L@go

I'd feel rude not to leave comment here as well - but as I said on Flickr, I think it's a magnificent building. The exterior is spot-on for the architectural style, that lettering is brilliant, and the interior is no less nice. The colour combinations and the details - like those recessed lamps in the bar - are all wonderful. I don't think there's anybody out there that does Art Deco better. Keep it up! :)

I agree with Henrik here, it's a great one. You really are the king of mini modulars!

Now, here's a fun fact for you. I just switched by Discovery Channel, and lo and behold, there's a documentary on the construction of the Maersk Triple-E. Apparently, the real ship is so big it has to be built in huge sections, which are then welded together. Any guesses as to what they refer to these sections as? No? Anybody? "Megablocks." I kid you not. How ironic is that? Has to be one of the most hilarious coincidences I've ever heard of.

That's a very nice rendition of an architectural masterpiece. Your presentation made me feel as if I were reading one of the official LEGO Architecture building instruction books. Well done!

Thanks - these are the best I have :) But again, there are more here, in the Flickr album. See if you find anything you like!

Wow. I saw the cathedral and some of the other buildings on display at Fanwelt a year ago, but I never thought you were planning to extend the layout even further. This is highly impressive - how big is it going to get?

Haha, this is brilliant, right down to the clock with the switch on it. Where in today's game are we at the point you've pictured - is it a decisive move? On another note, I think Magnus Carlsen would have been even better if you had managed to offset the lowest plate of the head by half a stud - to recreate his underbite ;)

...and he's changed the image (and deleted the comments). So it worked :)

I wouldn't be too sure about that. I recently posted on Flickr a picture I took at LEGO World in Utrecht, Holland, of one of the new Chima minifigures, Rogon the Rhino. This soon found its way around the internet, mainly via blogs that credited my Flickr as the source for the picture and, if they were being as polite as they should be, even provided a link to that picture in my photostream. Of course, there are a few rotten apples here and there, one of which turned out to be a French website called HothBricks. They simply took my picture, cropped it a little bit to make it look slightly different, and posted it in their own photostream on Flickr, without asking me - and then linked to their own picture from the article on the blog. Now, somebody asked where they got the picture from, and they subsequently offered a link, but the point is: They didn't ask me first. And they still stole the picture. I posted a comment on their version of the picture, saying I thought their behaviour was rude and impolite, and that I would report it as a breach of Flickr policy. That comment was removed within a day, and they blocked me from making further comments. So I filed a complaint and "their" image got deleted. If they had asked me if they could use the picture, I would have said yes, of course you can, but I'd appreciate it if you'd provide a link to my photostream. They didn't ask, and behaved like spoilt little brats when told that that wasn't the way to do it, so they have to make do without the picture. Anyway: As long as you have the original design on your DeviantArt photostream: If "FishDesign" doesn't acknowledge your claim, report him to Flickr. They'll act on it.

This is brilliant. I think you can expect other people's versions of these to pop up in MOCs and displays - and that's something to be proud of! I know I'll be looking here for inspiration when I need birds for a diorama :)

That sounds absolutely ridiculous. It's like a manufacturer of a specific modeling compund - like Play-Doh - should deny anybody the right to their own pictures of anything made from that particular material. And that's the actual image of your car. The other one? One hundred percent unfathomable.

Yes... but Cuusoo isn't turning into what I hoped it would, and I don't have much hope that anything this big would ever be considered for production as a Cuusoo set. I appreciate your optimism, though - and I certainly wouldn't say no if TLG wanted to market this :)

Thank you, chillmodious, I'm glad you like it! With almost 5,000 parts, instructions for the whole thing would probably fill more than a book alone - so no, you won't find instructions for the gas station. What you will find, though, are instructions for parts of the bigger build: The gas pumps, the street lamps, the parking ticket machine, the barbecue, the garden chairs, the sofa in the clubhouse lounge, and the fountain in the back. You will also find instructions for the Gas Guzzler (the tanker truck) and the Blue Eagle (the medium blue vintage car). And in the other chapters? You'll find instructions for this, this, this, this, this, and this - and much more :)

As always some lovely builds here, I'm really looking forward to seeing the finished big MOC! The DS is particularly nice, and the Type H is great, especially the side with the windows. You really have a thing for Citroëns, don't you? I don't blame you. I grew up with a BX, a CX and an XM - all very nice cars, in their own way :)

That's not really correct. Series 11 hasn't been released in regular, non-LEGO branded toy stores in the Nordic countries and BeNeLux, but it is available in the few LEGO Stores in these countries and on Shop@Home in all countries.

Thanks again, guys! I really appreciate the feedback :) While I can't speak for others, I have kept all my MOCs to date together. But then again, I haven't really been MOCing for more than about three years, so I don't have all that many. It is pretty clear to me that I can't keep building and building - I don't have the room - but I'll be dismantling most of the official sets that I have sitting on my shelves. I don't really need them anymore - I prefer MOCing :)

Well, let me tell you - if coming back from work to find that 21 people have responded to my post isn't genuinely inspiring, nothing is. Thank you so much for your kind words - I caught myself smiling as I read them all. This just reminds me again why I ended up on Eurobricks when I first came back to LEGO - it's such a great community, with friendly people. Now, let me respond to some replies in particular (I can't respond to all, there are just too many!) I really like that idea. I think experimenting with some lights is something I'll want to do sooner or later, and this MOC would be a good one for that, as it does get a bit dark underneath that parking floor. Well, I was working on this during the last contest - I just couldn't post any pictures of it because it was going into the book... ;) Thanks! As you can see, I tried to do something very similar on a smaller scale, and failed. So I made it bigger :) Yup, that is where that sticker came from. But you have to admit that it fits quite well as a gas company logo? A special thank you to you two. You are among the builders who inspire me the most. I'm honoured that you've noticed so many details - I spent a lot of time getting those right. Though nobody has mentioned the top magazine shelf yet... ;) Again, one of those tiny details that I felt added a little something special. Thank you so much for noticing! Yes, I've seen several, like the one Stefano linked to in the previous post. Regarding the stairs: It's probably the first thing I would change if I were to build this again. It's so easily doable, I'd just put in a spiral staircase leading from the curved arch to the ramp itself. But then again, it's not like the customers couldn't just walk up the ramp... Again, thanks for the replies! Makes me want to build something again - this thing drained me (and my wallet), so I've lacked some inspiration for the past months. And I'm very glad to see several of you mentioning the colour scheme - it was a case of it pretty much coming together without me thinking about it. The dark blue came from the tanker truck, and the light blue came from the Buzz Lightyear sticker - so it was natural to choose those two for accent colours. The station itself needed to be white, because that suited the architectural style best. It just happened to work very well together :) Oh, and fun fact: The whole thing (excluding the cars) consists of 4843 parts - 983 of which are 2x2 light bluish grey tiles...

Hello, fellow Eurobrickers! Warning: This is a picture heavy post - and there's a lot of text as well :) I've been much less active over the past months here on the forums than I used to be. The main reason for that is that I've been very, very active in the real world of LEGO fans, having visited nine LEGO events in the last thirteen months. Part of the time, I've also been busy building - mainly for the LEGO Adventure Book, Volume 2. I was very honoured to be asked to participate in Megan Rothrock's first book, which turned out great - I'm very proud of having been a part of that, although my chapter is a little, tiny one with only six pages. It has taken me to events in Germany, Portugal, the UK and the Netherlands that I probably wouldn't have been to - at least not this early in my MOCing days - if it hadn't been for the book, and I have met so many great people (many of whom are active Eurobricks members) as a result of that. So when Megan asked me if I wanted to build something for the second book, I knew I would be stupid not to say yes. But I had to approach the challenge differently than with the first book, because the stuff that ended up in Volume 1 was all stuff that had already been published on my Flickr (apart for the Ace of Spades building instructions, which I made specifically for the book). For Volume 2, Megan wanted me to build something new. And obviously, if you're building something that goes into a book, you want to do your best. I couldn't just repeat what I did for the first book and build some cars. I needed to do something bigger, and that's why I decided to pursue an idea I'd had for a while, but didn't expect to actually be able to turn into reality for a while yet. I had toyed with the idea of building a gas station that would fit into a modular street, but I also wanted it to feature a (removable) parking deck on top and a ramp leading up to it. So I started out in MLCad with a 32x64 stud footprint. Not a good idea. After having built the entire ground floor and the ramp, it looked like this: I was quite happy with it - but then I thought it might be clever to check how it would look with some cars on it. And they didn't fit - they wouldn't be able to make the turn on the ramp, and they wouldn't really be able to get to the pumps. So it was back to the drawing board... This was so much better. I had another idea all along as well - a pet project of mine is, as some of you might know, updating the classic Town sets from the eighties and nineties, and a favourite set of mine from that era (that I didn't have as a kid, but bought right after coming out of my Dark Ages) is 6561, Hot Rod Club. My contribution to book 1 had a strong flavour of hot rods, so it made sense to just let that evolve into book 2 - and therefore I wanted to make an updated Hot Rod Clubhouse to go on top of the parking deck. I also wanted it to be removable so it could stand alone as a separate building, like the old one. And this is what I ended up with. Note that all stickers are official LEGO stickers. Here's a demonstration of the removable floors. The roof of the clubhouse also comes off (not visible in this picture): Some of my favourite details of the gas station: And the clubhouse: That last one is a respectful nod to the old set - the idea is that the hot rod club grew out of their old clubhouse... So, a gas station and a hot rod clubhouse. That's all good and well, but there needs to be some cars to go with it. First, the Gas Guzzler, a hot rod tanker truck. The idea came from those dark blue curved double slopes. I was able to pick up four of them from some building bins at an event in November, and I thought this would be a good way to use them. You can find complete instructions for the Guzzler in book 2. Add to this the hot rods that go with the updated clubhouse - two from set 6561 and, for good measure, set 6538, from the same year. Sweet Yello: Hot Howler: Rebel Roadster: And, for good measure, throw in a vintage car that I did earlier, the Blue Eagle, to be the gas station owner's daily driver (his name is Gus Gazzler, by the way): Complete instructions for this car can also be found in book 2. So there you have it: A modular gas station with a removable parking deck and a hot rod clubhouse, with three hot rods, a vintage car and a hot rod tanker truck - Chapter 3 of the LEGO Adventure Book, Volume 2, coming out in late November. Hope you like it - I'm certainly looking forward to getting my hands on the book to have a closer look at what the other contributors have built. There are some fantastic builders in there that I'm - again - honoured to be allowed to share space with in a book. And, personally, I feel this is my best build ever. Which is of course a very gratifying feeling when that was what I set out to do - and I was rewarded with a lot more pages in the second book :) More pictures of these MOCs can be found in my Service with a Smile photoset on Flickr. Thanks for stopping by! Are / L@go

Very nice images of an absolutely amazing castle display - the best and biggest I've seen. Some astonishing work has gone into this. So glad I could make it to STEAM to look at it 'in the plastic' - even though I see when I look at the pictures now that I wasn't even close to discovering all the details! I don my hat to the Great Eight :)

If you ask me, this is a welcome improvement. It might not look quite as smooth as the old one, but the old clip has too much grip (remember, these parts are intended for kids who don't have as strong hands as adults) and I know the parts designers have been looking for a solution for this for a while. This is obviously what they've come up with.

Knowing what sort of limitations you've had to deal with when building in pearl gold, this is nothing short of astonishing. I'm awestruck. A master build.

Hi there! Here's a little thing I originally intended to get done for the FABULAND Vehicle Contest here on EB, but seeing as the voting thread closed on April 17th, I'm a little late to the party... I realised quite early I wouldn't be able to finish it in time, so I didn't rush it, and I have only now been able to snap some proper pictures of it. This is the Faboo GTS, a muscle car with the classic twin white stripes. It features custom chromed wheels (from ChromeBricks) and seats a FABULAND figure without problems - in this case, the FABUfied version of my own s(t)igfig. And it's basically a scaled-up version of the type of car I normally build. I enjoyed building on a slightly different scale for a change - even if it's not very different. The doors are old - I ordered several to be sure I had a pair that wouldn't look too worn - and the black stripe along the bottom is a cutoff from an official LEGO sticker sheet. I hope you like it. Here, have some pictures! Some say his face resembles a BIONICLE mask, and that his bone structure is built from Modulex. All we know is... And remember to stop and smell the flowers. Although... some say he has no sense of smell... Thanks for taking the time to look at this! There's a few more pictures in my Flickr stream, if you're interested.

I really like what you've done with this. The offroad racing truck is brilliantly built, and I love the colour scheme. I agree that it would look much better (and much more realistic) with some stickers, but that doesn't detract from the fact that you've done some great design work here. I would buy this as a set.

Indeed - in the closeup shots you can clearly see the licence plate starting with PN. Well spotted!

I can see how people are disappointed that we get police sets again, but it's hardly a surprise... when it comes to the other sets, though, I think they look spectacular. The design of LEGO City vehicles is ever improving, and those trucks look very promising. The big one in the middle of the picture reminds me of the tow truck from the classic Big-Rig Truck Stop, set 6393, that we sadly didn't get in Europe. I always wanted that as a kid. And the other ones... well, I like the Le Mans racer - hardly surprising, as I've built something similar myself - and the SUV, although similar to the one pulling the horse trailer from a couple of years ago, looks very nice. The camper is also nice. And the car transporter? It was a matter of time before they had to try something like that, and I like it. As a car builder, and a fan of the current style of City vehicles, I'm excited about the upcoming sets.