puddleglum

Thanks again for all the kind words everyone. I have updated the photo with microscale figs and the window washer. I also took a shot mimicking the LEGO marketing shot on the back of the box. Thank you! I also am not huge on the escalators, to be honest I worked out that solution for them and didn't attempt to revise or improve it. I think they could probably be done better. I'm curious what you would have done for the grille bricks - do you think it would have been better to simply drop that detail and leave it flat there?

It is a great set, I am sure it will be considered a classic, and there are only 15 left on BrickLink. So there is a collector's market supply/demand thing going on there. That said, the aggregate value of the set's parts according to BrickLink is about $300. (In fact, all the modular buildings besides Market Street are right around $300 in parts value) They are mostly common, easily obtainable parts. Let's say it would cost you $350 after shipping and stuff buying from different sellers. So when someone buys the set for $600, they are basically paying $250 for those 36 dark red slopes, and the time saved on shopping from store to store to get all the parts. Yikes! The best bang for your buck is definitely buying current sets. I would rather have four copies of Fire Brigade than one Cafe Corner.

The new camera came in yesterday, here's the brick-built replacement solution I was mentioning before. I still think the 2-wide dark red slopes or a black roof are better options though. Note that the 2x3 tan plate at the bottom here is just to "hold things together", if this solution were really used, that plate would be omitted and the rest of the assembly would be built directly onto the 3rd floor. (i.e. this isn't quite as neat/clean as the instructions where the assembly is completely self-contained)

I think your best bet here is to make a custom sticker.

There is also the mouse, the new dog mold, parrot, frog, and spider. Plenty of stuff to fill multiple floors even without new animal molds, so I think it could go either way.

Very nice, the ginger especially is brilliant.

Thanks for all the kind words everyone! Good catch! It is the one detail that was omitted in this picture. At the time of photographing it, I had the window washer's platform built, but I could not find one of those strings with studs on each end for the life of me, so I left it out. As luck would have it, I found the part yesterday evening while sorting, so the window washer is now happily in place. But luck is a fickle friend: my wife came back from a trip today and told me our "good" camera had broken on the trip, and the "old" camera that I took these pictures with also stopped working today! Anyways, whenever we get a new camera, I will post an updated shot.

I think your two best options are to do it in black, or to use the 2-wide dark red roof tiles like smith_sam88 suggested, which are pretty widely available. I think black would look fine, see Green Grocer for example. One other option I just came up with is this. If you look at the instructions, the roof area is made up of little modules that you build and attach, they are 2x3 at the base and 19 plates tall. I built a SNOT construction that would fit the same size parameters and has essentially the same grade of slope, using 1x1 bricks with stud, some plates, and dark red 1x1 tiles. The parts are all easily available but it would be a very parts intensive way to do it. I don't have a Cafe Corner though so I can't swap it in to see how it looks. I was going to post a picture but my camera has gone kaput today. :-( Anyways, it's LEGO, don't worry about not having it exactly like the actual set, have fun with it and make it your own. Lastly, I think the odds are in favor of this part/color combination making it back into circulation one day down the road. Patience might be a virtue here.

Hi all, I have completed my next 1/2 scale version of a LEGO modular building, 10211 Grand Emporium. I decided to go the whole hog this time, with separating levels and full interior details. It was very rewarding to come up with a design that looked accurate on the outside and still maintain all the interior details. I am totally hooked on this scale, in a few weeks I will post pictures of the full layout with cars, roads, and a park.

Wouldn't a 1x1 round brick make sense?

Thanks for the kind words everyone! These have been a real blast to work on. Today I also decided to take another picture of Green Grocer to get a better sense of scale.

Hi all, I haven't posted here at EB in a while but I have been working on something I thought the townies would appreciate. It all started with Marcos Bessa's lovely Little Cafe Corner, which is a 1/2 scale version of 10182 Cafe Corner. It inspired me to try the same with Fire Brigade. I enjoyed it so much that I have now done Green Grocer and Grand Emporium is nearly finished, as well as a few buildings of my own design, which will all be displayed together in a community window. Anyways, here's the Fire Brigade and Green Grocer. Lastly, here they are together with a few of my WIP buildings: Cheers, Puddleglum

^Holy security hole, Batman! I posted that, somehow as Mariann. Is the session key stored in the URL?

The only sets I consider “must buys” are the modular building sets. If I only had $150 to spend on LEGO per year, that’s what I’d do. I buy sets for parts and they are all chock-full of great parts, and offer an incredible value for what you get. But I can understand if someone only wanted to build spaceships, why those sets would not interest them. But for me, those are the only AFOL sets I own, since most of the others don’t seem to be nearly as good of a value. Besides those, I mostly buy whatever I can get on sale. I’m not really big into having a huge minifig collection, so sometimes I buy sets on sale (20-30% off deals at TRU come along often enough), sell the minifigs, and end up with the parts for free or almost free. For example, I recently bought two copies of Woody’s Roundup for $40 each at TRU. I sold the figs for a total of $60, and ended up paying about $24 total for nearly 1000 very nice parts, after you figure in taxes, PayPal & BL fees, etc. In my experience, buying sets & selling the figs will get you more LEGO bang for your buck even than buying Creator sets. (Even though I love the Creator line) Occasionally I find clearance-type stuff (50%+ off), for those I buy several copies, enough so I can sell some, keep some, and end up breaking even. All that said, I find it important to budget my spending, and make proactive choices about which sets I really don’t want to miss, and which sets I am willing to pass on. Buying discontinued sets is too expensive, and once you start doing it, it takes away from your money to buy current sets, which leads to missing those and then having to buy them second-hand as well. It’s a nasty cycle. Most of us can’t have it all, so it seems better to me to get the best value out of what money we do spend on LEGO.

Funny in the US all we ever hear about is how our health care system is busted and we should be more like Sweden. But if that means more expensive LEGO than I say LET ME DIE WITH MY CHEAP LEGO!!!

I have been slowly softening my wife up to LEGO over time. It helps that our son (almost 4 now) is really getting into it, she builds with him more and more. But I know I'm slowly winning her over, she proudly posted this on her Facebook profile the other day. :-)

I spent this morning cooking up alternate models for the Mini Republic Attack Shuttle (30050), it was a lot of fun, this is a great little set of parts to toy around with. Republic Fighter Tank: ClownBot: And this one has no name:

This is a fantastic set for $3.50. The model is nice and while none of the parts are mind blowing, taken as a whole it is a very nice assortment. Counting extras there are 9 cheese slopes here! And lots of nice white plates, which I have been running short on. I just got done making a bunch of alternate models with this set, it's a very versatile assortment of parts. The X-Wing is a very nice model but in terms of parts it is very lackluster.

This is M-O, the cleaning bot from WALL-E. In my opinion he stole every scene he was in, he made great comic relief. I started with the eyes, and kind of just tried to get the best shapes I could at that scale.

Was it really 140 pounds? That's a 40% increase in price over Green Grocer and Fire Brigade . . . which would mean USD 210 if we also see a 40% bump in the US. Or were you maybe sort of paying a "buy it early" premium?

As others have said, at this point I would be shocked if we didn't get a POTC line. The film is targeted for May 2011, making the January 2011 wave a pretty likely candidate to have POTC sets. Personally, I don't mind fleshies. Prince of Persia has looked promising so far, I expect there will be a lot to like about (hypothetical) POTC sets as well.

I have $40 sitting here, waiting to be spent on a Pirates Advent Calendar! And I'm not buying the City one, it's the same thing every year!

Not sure what the problem with the first one is, LEGO calls those "LEGO DUPLO bricks." I think it's a perfectly appropriate picture for the story and the caption "The popularity of LEGO toy building bricks remains strong." I am sure that LEGO would agree that DUPLO bricks would fall into the category of "LEGO toy building bricks".

Well said. 6754 is a fantastic buy, I plan to pick up several copies to stock up on tan bricks. (I missed out on 4954 :() I wouldn't even mess around with BrickLink, the tan parts alone from 6754 would cost you ~$43, assuming you could find one seller that hand all of them for the average price. Here's the tan parts from 6754, with quantity and the average BL sale prices:

The 1x1 brick with studs on 4 sides, and the yellow lightsaber are great examples of current production parts that are expensive on BrickLink (both are over $.20 for large quantities!). However, I'm not sure why you'd mess around with 1x1 round plates in the various colors. Those are available on BrickLink in the thousands for $.01-$.02 a piece. The antenna in yellow was last in a set in 2004, and before that, 2000, so I doubt it is currently in production. As for me, I would want: 1x1, 1x2, 1x3, 1x4, and 2x2 corner bricks in dark red, dark green, dark blue, light bley, tan and any sand colors or other "dark" variants that were available. (I would wet my pants if they started making dark orange and sand red bricks again) The same again for 1x1, 1x2, 2x2, and 1x4 tiles. The same again for 1x1, 1x2, 1x3, 1x4, 1x8, 2x2, 2x2 corner, 2x3, and 2x4 plates.