November 2009 Raleigh, NC Window Into the Community Display

I recently built and installed a display for the Raleigh, NC LEGO store. My display, titled "LEGO Castle Through the Years", will be visible in the Window Into the Community (a special store window at LEGO stores that features creations by local builders - in this case it's in the back of the store, to your left as you look at the Pick-A-Brick wall) through the end of the month. For those of you who haven't been into LEGO Castle sets from the 1970's to today, the layout uses a variety of popular sets and minifigs from over the years - the landscaping and overall layout is an original design (as is the mill building styled similarly to the 10193 Medieval Market Village set), but most of the layout closely follows popular LEGO sets from over the years. Notable sets here include 375 Yellow Castle, 6066 Camouflaged Outpost, and 6038 Wolfpack Renegades. A few classic minifigs from various LEGO Castle lines show up as well - see if you can spot Majisto. The tree from 10193 Medieval Market Villagemakes an appearance too, but I decided to use an original mill building (which, of course, has a working water wheel and grindstone) to represent peasants instead of using a building from the current set (as a current high-ticket item, 10193 is already displayed in the store for sales purposes).

Matthew (Brickapolis) was at the swap-out and got some set-up photos. These are mostly for seeing me set up my display, but you can also get a glimpse of my tree technique. You can see the rest of Matthew's photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/brickapolis/tags/nov/

My photos can be seen at http://www.flickr.com/photos/dp3/tags/november/ . I may add more photos later - I've been surprised to see how some details have come out in the end. A cave that I was afraid would be hidden turned out to actually be perfectly visible from a child's eye level, but appears to be covered by the large tree in the front when looking at it from an adult eye level. That's the only highlight that the brightly-lit display area has brought to my attention so far, but there may be others. I'd also like to try getting some photos with less glare - we'll have to see if I can get my camera back in there soon.

"Instantly Recognizable"

If you've ever discussed LEGO blogging with me for any serious amount of time, you've probably heard me mention how difficult it is to find interesting things to say about other people's models. There are only so many complimentary words in the English language, and inevitably we end up repeating common phrases, descriptions, techniques, etc.

Over at The Living Brick, they've taken on one cliche I use regularly - "instantly recognizable". I would have linked to this over at LMOTD, but since that's supposed to be all kid-friendly and the link above used the word "testicle", it's off-limits there - so it shows up here instead.

Don't worry too much about this blog becoming an addendum to LMOTD - I'm working on some slightly longer-term projects lately, but I will post about some of them soon (most notably: Castle Window In the Community display and some updates on the still-unnamed robotic LEGO band).

BrickFair

I may get around to writing a "journal" of sorts about BrickFair (I attended quite a few seminars and games there that won't get too much attention elsewhere), but for now I'm just posting general commentary over at LMOTD.

Lamp

At long last, I'm finally writing about the lamp. My lamp has been around for nearly a decade now, but since the largest event it's ever appeared at is LEGOPalooza at UNC Chapel Hill, not many people know about it. Everyone who has seen it expresses interest, though, and I keep saying one of these days, I'll write about it. That day is today. Sure, I wish I had better photos (these were taken before I bought myself a proper duster), but at least we're here now...



This is a sculpture with a socket cord in it lamp made out of LEGO. Back when electronics casing hadn't become such a popular thing to build out of LEGO, I came across a socket cord at a hardware store and thought this would be a good opportunity to try my hand at building non-LEGO electrical matter into some sort of LEGO sculpture. Surprisingly, I'm yet to hear about anyone else building one of these, even though it is relatively simple to do.

I have built and re-built this a few times now, and I hope to post reasonably good instructions at some point in the future (sadly, the twisty red part isn't easy to toss into a CAD program to make instructions). You can get the gist of how this is constructed from the photos below. Sadly, none of these were taken with the intended clip-on shade, but I don't think it looks that bad with this lampshade either.

Personally, I don't think this should count as "cheating" - the cord, bulb, and shade are the only non-LEGO parts. This is otherwise completely purist - something that you can't do if you just build around a commercially available build-your-own-lamp kit. Socket cords are available at most hardware stores should you want to try this yourself.

On to the "detail" shots!



Here is the base of the lamp. Note how DUPLO bricks were used to create a sturdy base without using that many parts. A gap the size of one 1x1 LEGO brick was appropriate to get the cord out safely.



This is the top of the lamp. The cord was snaked through the entire construction, but the socket itself requires some extra support - which this little ledge you can see provides.



Here's the top section. When I built this, I was into showing off techniques. I don't think the design suffered for it. This is another fairly straightforward trick - just angle the bricks a little bit. You do have to make sure you get the right height in there - believe it or not, you can often get parts to "stick" in there when the connection is not really sturdy enough to stay. I put 8 bricks in between the two red 2x4s, but if I wanted to squeeze 9 or 10 in there and let things twist, I could have gotten away with it.



Look! It's my ball! Complete building instructions are available to download. This, by the way, is one of the reasons I decided to make my ball in sections that allow the "core" to be popped out.

That about sums it up. Any questions?

Things to Build out of LEGO Parts

I recently came across this post that I started writing last March, and I thought I would go ahead and share it today. I should probably make a longer and more complete list, but this is interesting enough on its own.

It's been a while since I've made one of these lists and I'm finding that inspiration has struck me repeatedly and violently tonight. I've toyed around with the idea of doing some sort of CAD-related contest for some of these to gather up ideas on how I want mine to look (but never actually figured out how I'd make that work).

• Oil rig (the tall tower kind - I never did get to it)


• Large hospital (possibly based on the 1987 Emergency Treatment Center kit, but with more realistic scale)


• Aquarium (1x4x3 trans-light-blue panels to separate visitors from underwater vignettes)


• Soda Shoppe (already started even though I really don't have time - never mind the tiles for a proper checked floor, or the correct minifigs for soda jerks...)


• suburban restaurant (buffet?) with enclosed patio (or two)


• suburban American houses in colors that a homeowner's association would actually allow (for inspiration, use Street View for this subdivision in Apex, NC) - bought specially-colored parts from Cary for this, but will probably have to be clever for roofing


• suburban American landscaping (there is no such thing as a cul-de-sac roadplate piece)


• Parking lot or parking garage (where the heck do people park when they go to the Cafe Corner?) - side thought - parking spaces on road plates?


• Large urban bank


• Town Plan buildings upsized to Cafe Corner scale (restyled?)


• Great Ball Contraption town - factory buildings dump balls onto motorized cars/trucks/train, train/cars unload balls themselves back into other factory buildings, chutes and machinery maneuver balls withing factory buildings.


• Jewelry store (to use the "Diamonds" brick from a Spiderman set)


• Girly clothing store (for realistic variety and cool sideways use of DUPLO roof piece)


• A few buildings that minifigs walk around (done using hockey sports pieces)


• Cathedral (in bley)

I've been a bit inspired by the thought of building some Americana lately. All these plans are for naught, though, because my big bag 'o' minifigs is MIA. Perhaps it's time for me to build miniland-scale instead (but where to start?)