eventually. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I suspect that with the studless building, the construction of technic sets has become more complicated. Cheers, Ralph

I know. I have a few hundred sets as well and have boxes full of instructions, but I reckon that storing the LEGO parts from those 500+ sets or the MOCs you build with them are a bigger issue. It certainly is for me. Cheers, Ralph

V-LV-18C Funny that it shows up on google. It's a model I built about three years ago. More pictures are still on brickshelf If you like this, perhaps you'll also enjoy the newer one I built a few months ago which is also on brickshelf Neither of them are anything close to minifig scale, though. Cheers, Ralph

I don't really see what everybody is moaning about. Who cares how many steps the instruction have and whether more used to happen per step in the nineties or eighties? I think it is a non-issue. The reasons why they've been made longer seem obvious to me, and have been mentioned by a few posters: it's to make building the models easier. Most of us hard-core LEGO lovers might not need all those steps, but younger children who build the sets possibly do. LEGO are playing it safe. They don't want children to stop building with LEGO because the instructions are too hard, so they make them simpler. Children and AFOLs for whom the instructions may be a bit too simple can simply browse ahead and skip steps. Everybody is happy -even people who moan for the sake of moaning . Cheers, Ralph

The links seem to work for me, but I'll simply copy the url without anything fancy picture http://www.flickr.com/photos/madphysicist/2571981465/ photoset http://www.flickr.com/photos/madphysicist/.../thunderboltii/ It does look like a throwback to an earlier era. It always reminds me of a B-25 Mitchell somehow. Cheers, Ralph

A lot of people like the A-10. I think it's actually a rather ugly aircraft, but there's something about it somehow. I seem to be inadvertently building my way through that movie, first building the Pave Low (which quite a few people have told me was called blackout in the movie) and now this. I first built an A-10 as a teenager (more than 10 years ago) and have been meaning to build a new and improved version for a few years now, but never got around to it. Cheers, Ralph

Thanks. I have built a few military aircraft over the years. Thanks for pointing out that the link didn't work. I've fixed it. The wings indeed don't have flaps. They do have ailerons. The outer parts of the wings point upwards slightly and adding flaps would have caused structural problems with that. The canopy isn't made out of LEGO. I could have sculpted it out of transparent parts, but it wouldn't have looked very good. I took a look at a Starwars canopy (I have a single trans clear one, from a Naboo starfighter), but it's the wrong shape. It's a compromise. Cheers, Ralph

After building a lot of minifig stuff and helicopters in the last two months, I felt it was time for a new aircraft. So, here it is: an A-10 Thunderbolt II -better known as the Warthog: All the pictures can be seen in my photostream on flickr. Cheers, Ralph

I don't know how the archive utility on a MAC works, but with the standard 'copy to compressed folder' utility on a PC or with a program such as winzip all you get is a .zip file and that's all you have to delete afterwards. When I am uploading more than two images to the same folder, I always go via the zip option. Cheers, Ralph

I googled the Toyota AE86 to see what the real car looks like, and for a four wide vehicle yours is pretty amazing. I build my trucks and the bus to fit with the current city trucks. I doubt that the door on my bus would look good on a four-wide vehicle, because it needs to be quite tall in order to fit. Since trucks and busses are wide than normal cars, perhaps you could consider making your six wide. hat would look good with a four wide car next to it. You can see some of the mechanism in this picture. It uses the minifig robot arm attached to a 1x1 brick with handle on one end and a 1x2 plate with handle on the other end. To make sure that the door can swing out far enough, the inside of the wall is hollowed out a bit using a cheese slope. I can probably make a clearer picture sometime later today. Cheers, Ralph