eileenkeeney

Benny's Space ship comes with stickers, instead of printed bricks? If this is the case, I am not buying the set at all. I was going to buy it, but I really hate stickers. I am sure I can buy space kitty on bricklink.

Lego is a non necessity, so really I don't care if others want to invest in it, even if it means I cannot easily obtain a set I might want. There is no Lego set I want so badly that I will buy it much above original retail. I think it is silly to buy any set that is still in production, for more than original retail. One should just exercise patience, and buy when it becomes available. I think learning patience is also a good lesson for kids. Personally, I would rather buy stock than Lego, if the purpose is pure investment. With both there are some buys that will go WAY up, and some that will not. I guess with Lego there is less chance of the investment completely loosing value, but it also takes up more space than a stock certificate. Lego is harder to move when I relocate. It is more likely to get damaged or stolen from me. It is also very hard for me to have a Lego set that I do not want to rip open for some piece or another. I am baffled that anyone would pay the prices now being paid for some sets. Some of these sets are not even that rare. If a very similar thing can be built out of pieces that are commonly available, for much cheaper, why spend a thousand dollars on a set that sold only a few years ago for under 200? I am even more baffled that anyone would pay $63 for the stickers that go with the Grand Carousel. But then I hate stickers. Stickers are also very easy to forge in high quality. I would much rather use the metalic gold bricks and tiles to get a shiny look. But maybe someone else would be baffled that I was willing to pay over 80 cents each for chrome silver 1x2 tiles.

I really have no idea how many individual pieces I have, but I know I have over a few hundred gallons of pieces based on how many containers it takes to store the pieces. Yet, no matter how many pieces I have, it seems that there is always some piece that I think I need more of, to build whatever I am now wanting to build.

This is pretty awesome. I really like that you were able to create something this cool, using mostly inexpensive pieces (i.e. pieces that have been recently in the Lego Store PAB bins).

I rarely buy sets, but I have bought more than usual this year. I want Benny's Space Ship, and Emmet's Constructo-o-mech. I want all the versions of Uni-Kitty. I like enough of the pieces in the sets to just buy the sets and not pay the high prices on BL just for the Uni-Kitty versions. I am going to buy the Santa's Workshop set for my Dad. He works as a Santa, and has enjoyed the other Santa themed sets I have given him. I might buy one for myself as well. I am considering London Bridge, just because it has such an excellent mix of useful pieces.

I used Iron on patch material, when I made my own sails. It worked well, and had the needed stiffness. It felt very similar to the Lego sails. But I did not apply heat to actually activate the iron on feature. I am guessing that too much heat could cause an issue. But that does prevent the fabric from unraveling. Have you looked at outdoor materials at the fabric store. Feel the material they use on outdoor furniture. It has that same feel (well the cheaper stuff does). I also notice this material does not unravel as easily as other denim. It has some sort of coating.

I actually prefer the Friends scale for the princesses. One thing I did not like about the Duplo princesses was their shape was fat, and the animated versions of these princesses are not supposed to be fat. Minifig scale would do the same thing. I would like to see the classic Disney characters (Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy, etc ...) done in minifig scale, but with the oversized heads. This might be why Fabuland scale worked well for Mickey, Fabuland has the oversized heads.

I hate stickers. I rarely use them. My dislike of stickers is not limited to Lego, I dislike them on anything I might have a need to wash at some point, meaning most toys.

1x2 plate Really I am not sure, but I suspect this would be the piece I most use. But maybe I use more technic pins. I use a lot of technnic bricks, headlight bricks, stud jumpers, 1x2 tiles, 1x2 plates.

I am pretty certain they did not have any themes when I was a child. They had red and white bricks, windows, doors and wheels.

No. I did at one time, but it was a waste of space and labor (each time I rearranged stuff or moved). I know that a few sets have boxes that became quite valuable, but there are other things that gain value that take up less space and less labor. So I rarely keep boxes. I do sometimes, if the box is especially cool. Lego Boxes are just so oversized, way too much box for the contents. This irritates me a lot.

I would want to mix greys. The difference in the greys will make it more realistic looking.

I liked them many years ago when I had a shortage of pieces, and getting individual pieces was not so easy, and more expensive (no PAB bins at Lego stores, and very limited service pack selections from Lego). But now I very much dislike them. I dislike pre-molded base plates even more than I do burps. I used to like pre-molded base plates for the same reason I liked burps. I could get a look with many fewer pieces.

Initially I had no interest in these sets, except where I saw other uses for the pieces they contained. But recently I decided that the Leaning Tower of Pisa was about the right size and look to work into a version of the Disneyland Small World I plan to build. Then I started looking to see if other sets in this series might also fit well into that. Really, I think the DL Small World really has only a face to most of the architecture elements worked into that design. Then inside the Small World, the structures are much smaller. But until I get back to DL to look at this closer, I am not really sure. (Trip to DL is booked for October).

I have spent some time packing these cups in the Lego Store. But usually I give up the quest of stuffing as much as I can into a cup, just to get out of the Lego Store, due to the noise and masses of people in the area of the PAB bins. I also don't like having to sort when I get the cups home. Sometimes spending a bit more money is worth the time I can save. So I have gotten away from stuffing for maximum value, and now I do the following: - No more than two different pieces in any single cup, and the two pieces have to be easily separated using some sort of filter (such as a home made piece strainer I use to separate dots from larger pieces). - Two smaller cups is better than one large cup, unless the large cup contains all the same piece (or two pieces easily separated). I actually prefer the small cups for use in sorting while building, as they are not as easy to knock over. - I can never have enough of any tiny piece that easily fills up that space between larger pieces. Someday I really might have a use for thousands of dots in colors I now do not have a need for. - It is ok to take the time to separate flowers from the middle thing, as long as the Lego store is not crowded and noisy. - Any piece that is easy to separate, can be connected for placement in the container. This means I can quickly and easily take the pieces apart with out the use of any tools except the official lego separator. - Use holiday boxes for larger pieces, break above rules for connecting and mixing when filling these boxes due to not being able to just get more of them when I want them. - Fly SW (2 bags fly free) when traveling to Disney World or DisneyLand. The PAB wall at the Lego Imagination Center always has a much better selection than the one near where I live.

I don't necessarily know where I got all of the ideas I use. My building has been influenced by many things. Sometimes I think that some Lego sets that have come out in the last 15 years have used ideas that I thought I originated. But many ideas originate from multiple sources independently. However, if I use an idea that is especially creative (or brilliant) and I know its origin (or even where I got it), I should credit it. I thought I invented some of the common SNOT techniques, before it was even an acronym. But I am certain that many others did the same thing. I had no idea that some of my common building techniques were considered "illegal" by some purists, until I read an article by one of these purists. Some of the reasons for these connections being "illegal" I agreed with, but not all of them. (A few of these supposedly "illegal" techniques can be spoted in the Fire Station MOC I posted in another thread).

My dream house (that I will never really be able to build) has a moat around it. It is designed to be a castle tower, with a few floors dedicated completely to Lego building. These rooms would be entered by a staircase, that came up in the center, so the train could go all around the room, without blocking entry to the room, and without needing to be up high. Around the tower there would be a moat, that would also serve as a lazy river style swimming pool. There would be a working drawbridge as well. I would have annimatronic wildlife in and around the moat, all made out of Lego. (Or maybe they would just have a Lego layer, like some of the Lego stuff I have seen, including a Lego air operated car). I have not banned anyone from touching my Lego, except kids that still put things in their mouths (for safety reasons). I have some Duplo stuff they can touch. I try to design for playability. But I don't have any kids living with me, and when I have kids over it is all pretty well supervised.

I am not sure I want to know either. I did once look and see how much I had spent on BL, in a 6 month window, and it was a LOT more than I would have estimated. But I do keep an eye on my actual bank account balance, and it was never in trouble. I suspect the fire station I just built contains over $300 worth of pieces, with over $1000 worth of pieces not used due to re-design. But many of these pieces I will use when I build the train station and town hall. Only a few pieces were really expensive. I did make some design choices where I decided to not use a piece due to the price of the piece. But in one case that just caused me to later decide it was worth the cost to use the more expensive piece, so I bought several hundred of both the unused piece and the piece I eventually used. In other cases, it did save me money. I did notice the BL prices getting pushed up as I was trying to aquire some quantitites of some specific parts. Fortunatly for me, by the time the price of the dark red flat hinge had pushed up too far, I already had all that I needed. The same is true for the dark red technic 1x2 brick with 2 holes. I needed only a few of these. I have decided that going forward, I am going to try to design around the parts I either already have, or parts I find at the Lego Store in the PAB bins. Trying to stay Lego Pure also tends to push the price up. Should I really be paying so much for a part in the color I need, or just buying a can of paint that works on plastic? I was really tempted to just paint some 1x1 plates dark green when the price each was almost $2. Then the piece showed up in the PAB bins in LegoLand Germany, and the price of the part is now reasonable.

Thank you. Probably no monorail, as I won't have room for Tommorrow Land, unless I build in the yard or use my neighbor's house. I can put Jungle Cruise in my Garage, as that is just behind the living room wall, that the fire station and Town hall would be up against. But I have no room to the right side of where the train station will be in the front of my house, and small world in the very back of my house. With this layout it puts small world further to the left than it really is, but I don't want to put it outside, and I want the flower garden in front of the train station to be centered in my front window. My monorail sets have either been stolen or misplaced anyway. Not that I liked them much anyway. I have seen monorail implementations that build their own track out of non monorail set pieces, that I think are better. I let some college kids (my niece and her friends, that are no longer her friends) live in my house, after my employer forced me to move (or quit my job). I thought since I wasn't charging anyone rent, that they might respect my things. If I can ever afford a much larger building space (like an air craft hanger) then I would build tommorrow land and the monorail. I wonder how much space it would really take, to build all of DisneyLand, to Fabuland scale.

Thank you. The plan is this: - Train station in Fabuland Scale - Town Hall in Fabuland Scale - Castle in Friends Scale, and placed much closer to the train station than in reality. Perspective might work here, and might not, since my living room is not long enough for anything close to the length of Main Street DL between the train station and the Castle. - Carousel in Friends/minifig scale. - Small World, maybe with the outside closer to minifig scale, and the puppets closer to homemaker scale. I will have to size this down to make it fit in the space. The garden area in front of the train station will be right in front of my front window. The train station will be up high, so that the train can pass in front of it, and then does not have to climb up too much higher to pass overhead the area where I walk into my house. Then the train will pass behind the fire station, and then over the back of the small world, just as it does in DisneyLand. As for scale, when working with characters that are not built to normal human proportions, scale becomes interpretable anyway. Comparing the sizes of the figures (Fabuland, minifig, friends) the bodies (ignoring the head) all are close to the same height. Then the Fabuland has a huge head. The Friends figure is very slightly taller than the minifig, and much thinner. Notice that my fire station, compared to the real building, has slightly exagerated width compared to height and depth. This was intentional, sort of a compromise between getting a look I liked, having the doors wide enough for the Mickey figure, and fitting onto the shelf where I initially planned to display the building.

Years ago I thought Lego had made a mistake by not having the top of the minifig head as a hole instead of a stud. This way there could have been a small stud to fill it in, for a bald figure. I also think this would have adapted well to making hair that hats fit on top of. Back before I went "purist", I used to drill holes in the top of hair pieces, and then use a double/stud like piece (some made from flower pieces and some made from technic pins) to put hats on. Back before I went "purist", I often made my own pieces by slicing and drilling existing pieces, and then using Kragle to create the shape I wanted. I also used evil clone brands to get colors like pink and purple.

Yes, Years ago I ran my whole carnival with train controllers. I didn't care for batteries either. At that time I had a carousel and ferris wheel (both smaller than the versions Lego later came out with). I had my train connected to a separate controller. On train controller ran both the carousel and ferris wheel, although it did take two motors to run the small carousel. I also used a train controller for lights. Now that they have the rechargeable batter pack, I use that for lights.

They could use the current 2x2 dome piece, and give it printing, as they did for R2D2, as the top. So more than a special mold, they would need printing. I think the same would work for the bottom using the 2x2 round brick, or a stack of the 2x2 round plates. The feet could be either a new mold, or existing pieces as well.

I have used so many methods over the years. I like these: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0052POMAM/ref=ox_sc_act_image_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER I then use a combination of the Lego PAB containers, and plastic bags, in each section. I like that I can have a few of these surrounding me while I am building, and reach several different pieces from one sitting location. But the bulk of my stock is in large plastic bins on shelves, and each bin has bags of pieces in it. I have tried drawers, I don't like them. However, when I had more limited space, and I stored pieces in the same area as I displayed MOCs, I wanted nice looking drawers. Really I wanted Lego to make drawers, that also integrated together as large pieces, and used Duplo (or Lego) scale bumps and holes for the connections. Then one could work the storage into the landscape. I have a design for these in my head. No one understands it when I try to describe it.

I have started building DisneyLand to Fabuland Scale. I started with the Fire Station, inspired by my Lego Mickey Mouse Fire Chief (who is Fabuland Scale). I have more pictures on Flickr, showing the back, and more details. https://www.flickr.com/photos/96972328@N05/sets/72157644398342671/ I am open to suggestions for improvements, while maintaining Lego Purity. The plan is to put this where I have a Lego mural behind it, that shows the background as it would look to the person viewing from inside the DisneyLand park. The inside back wall of the building would also be part of the mural. I did the inside rooms pretty close to how they are in the real version of the Fire Station, including the horse stable. Mickey and Minnie now occupy Walt's apartment upstairs. The lamp in the front window lights up. But most of the light come in through top. I used the grated 8x8 plates on top for this purpose.