JayDuck

Looking good! The straight sides with running boards, relocated tail lights, and the shortened wheelbase really improved the look of your truck. The bed box is great as well. I really like the trailer, too. I might just make one like it myself. If I might make a suggestion, you might try substituting a pair of 2 x 3 tiles with clips (part 30350) for the ramps, those mudflaps look a bit too short.

One of the funny things about the storm that got this thread started was that those of us in northern New England, who are more used to dealing with heavy snows than the folks in the Mid-Atlantic, got next to nothing. I think we might have had three inches in the driveway at most.

I'm a bit late to the party here. We've had this set up since early December, but I had to wait for Santa to bring the new camera, and then I had to get around to posting the pics. Our setup consists of a 10199, a 30008 Snowman, a 30009 Christmas Tree, a keychain Santa on top of the chimney, and minifig versions of my wife and me. The ski hill is a white felt scarf on some phone books. And I have to point out this little mod that my wife made when we put it together:

Ha, that's great! Too bad it's too small for hide-away Secret Hyperjets.

Better late than never, I suppose. In reply to the post above, the instructions are a .pdf, a cross-platform file format. Just head over to the Adobe site and get the version of Acrobat Reader for your OS. http://get.adobe.com/reader/otherversions/ Download, install, and enjoy. Hope that helps.

Well, there might've been 174,999 LEGO fans there... I didn't make it. I think this is the first time I've ever been glad to have had car trouble. Before the wheel bearing started making noise this past week I'd been planning on heading down there today. Granted, now I have to get the car fixed, but if I'd driven two and a half hours just to be turned away I would've been disappointed to say the least.

I'll echo that the truck is superb, as well as the scene around it. Great job!

That tractor looks great in yellow, and that's a clever mod to put the little cement mixer behind the truck.

Ha, this is great! I'm glad to see it got bumped. Great details in the studio.

Nah, lots of propane powered equipment has the propane cylinder mounted externally. A quick Google Image search for stuff like "propane sweeper" or "propane forklift" (aka fork truck) will show you what I mean. Not that I'm saying you're wrong about it looking tacked on, just dangling off of the back there. Usually tanks like that are mounted on top of something. I wouldn't want to back in to something with a real version of that setup!

I'll apologize in advance, since I have a feeling this is going to get rather long-winded; The thing is though, they aren't. Although they are the number one toy-only retailer in the US, and they do take roughly 20% of the domestic market, Wal-Mart is by far the country's #1 toy retailer. By a large margin, too, since WM is purported to take over 25% of the US toy market. Five percent may not sound like much, but look at it this way; take twenty 'average' kids on the playground with one toy each: of those twenty toys, four of them may have come from TRU, but five of them were bought at WM. Target wants a bigger slice of the toy pie as well, and would really like to get themselves into that #2 slot. Wal-Mart has also put in place plans which they hope will (among other things) kill off their specialty competition (drug stores, TRU, etc.) dubbed "Project Impact": Wal-Mart really has two things in its favor; variety and volume. By variety, I mean that WM has the whole range of products they sell, so they don't necessarily have to mark up their toys enough to cover their margins (that is, sell the product with a high enough markup to pay for the expenses to buy/ship/stock it as well as other costs and still turn a profit). In fact, WM often will use toys as loss leaders, selling them at or below cost on the assumption (usually correct) that customers will also buy other (marked-up) items so overall the store will make a profit. As far as volume, since WM sells more, that means that they buy more from the the suppliers, and bigger orders means bigger discounts. Since they can buy items at lower cost, that means they can apply a larger markup to make the difference between cost and MSRP. Even if the difference is as little as a single cent, if WM sells 100,000 of that item, they make $1,000 more than the other guy. TRU, on the other hand, has only their toys on which to make enough to cover all of their operating costs and profits, hence the higher prices. Also, TRU has chosen to place emphasis on variety rather than price, so they're hoping that while customers are there getting something that is only they carry, customers will pay a little more to get other more common items at the same time. It also seems that TRU is hoping for higher returns on licensed Lego, since, for example 7195 Ambush in Cairo is priced at $14.99 but the plain old 8401 City Minifigure Collection is only $11.99. Compared to S@H, the City set is $2 more, where the Indy set is $4 more. But the Indy sets will likely sell more units since they are from a licensed property and can sell on name over value. I'm not necessarily defending TRU's pricing, but I thought it was worth pointing out that their pricing is a result of TRU having an inherently different business model than their big chain competition (WM, Target, etc.). tl;dr: TRU charges more because they have to make more profit per toy. Well, you can't actually just buy the brick. If you look, (link), the page lacks the 'add to cart' button. If you check the box to 'add the additional item' with nothing in your cart, you still have an empty cart until you add some other Lego. It's a 'get something for nothing' value that TRU gave it. Besides, if you think five bucks is bad for a Duplo brick, don't follow this link. Well, as I said above, TRU has to charge a bit more due to the nature of their business model. And remember, we're fortunate enough to be part of Lego's largest volume market, so we get pretty much the lowest prices across the board. People in lots of other countries would love to be able to get their Lego at even TRU's 'high' prices. It's all relative. Yep, I was right. Looong-winded.

That vending machine is great, and the tiling on the wall is a neat detail. It's a great scene, even if it does remind me of the time I spent in the hospital in the spring.

I'd imagine it's supposed to be a propane tank. That way your toy sweeper has some pretend fuel to run on. I'd say the main flaw of the new sweeper compared to the older ones is that it's too monochromatic. The others had a stripe to break up the yellow. Thanks for the review!

Nice! I was just thinking the other day it would be fun to make a minifig-scale version of the 5571.