Carbohydrates

Wow, been a long time since I updated this, huh? Didn't do a lot of cars in the back half of last year, but I'm back at it again. 1983 Toyota AE86 Sprinter Trueno I tried this one a few different ways before I landed on this design, including 5 and 7-wide, but I feel like the classic 6-wide ended up getting me the most streamlined, finished-looking result. I'm particularly happy with the rear side window geometry - that's a 1x2 - 2x4 bracket angled against the top of the lower 18 degree slope, perfectly filling the 1/2 plate gap between it and the adjacent, higher 18 degree slope and giving me a surface to attach the C pillar tiles to. Also has the requisite paper water cup inside.

Not knowing anything about the car at all, I prefer the second one for its streamlining, but both look incredible. Very well done.

Very nice! This set is so interesting to me, being kind of a modified version of a previous set aimed at a different demographic. It is indeed fun to dig into and modify. I like your side exit exhausts!

This feels like a pretty harsh statement! I would prefer not to accept it. I like to integrate Speed Champions-scale vehicles into minifig-scale City builds and I'll accept that the scale isn't perfect, but I'm not willing to accept that this integration is somehow invalid. It's LEGO.

I've seen people who build cars close to what minifig scale "should" be based on height, and the models are tiny. They're usually 4 or 5 studs wide and far too small to actually fit a minifig. Taking things to this extreme really forces us to face the limitations of the minifig and accept that any car that fits one inside is just not going to scale accurately to a fig's height. That said, it did strike me how tall LEGO's GT40 was, considering it's supposed to be a legendarily short car. This is as low as I was able to get it while still fitting a minifig in the cabin. It's still too tall, of course, but at least mine doesn't tower over minifigs anymore!

Such kind words! Thanks, everyone. Yes, I'm a big fan of mini furniture builds and such. I cram them into everything I make, and sometimes, entire scenes come from one tiny model. For me, a large MOC is often just an excuse to show off a bunch of smaller ones!

Right, this comes back to the classic LEGO conundrum: there is no such thing as minifig scale as it pertains to human proportions, because minifigs are not to scale with people. You can scale something to a minifig's height, or to its width, or to its approximate mass/size, and all three will yield somewhat different results. I know this isn't a new topic, but I still favor 6-wide for its ability to integrate more cleanly into City scale stuff, and to be closer to what "minifig scale" means in my mind. 8-wide offers tremendously more detail, but at the cost of fitting into City scale builds (and fitting in with the older 6-wide cars), which is enough of a shame to me that I don't think I'll ever prefer the 8-wides. I don't display these on their own, I display them with figs and buildings, so context matters a lot to me. I'm still really excited to check out these 2021 offerings, though.

You're not kidding! I sourced a set a while ago and ended up just buying a couple copies of the set they came in instead. It worked out to be cheaper in my case. Great work, by the way. It's great seeing these all in one place. Plus, seeing your AE86 a few days ago motivated me to finally design my own (I'm more of a 6-wide guy), so special thanks for that.

I am tremendously excited to present my very first IDEAS submission. After years of being pushed, prodded, and cyber-bullied by my online and LEGO community friends to put something on IDEAS, I am proud to show you my love letter to the classic Western theme, the Frontier Bank Heist. From a product standpoint, it's intended to meet an intersection of display value and playability, with a bunch of features built in. Frontier Bank Heist As an homage to the classic sets 6755 Sheriff's Lock-Up and 6765 Gold City Junction, the "killer feature" is an exploding wall, detonated by the bandits to reveal the safe inside. Unlike the classic sets that required you to push a printed 1 x 2 tile into a slot, this mechanism is actually activated by pressing the plunger on the TNT detonator! The bank also features modular construction, allowing the back wall and the roof each to be easily removed. This means you can access it like a modular building by removing the roof, or display it like a classic LEGO set with the rear wall off, or remove both for maximum interior access! In fact, to make posing figures and staging robberies even easier, the entire interior lifts out as well. The interior is filled with all kinds of furniture and details. There's a writing desk, a filing cabinet, a ledger book, a balance scales, and a safe full of cash and gold bars with a simple locking mechanism - it cannot be opened until the bars are turned. To really tie together the story, I've built a wagon that the bandits can use in order to escape with the safe. You can lower the rear hatch and use the hook and chain to pull the safe out of the bank. The rear axle sags under the immense weight of all that gold! The sheriff still has a chance to stop the bandits, though, as he lines up a shot at the TNT crate in the bed of the wagon - push down on it to launch the driver off the bench! Thanks so much for taking the time to read this, and I hope you'll help make the Frontier Bank Heist a reality!

Thanks so much! Also, I forgot that I took a photo of everything together, too:

A little over 10 years ago, I posted a MOC here that I had built: a Western Saloon and Hotel. It has sat proudly on my display shelf all this time. This year, I got the urge to rebuild and update it. Now, instead of just being a fixed, open-backed building, it has a removable roof and second floor as well as removable back walls. A lot of details were updated, the weight of the "HOTEL" font was fixed, and a custom base was added: You can see the whole album here, but I'll highlight a couple specific things here: Back in the day, I used to display my saloon alongside the classic LEGO Western sets Sheriff's Lockup and Gold City Junction, but the scale and level of detail didn't really work, so I decided to build a couple more buildings to accompany it. So next up is a bank! Much like the saloon above, this one has modular construction: the roof lifts off and the back wall slides out. Because the interior has a dividing wall, it can still be difficult to reach inside to pose minifigs, so I also made the whole interior removable. This also has a killer feature: robbers can use TNT to blow up part of the back wall to reach the safe, just like the classic Western sets. This time, rather than sliding dynamite into the building by hand to trigger the mechanism, this one is activated by pressing the plunger on the TNT detonator! Oh yeah, and the safe itself has a simple locking mechanism so that the door cannot open until the bars are turned. Here's the link to the whole album, and here's a few more pics: And finally, one more building to round it all out. I chose to make a trading post, and I wanted to make it very different from the other buildings: more vertical, cooler colors, and more of a "lived-in" or "worn, but not run down" feel. So again you've got modular construction (the floors come apart, the roof comes off, the back walls slide out) plus some unique features. The barn door on the first floor is a functional sliding door that opens to a storage room. The windmill can rotate 360 degrees and its vane can pivot 90 degrees to act as a brake. Also, when its turbine spins, it actuates the water pump at the base! Here's the album link for this one, and here's a few more details: Let me know what you think! Some of my friends are cyber-bullying me into submitting the Bank onto LEGO IDEAS, so I'm taking some extra time to fine tune its play features and story elements to get it all polished up, but maybe expect to see that in a week or so.

Solid choices. I see you also spend a lot of time figuring out "appropriate enough" leg and torso combinations! I like the Han Solo torsos in particular. You might also dip into Harry Potter and Speed Racer. There are some pretty good, passably Western torsos in those themes, too: 1, 2, 3

Very nice! Picking up a lot of influence from last year's ADP saloon - the base, the siding color and technique, the skull, and the pillars in particular. The drab palette is appealing and I always love a solid Western build. Nicely done!

1973 Buick Gran Sport I think this is my new favorite build. There were a lot of curves and angles to figure out and it was a very fun to design. I redesigned the rear of the cabin several times until I was satisfied with the pillars, but they're now the highlight of the model, I think. Almost every part of this build required some kind of weird trick to make it work the way I wanted.

1971 Chevrolet Chevelle This one was modeled after a car my dad's wife owned when she was young, a lime '71 Chevelle SS 350 coupe with a white top and stripes. This was a super fun build with some novel shaping, such as the gently sloped hood bits, the 1/5 stud recessed rear deck, and the bodywork under the rear bumper. Also, I was really happy to finally build an original design in lime green. I really like the citrus-toned high impact colors. Ha! If I did that, I don't think I could build the car in as nice a condition as I did!

Nice to see a bar that looks like it was designed by somebody who's actually worked in a bar before! Though I am worried about a lack of non-slip mats back there. What a fantastic and creative build with tons of fun details!

I think part of why you have received such immediate backlash is because you are leveraging your followers in a very similar fashion to how online influencers tend to throw their weight around to request free things. For example: requesting a free hotel room in exchange for posting photos taken in it and telling your insta/snap/whatever followers how nice it is. A lot of these folks tend to think that the "exposure" they can offer is worth more than just paying for the thing, and since this assertion is often based on ego, they get insulted when a creator would rather just get paid. The prevalence of these sorts of attitudes has led to influencers (and people who propose things like them) having a really bad reputation in creative communities. Nothing in this post so far was about you, but the existence of methods like this MAY explain why some people seem predisposed against you. Also, you're specifically talking about modular buildings, which do have a hefty parts cost, as you mentioned. If you have "over 1,000" followers right now, how many of those people need to see the photos you post and get excited enough about the MOC to purchase instructions for themselves in order for the creator to benefit? I'll throw out some arbitrary example numbers here to illustrate the point: let's say a MOC costs $300 in parts to build, and instructions sell for $20. If a creator fronts you the instructions and pieces, they are giving you $320 worth of merchandise. Thus, your post would need to directly lead to 16 sales that the creator would not have otherwise gotten in order to break even on this proposition, not even accounting for additional costs: shipping the pieces, transaction fees, and possibly even taxes if this is a significant side business for the creator. That may nudge that number closer to 18-20 sales needed, maybe even higher. To qualify this post, all of this is purely my own opinion as somebody who does make a decent amount of side income selling instructions.

Yup! every one can fit a fig, and almost all of them have detailed interiors for the minifigs, too, with steering wheels, gauges, and nice seats. 1970 Plymouth Hemi Cuda v.2.0 update: the previous version of this was always my least favorite car that I had built. It felt too short, too stubby, too low to the ground. It was just overall too small, especially placed next to any other SC car, and a bit... chunky. This is a complete overhaul and rebuild. I kept the old cabin, headlight/grill, and taillight designs. I lengthened the rear deck (and entire car) by one stud and increased its ride height by one plate. I redesigned the sides to be sleeker and accentuate the rocker panels better. The front and rear lower fascias were rebuilt as well to be a little sleeker and to highlight the exhaust pipes. The interior also had to be completely redone to accommodate the method used to build the new sides. Though it may look very similar at a glance, I believe this only has about 50% of its pieces in common with the original design. I sure like it a lot more now! "Death Proof" 1971 Chevrolet Nova Since I made a Nova a little bit ago (February, I think?), it made sense to build Stuntman Mike's unique Death Proof Nova as well. It's a very similar build, with a couple of things changed out of necessity in the color swap, but I also redesigned the front fascia. As much as I love how the front end was built on the original Nova model, someone on Rebrickable (correctly) pointed out that the aggressive angle looked more like a Chevelle than a Nova. This new build feels less clever, but is undoubtedly more accurate to the real car. The graphics on the hood are custom UV printed because I don't really like stickers.

The Cyclone's nose was a lot of fun! I had wanted to build this car for a little while and couldn't really figure out how to make the geometry work in front to fit everything into place. Then, in 2019, the Dodge Charger/Challenger set came out, and it was brilliant. I borrowed the geometry of the Charger's taillights and applied it to the Cyclone's fascia and it was about perfect. Thanks, you're very kind! I don't have a book, but I do have a Rebrickable account that has nearly all of these posted to it. I won't link it directly because that feels spammy, but you can search for my username or any of these specific cars on there and you should find it.

Thank you, I appreciate it! I kind of build more in a "caricature" style than a hyper realistic one, so "recognizable" at a glance is the key. Anyway, here's a new build! 1981 Chevrolet El Camino An El Camino is probably the car I've gotten the most requests for ever, so here's an '81 - specifically, the one that appeared in the series finale of Breaking Bad, and of course the standalone El Camino. This was a bit of a collaborative build, as some of the best ideas (like building the hood stripes sideways) came from a friend on another forum. I had some fun making the minifig to match, too.

1979 Ford Mustang This turned out to be a tricky one, especially since I really wanted to build a car in dark red, which introduced a lot of parts limitations. The internals of this thing are a lot of weird connections jammed into a very tight space, especially since it still has a full interior for a minifig. It's also not any specific model or trim package, because I wanted to build several iconic elements of the model year: the window louvers, hood scoop, black trim stripe, sun roof, and spoiler.

Thank you, you're very kind! The Cyclone was a real challenge. When the official Dodge Charger set came out, a lightbulb went off when I built its taillight assembly, and some of the same geometry was used to get the Cyclone's fascia right. My personal favorites are these, in this order: #5: 1970 AMC Rebel "The Machine" #4: 1972 Datsun 240z pace car #3: 1967 Ford Mustang "Eleanor" #2: 1969 Chevrolet Nova SS #1: 1970 Chevrolet Camaro RS/Z28

Oh hey, I haven't updated this thread in... a year and a half? Okay! Updated OP with 15 new original models and 4 new mods. Should be up to date now.

I don't know why Maersk got a special exemption, but their sets had STAMPs for longer than any other line of which I am aware - the Train in 2011 and the Triple-E in 2014, which is (to my knowledge) the last set ever with STAMPs. And what a send-off to the practice it was, with just an absolutely enormous amount of them. It was an appropriate nail in the coffin.

I don't think peedeejay's comment had anything to do with whether it's a good idea or controversial, but more to do with the fact that LEGO no longer allows this technique in sets at all.