The Magazine for LEGO® Enthusiasts of All Ages! Issue 38 • February 2016
8.95
$
in the US
Feeling the Need for Speed!
Building LEGO MINILAND cars by Stephan Sander Also: Car Builders Andrea Lattanzio and Marcus Paul Instructions AND MORE!
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Issue 38 • February 2016
Contents
From the Editor....................................................2
News A LEGO TARDIS on Bondi Beach?................3 The Force Awakens at Hong Kong Times Square.....................................................4 The LEGO House: A BIG Project....................6
People Builder Spotlight: Marcus Paul.....................................................10 Builder Spotlight: Jordan Schwartz...........................................14 Builder Spotlight: Andrea Lattanzio..........................................17 Spotlight: Paul J. Boratko’s Shuriken..........................20
Building
Community
Building Distinctive Cars..............................22 Building a Mistress of a Supercar.............30 Color Your Life...................................................38 You Can Build It: MINI Batmobile...............................................44 BrickNerd’s DIY Fan Art: Red Choo Choo.............................................47 You Can Build It: MINI A-Team Van...........................................49 MINDSTORMS 101: Giving Your Bot a Voice..............................54 Minifigure Customization 101: Some Say He Looks a Lot Taller on TV and Not Made of Plastic.. All We Know is He’s Called the Stig................................................58
Event Report: Skaerbaek Fan Weekend...........................60 LEGO Fans Help Refugee Kids!..................67 Event Report: Japan BrickFest..............................................68 Japan BrickFest Brick Master Building Competition.................................72 Community Ads...............................................78 Last Word.............................................................79 AFOLs....................................................................80
From the Editor: Hi! This issue is themed to the automobile, and there’s been a surprising amount of builds to look at and check out. There’s articles on minifigure-scaled cars and Technic-built cars. In fact, two former LEGO designers talk about building LEGO cars, which is a nice surprise!
February 2016 Issue 38 Publisher John Morrow
Editor in Chief Joe Meno
Photography Editor Geoff Gray Proofreader John Morrow
Japanese Bureau Editor Nathan Bryan
We’ve also got some event reports from places overseas, including Denmark and Japan. Both have events that are much different from the conventions in the US, and worth reading about. Finally there are some great MOCs to look at on the pages of this magazine. Enjoy!
West Coast Editors Todd Kubo Ashley Glennon
Joe Meno, Editor
Contributors: Paul J. Boratko, Jared Burks, Jared Chan, Christopher Deck, Matthew Hocker, Damien Kee, Andrea Lattanzio, Ryan McNaught, Jeroen Ottens, Marcus Paul, Jörg Ruckel, Stephan Sander, Ralph Savelsberg, Jordan Schwartz, Tommy Williamson, and Greg Hyland. Many thanks to the websites who have served as mirrors for BrickJournal:
P.P.S... Yes, BrickJournal has a website — www.brickjournal.com! Twitter? Yep, there too — http://twitter.com/brickjournal. Facebook? Yup — http://www.facebook.com/group. php?gid=58728699914&ref=mf. Or you can scan the bottom codes with a QR reader!
LEGO Ideas Correspondent Glen Wadleigh
www.LUGNET.com, www.Brickshelf.com, www.peeron.com, www.brickmodder.net www.rustyclank.com
About the Cover: Stephan Sander’s colorful cars take the cover. Photo provided by Stephan Sander. About the Contents: One of the many hot rods built by Andrea Lattanzio—a green T-bucket. Photo by Andrea Lattanzio.
P.S. Have ideas or comments? Drop me a line at admin@brickjournal.com. I’m open to suggestions and comments and will do my best to reply.
P.P.P.S. If you want info on a subscription, you can go to: http://twomorrows.com/index. php?main_page=product_info&cPath=78&products_id=616 or scan below!
Website
Glossary AFOL (Adult Fan of LEGO) NLSO (Non-LEGO Significant Other) MOC (My Own Creation) TLG (The LEGO Group) BURP (Big Ugly Rock Piece) LURP (Little Ugly Rock Piece) SNOT (Studs Not on Top)
Subscriptions
POOP (Pieces—that can be or should be made—Of Other Pieces) LUG (LEGO Users Group) LTC (LEGO Train Club) DARK AGES (usually teen years, when you drift away from building) STUDS OUT (building where the studs on bricks face the viewer)
LEGO®, TECHNIC, MINDSTORMS, Belville, Scala, BIONICLE, ExoForce, Mars Mission, World City, and other LEGO theme lines are trademarks of the LEGO Group of companies. All articles, photos, and art are copyright BrickJournal Media, LLC 2016, TwoMorrows Publishing and the respective writers, photographers, and artists. All rights reserved. All trademarked items are the property of their respective owners and licensees. Subscriptions are $50USD Media Mail, $68 Canada, $78 International Surface, $180 International Airmail and can be purchased at www.twomorrows.com or payment sent to: TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614 USA. The editorial/advertising office address for BrickJournal is: BrickJournal Editor, 5610 Briar Oak Lane #510, Raleigh, NC 27612 USA or admin@brickjournal.com. First Printing. Printed in the USA. ISSN 1941-2347. BrickJournal and its staff would like to thank the LDraw community for the software it makes available to the community, which we use for making all of the instructions and renderings in this magazine. We would especially like to thank Kevin Clague for his continued upgrades of the LPub tool that is a part of2the LDraw suite. For more information, please visit http://www.ldraw.org.
A LEGO TARDIS on Bondi Beach?
News
Article by Ryan McNaught (the Brickman)
On November 10, 2015, a blue police box appeared at Bondi Beach, Australia. The box is actually built out of LEGO elements by my team in our workshop: Clay Mellington, Luke Cini, Claire Ashworth and myself. Designed by both Chris Steininger and me, it took 65 hours to design and 206 man-hours to build. Built to the exact specs that the BBC archivists provided about the TARDIS, it is 316 bricks high (including the light), so that is 303cm or just short of 10ft tall. It’s about 90,000 bricks, give or take. It has a functional door, as it was designed for Peter Capaldi (the current Dr. Who) to emerge from at the Dr. Who Festival in Sydney on the 21st and 22nd of November. It has a fully working light and even comes with a matching sonic screwdriver! (Thanks to Rob Hendrix at Lifelights!) The model also has an internal steel frame, mainly because it has to be transported around to various events and locations. The door handles and labels are the only real detail on it; it’s pretty much a giant Box. It may in fact be bigger on the inside; it certainly felt like it when we were building it!
The TARDIS at the beach.
Ryan McNaught explains: “The signs are an interesting point, as there was a TARDIS built by Bright Bricks in the UK for the BBC as well. Our TARDIS did differ in the build, however we did work on the signs together; they did the St John’s cross for the right door while we did the police information on the left door, and we copied each others signs!” Left: The build team.
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News
A rendering of the completed LEGO House.
The LEGO House:
A BIG Project! Article and Photography by Joe Meno and the LEGO Group Art provided by BIG Renders by Adam Rollins
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In 2014, the LEGO Group announced the plans and construction of a new experience center to celebrate the company’s history and heritage. Christened the LEGO House, this facility will have hands-on/minds-on activities showcasing the almost infinite possibilities of LEGO building and play. Design of LEGO House is being spearheaded by the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), an internationally known architecture firm that is working on many projects, including reworking and modernizing the Smithsonian Institution complex in Washington, DC. Compared to the Smithsonian, LEGO House is much smaller, but has the same mission: preserving and celebrating a community, in this case, the LEGO community. BrickJournal got an opportunity to talk to Bjarke Ingels at the opening of BIG’s display “HOT to COLD” in the National Building Museum in Washington, DC. There, he told how he and his firm got the LEGO House Project.
Designing the LEGO House
As Ingels recalls, “I came and I spoke at the LEGO Idea Day in 2010 and afterwards I went on a drive around the city. The vision for the city is to become the Capital of Children, which inspired our design for LEGO House.” At that point, the idea was still pretty broad. Ingels explained, “The LEGO house was planned to be some kind of expansion of the LEGO Idea House they have right now, on a much bigger scale. The plan was to build it where the city hall was, as the city hall was moving and merging with another city municipality, so suddenly there was street space.” Finally, in 2013, the LEGO Group reached out to us and asked us to come to Billund and present some of our reference, and then they asked us to spend six weeks on trying to address what we would see as the challenges of making a LEGO House on that location.” At this time Ingels began working on the project: “I rallied the troops and put one of our best young project leaders on the project, a guy who actually just became a partner of BIG: Bryan Yang, one of my former students from Harvard. I told the team that if BIG had been founded with the purpose of building a single building, then it would be this building. We really had to win this project. So we went completely nuts and did all kinds of work and we took all our work and all our sketch models—all that we have done and thought, put it in the back of a van and we drove to Billund and we filled conference space with stuff.
“The LEGO Group had asked several other architects to make a proposal, but I had a feeling that ours went well. What happened right after that, was that the company invited us to come to Billund for a two-day workshop where we would present our thinking to them and then we would get feedback. “Some specific things came out of the workshop, including the idea of creating a cloud of interconnected galleries, almost like interconnected LEGO bricks, and also a central gallery that we called the Keystone Gallery, with 8 skylights, 2 x 4 with the same iconic proportions of a LEGO brick. BIG took those suggestions and incorporated them into the design.
A form study of the building, seen at the National History Museum in Washington DC.
“You try to understand the traditional typology or the local vernacular and then you depart from that typology by doing something to it by adapting it to a certain situation, and you put new life into it.”
“ I am very passionate about play and how children learn through playing with LEGO bricks. This is essentially the LEGO idea and what the LEGO House is all about. I look forward to seeing the long time dream of having one place where anyone can experience the LEGO idea come true.”
Construction of LEGO House will be completed in 2017. With that, BIG will have created a place that touches on the past, present, and future of the company by celebrating the LEGO Group. It will be, for the community and the company, the ultimate LEGO creation, or as the community would call it: the ultimate MOC.
Bjarke Ingels at the 2010 LEGO Idea Conference. A rendering of the roof terraces, showing how color will be used to visually tie in galleries.
—Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, LEGO Group Owner
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People
Builder Spotlight:
Marcus Paul Article by Joe Meno Photography by Marcus Paul Marcus Paul (known as er0l online) is a 48-year-old freelance journalist and copy editor who is one of many LEGO builders that is an expert on cars. Though he may not say it, his automobiles have a level of detail that is hard to maintain in a minifigure scale. His models caught my attention when I saw his Aston Martin DB5, otherwise known as one of James Bond’s cars. Marcus has done a couple more of the Bond cars, but also has some classic roadsters. Outside of cars, he also built a yacht that is definitely eye-catching. I asked him a few questions about his building and models for BrickJournal.
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Paul’s DB5 from Goldfinger.
BrickJournal: When did you start LEGO Building? I restarted my LEGO building in 2011 after an unusually long Dark Age. Some years ago I had given away all of my childhood LEGO to relatives; I didn’t know anything about the actual LEGO at that time and couldn’t imagine that there was such a great worldwide community of adults building with LEGO. My first encounter with “modern” LEGO was an iPad stand built out of LEGO which I saw on the Internet. I wanted to do that, too, so I bought a set and built an iPad stand (which looked horrible) out of a Technic jeep. I was hooked. My first MOCs were Technic builds— hardly anybody knows them, and that‘s better, I guess … ;-) It wasn’t until I saw those nice 7-stud wide minifig scale cars by a great builder named danthaman11 some months later, that I understood this was the real thing for me. What are your favorite themes? My favorite theme is City, of course, or let’s call it contemporary LEGO in minifig scale. Within this range I’m interested in practically everything, including trains, and I have a weak spot for the monorail, one of the best things TLG ever did (in my opinion). Regarding sets, I like the modular buildings, and I also like the Friends line. Both themes have widened our possibilities as Town related builders very much. However, I’d rather buy a set regardless of the theme when it has nice parts at a decent price. I’m not much of a LEGO collector compared to building. What got you interested in the James Bond cars? Building movie cars is a common thing among minifig scale
Paul’s version of the Lotus Esprit from The Spy Who Loved Me.
Another view of the DB5.
car builders—there’s hardly a movie-based car which hasn’t been built out of LEGO. Quite a few of those builders are incredibly talented—you just don’t want to build something that doesn’t match up, or is rather a copy of an existing model. That’s why you try to find subjects that aren’t already overcrowded with MOCs. James Bond seems to be one of those subjects. Another reason: I’m a Bond movie fan. I like the way the franchise has developed over the years. The final reason was, of course, the upcoming and now released Bond movie. Tell us about the DB5 and the Lotus Esprit. DB5: One morning I woke up and had an idea of how to build the typical radiator grille of an Aston Martin. It took perhaps ten minutes to see if it would work or not. Since it worked, the rest of the car had to be built—which was more difficult and took more time than I had expected. However, the DB5 is my most successful model to date.
Top view of the Lotus Esprit in submarine mode.
Lotus: Similar. The main idea was to build the front end without curved slopes since there’s only a very light slope on the original car. But it took several days to find a—more or less—adequate solution. It took some time to build the submarine version, too, whose boat-like understructure had to be built upside-down. How do you plan your builds? I try to find good photos, and I look at what‘s already existing in LEGO. Sometimes videos are important to see how a car moves, which may be a part of its character. The next step is building a (rather colorful) preliminary model which serves to define the main aspects and to solve the main technical problems. I always begin with what I think is the most crucial part of a car. If you fail here, you can drop the whole thing quickly and not lose time. For some time now I’m trying to build closer to the scale I’ve found to be suitable for my MOCs. Regarding cars, the main measure is the wheelbase. If the wheelbase is—more or less—correct, the whole car won’t be completely out of proportion.
Rear view of the Lotus Esprit in submarine mode.
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Building
Building Distinctive Cars Article by Ralph Savelsberg
Several accomplished or, dare I say, famous builders have told me that the one thing they cannot quite wrap their heads around is building cars. I also know plenty of people who will happily confess that, when building a City display, they use cars from LEGO sets, because building cars of their own is too hard. I have been building LEGO cars for pretty much as long as I can remember and I think it is not really all that difficult, as long as you keep a few things in mind. I will share a few tips and tricks and will illustrate them using a Pontiac Bonneville and some of the other distinctive cars that I have built recently.
Finding Inspiration The first step is finding a suitable car to build. This is far from trivial, because not every car will work as a LEGO model. For me, the inspiration can come from a lot of different sources. Often I find something I like on the Internet. I am an active member of LUGNuts, which is an online group for LEGO car builders and the subject of BrickJournal #21. Our monthly themed build challenges have regularly prompted me to find something interesting. I also have a collection of books on classic cars. I picked up Quentin Wilson’s Cool Cars many years ago in the UK and, while on a holiday in the US, I bought Cars of 1965. I also have a book called Ultimate American Cars. Many of the cars that I have built are from these three books. Earlier this year, whilst visiting a car show, I came across the 1965 Pontiac Bonneville. This just happens to be one of the coolest cars in my Cars of 1965 book. It is big and sleek and, even though the weather was overcast, its metallic blue paint seemed to sparkle. I decided there and then that I wanted to build one.
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The 1/22 scale LEGO model (above) and the real Pontiac Bonneville on a typically gloomy Dutch day (right).
Another source of inspiration is some of the more interesting cars from my childhood. For more than twenty years my parents owned a green 1969 Volkswagen Beetle. It rarely let us down. We went on family holidays with it, as well as on countless trips to my grandparents, and when I left home for university, the Beetle was used to move all my stuff. It is no surprise then that Beetles feature heavily in my car collection. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine challenged me to build a Citroën DS. I have fond memories of my aunt giving me a ride in hers when I was a teenager. It was already a classic car then and, apart from the bits of insulation foam that occasionally would be coughed up by the ventilation system, to fly in my face, and the sun visor regularly drooping down, it was one of the most comfortable cars I have ever been in, like a magic carpet.
A model of my parents’ 1969 Volkswagen Beetle (left) and the Citroën DS (right).
One thing these three cars have in common, as do most of the other cars I build, is that they look distinctive. This is part of what makes them interesting as cars, but also what makes them suitable as LEGO models. You may love your father’s Toyota Camry, but there are so many similar-looking cars out there that you will be hard-pressed to build a recognizable LEGO model of it at any reasonable scale. Basically, the more distinctive your subject is, the more mistakes you can get away with.
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Building
Jeroen Otten’s Mistress.
Building a Mistress of a Supercar! Article by Jeroen Ottens
The LEGO brand has a very diverse offering, ranging from the Duplo (or even Primo) to the UCS sets. But until the appearance of the UCS sets, the older age group was serviced with the LEGO Technic brand. And within that brand the ultimate challenge, the pinnacle of engineering, the top of the bill is the LEGO Technic supercar. Since the introduction of LEGO Technic in 1977, eight supercars have been released with various functions. There is not a well-defined definition of what a supercar has to offer in terms of features (and not all LEGO supercars offer all features), but it should have at least most of the following: • Big wheels (at least 9 studs diameter) and therefore be a big model (~60 studs long) • (independent) suspension on all wheels • Steerable front wheels • ‘Fake’ engine (where the pistons actually work, but does not provide power to the engine itself) • Gearbox (nowadays with at least 6 gear ratios) • Something special (Gull wing doors, AWD, pop-up headlights, or modular build, for example) When I joined The LEGO Group in 1998 (yes, that is right, I was a LEGO Technic designer in the previous century), the fifth supercar, the Super Street Sensation, was in the last phase of its development. It was a true supercar, with independent suspension, a 5+R gearbox, a modular chassis design and reconfigurable bodywork. I had the privilege of designing two other sets before I left the company. In that same period LEGO Technic went through its most drastic change since its start in 1977. We started to abandon the studs. At first only the bodywork became studless, but by 2003, the internal chassis had also become studless. This revolutionized the way of building with LEGO Technic. Instead of the traditional stacking of bricks, it now became possible to design in every direction. You could say it was SNOT galore in the Technic brand, only without the S.
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In this article I would like to describe how I designed my latest studless supercar, the Mistress, and compare that to the way I designed the studful Power Puller when I still worked at LEGO.
Starting the Model
Every design starts with inspiration. For the Power Puller it was the idea that we should offer a Racer theme. We searched for pictures and photos and even went to a Power Puller contest to get inspiration. For the Mistress, I drew inspiration from other MOCs and modern supercars like the Lamborghini and Ferrari. Once I had an image in my head, I started to think about the functions. For the Power Puller that was clear from the beginning: It had to have big wheels (the biggest ever released by LEGO), configurable engines, a sled that could be pulled along, it should be motorized, and it should tilt upwards when it had pulled the sled a certain distance. For the Mistress, I wanted to have as many supercar functions as possible. I wanted to have four-wheel drive, four-wheel steering, scissor doors, a 5+R gearbox, a gearbox to switch between two-wheel drive, four-wheel drive with differential and four-wheel drive with locked differential, and finally a sleek (and as closed as possible) body.
Jeroen’s Technic set.
So far the design process was pretty similar, but now the paths started to diverge, partly due to the difference between studful and studless building. For the Power Puller, we (I worked together with Markus Kossman on this model) started to build crude versions of tractors and sleds. Every time we ran into trouble we put the model aside and started anew. As you can imagine, our workplace got cluttered fast with piles of unfinished prototypes. For the Mistress, however, I started digitally (with LEGO Digital Designer— LDD). The most complex part of studless building is the interlocking nature of it. Since there are no studs to connect pieces to each other, you have to rely on pins and axles to connect pieces. Furthermore, a lot of parts have the ability to connect in perpendicular directions. For the strength and rigidity of the model it is important to make designs that lock themselves in all directions so that they do not fall apart when pressure is applied. The consequence of that is that it is not too easy to take them apart again. That, in itself, wouldn’t be a problem if you could simply start anew whenever you ran into trouble, but unlike at LEGO I don’t have an infinite amount of pieces at my disposal at home. But LDD does have an infinite amount of bricks. So here are my first digital iterations on the front and rear axle set-up:
Prototype axle set-ups.
This is the digital version of the first pile of prototypes. The actual number of prototypes is considerably larger than the few displayed here. Each one has gone through its own set of iterations to come to this point. I think it is a safe bet that I designed over a hundred suspension set-ups for this car...
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You Can Build It MINI Model
MINI Batmobile Design and Instructions by Matthew Hocker
The scale of the car lets you use a few parts to make an iconic vehicle. If you don’t have any chrome wheels, you can substitute light gray wheels instead. Have fun!
Parts List
(Parts can be ordered from Bricklink.com by searching by part number and color) Qty Color Part 1 Trans Clear 3023.dat 2 Trans Clear 54200.dat 1 Trans Neon Orange 64647.dat 4 Yellow 4624.dat 6 Black 87747.dat 1 Black 41854.dat 1 Black 59900.dat 2 Black 2654.dat 1 Black 4740.dat 1 Black 85975.dat 2 Black 61252.dat 4 Black 4081b.dat 3 Black 3023.dat 1 Black 15573.dat
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The model that led to Matt Hocker’s Batcave in BrickJournal #36 was his Batmobile, so it ended up here to be with some more cars! His Batcave is still on the LEGO Ideas website, so you can still vote on it!
Description Plate 1 x 2 Slope Brick 31 1 x 1 x 0.667 Minifig Plume/ Flame Triple Wheel Rim 6.4 x 8 Bar 0.5L with Curved Blade 2L Car Mudguard 2 x 4 Swept Back Cone 1 x 1 with Stop Dish 2 x 2 Dish 2 x 2 Inverted Minifig Hat Fez Plate 1 x 1 with Clip Horizontal (Thick C-Clip) Plate 1 x 1 with Clip Light Type 2 Plate 1 x 2 Plate 1 x 2 with Groove with 1 Centre Stud, without Understud
Qty Color Part 4 Black 2540.dat 1 Black 3022.dat 1 Black 10247.dat 2 Black 4600.dat 1 Black 3020.dat 1 Black 47458.dat 1 Black 30602.dat 1 Black 41855.dat 1 Black 3700.dat 1 Black 3070b.dat 4 Black 3139.dat 2 Blue 4274.dat
Description Plate 1 x 2 with Handle Plate 2 x 2 Plate 2 x 2 with Hole and Complete Underside Rib Plate 2 x 2 with Wheel Holders Plate 2 x 4 Slope Brick Curved 1 x 2 x 2/3 with Fin without Studs Slope Brick Curved Top 2 x 2 x 1 Slope Brick Round 2 x 2 x 2/3 Technic Brick 1 x 2 with Hole Tile 1 x 1 with Groove Tyre 4/ 80 x 8 Single Smooth Type 1 Technic Pin 1/2
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Events
Event Report:
Skærbæk Fan Weekend
Article and Photography by Stephan Sander 60
Enchanted Forest by César Soares and Hugo Santos.
Over a decade ago, the first LEGO Fan Weekend was held in Skærbæk, Denmark. As the years went by, the event grew from a small gathering to one of the major meetings for AFOLs in Europe. However, the tenth LEGO Fan Weekend would be the last one ever to happen, and many thought it marked the end of an era... until another event was created to take its place. Skærbæk Fan Weekend premiered this year, and heading this first event was AFOL Stephan Sander. Here, he reflects on the past, present and future of Fan Weekend.
BrickJournal: Tell me about the history of the event—how it began, and how it grew up to last year, when LEGO was still an official part of the event. Stephan Sander: The very first LEGO Fan Weekend took place in 2004. Sadly I missed that one. But I know that it was small and cozy and a nice get-together of a couple of fans. The Skærbæk Fritidscenter (Conference Center) has two sport halls, but only one of them was barely filled with models. I guess back then nobody expected that this event would grow to what it became today. There were two facts which made this different from all the other great events I know. The first thing is the short distance to Billund, the heart of LEGO. It’s just one hour by car to drive and compared to the distance to most participants’ home, it’s literally just around the corner. This means it’s a good opportunity to visit LEGOLand. This also means that curious LEGO employees might show up at the event and check out what other AFOLs are doing with the bricks and get in touch with them.
Skærbæk is relatively close to Billund and LEGO headquarters, making it an ideal location for a LEGO fan event.
DENMARK Billund Billund
Skærbæk Skærbæk
Fredriksbergs bruk by Anders Nilssons.
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