The Magazine for LEGO® Enthusiasts of All Ages! Issue 57 • June 2019
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BUILDING MICROSCALE: Wayne Tyler’s National Mall Rocco Buttliere’s Microscale Skyscrapers
Blake Foster’s Ugly Duckling
Instructions AND MORE!
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Issue 57 • June 2019
Contents From the Editor........................................................2
People Wayne Tyler’s National Mall Project...............3 Lighting the Washington Monument........11 Rocco Buttliere: Building Small Scale on a Large Scale.....14
Building Mike Koppe’s Challenging Build...................24 Blake Foster’s Ugly Duckling............................28 You Can Build It: USCSS Nostromo................................................32 The Justice League’s Hall of Justice..........42 Mini 6930 Space Supply Station................48 Minifigure Customization 101 Usurping a Theme: Evil Soliloquy..............58
Community Dinosaurs and a Coaster: James Burrows’ Jurassic World...................64 You Can Build It: Hot Dog Stand...................................................66 Aaron Fiskum: Launching Brick Formation.........................72 Community Ads...................................................78 Last Word.................................................................79 Bricks in the Middle............................................80
From the Editor: So we went small this issue. Microscale is the theme that I have the most fun with, as it’s the most challenging. It’s comparatively easy to build in minifigure scale (parts are built to that scale), but making smaller things is tough. Every part used in a micro is important, and working with the limitations of the brick often leads to some great learning experiences with building. A builder learns how to make the most out of a few parts with microbuilding.
June 2019 Issue 57
Publisher John Morrow
Editor in Chief Joe Meno
Photography Editor Geoff Gray Proofreader John Morrow
Our cover MOC is by a new builder, but you wouldn’t know that from the layout he built. Wayne Tyler’s work knocked my socks off at BrickSlopes last year, and I am happy to feature him in this issue. Rocco Buttliere’s work has been incredible and has been seen all over. His work is also here.
West Coast Editors Ashley Glennon
There are a lot more too, so don’t let me slow you down—get to the rest of the mag!
Japanese Bureau Editor Nathan Bryan
LEGO Ideas Correspondent Glen Wadleigh Contributors: Jared Burks, James Burrows, Rocco Buttliere, Christopher Deck, Aaron Fiskum, Blake Foster, Kevin Hinkle, Mike Koppe, Amado Pinlac, Daniel Claude Albert Stoeffler, Wayne Tyler, and Greg Hyland.
Joe Meno, Editor P.S. Have ideas or comments? Drop me a line at brickjournal@gmail.com. I’m open to suggestions and comments and will do my best to reply. 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! P.P.P.S. If you want info on a subscription, you can go to: http://bit.ly/BrickJournalSub or scan below! Website
Subscriptions
Many thanks to the websites who have served as mirrors for BrickJournal:
www.LUGNET.com, www.Brickshelf.com, www.peeron.com, www.brickmodder.net www.rustyclank.com
About the Cover: Wayne Tyler’s Capitol Hill rises above his National Mall display. Photo by Joe Meno. About the Contents: Rocco Buttliere’s Golden Gate Bridge reaches to the sky in this bird’s eye view. Photo provided by Rocco Buttliere.
Glossary AFOL (Adult Fan of LEGO) AFFOL (Adult Female Fan of LEGO) TFFOL (Teen Female 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) POOP (Pieces—that can be or should be made—Of Other Pieces)
SNOT (Studs Not on Top) LUG (LEGO Users Group) LTC (LEGO Train Club) MECHA (a large armored robot on legs, typically controlled by a pilot seated inside) MECH (a large piloted combat robot) 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 2011, 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 $62 Economy US, $74 Expedited US, $96 International, or $24 Digital Only 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, 9001 Barb Anne Court, Springfield, VA 22152, USA or admin@brickjournal.com. First Printing. Printed in China. 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.
Building
Wayne Tyler’s
National Mall Project Article by Joe Meno Photography by Wayne Tyler and Joe Meno
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I first saw this layout at BrickSlopes 2018, where it had its own display area. Basically an island made up of some tables, this allowed visitors to be able to take a look at the layout from all angles. The layout was of the National Mall in Washington, DC, and its scale let the viewer have a bird’s eye view of the landscape. The builder of this model is Wayne Tyler, and this is his first display.
12th Street, including the 12th Street Expressway.
Making environments is something that Wayne has done for years—he retired from 20+ years of work in the video game industry where he was a 3-D computer artist, creating environments and structures for the games he worked on, which included WWF Wrestling, Tiger Woods Golf, Littlest Pet Shop, and Sims 3. From there it wasn’t much of a jump to start building the same in LEGO, but he didn’t start LEGO building until 2015, and he began with a Star Wars set. While talking to him about his work, he told the story of how he began his LEGO building hobby: “In 2015, my daughter told me about a gift she had gotten her husband for Christmas—the Star Wars Advent Calendar. I was intrigued, but by the time she told me about it, it was early December and the price of the set had skyrocketed to the point where it wasn’t affordable. But I set up a reminder to be on the lookout for the Star Wars Advent Calendar the next year.” “When I got the 2016 Star Wars Advent Calendar, I had such a great time putting the simple models together every day through December that I thought, ‘I gotta do more of this’ and went looking for LEGO sets. Most of the LEGO line wasn’t of interest, but then I ran across the Architecture series, specifically the Lincoln Memorial. It was a must have
A look at the National Museum of American History, then the National Museum of Natural History.
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NMP The
National Mall Project
The full project is to have the entire National Mall with all museums, monuments, gardens, and government buildings from the U.S. Capitol Building to the Lincoln Memorial. And just for fun, throw in the Jefferson Memorial, the FDR Memorial and the MLK Memorial. Here is the projected schedule of building completions by year:
Year Four: Everything on the south side of West Potomac Park. Included will be the Korean War Memorial, the National Park Service Stables, the Sylvan Theatre, the MLK Memorial, the FDR Memorial, and the Jefferson Memorial.
Year One: The National Museum of African-American History and Culture, the National Museum of American History, the National Museum of Natural History, the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden, the National Gallery of Art West Building, the National Gallery of Art East Building, the Capitol Reflecting Pool, the Grant Memorial, “The Hill”, and the US Capitol Building. Year Two: The National Botanic Garden, the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), the National Air and Space Museum (NASM), the Hirshhorn Museum, the Smithsonian Arts and Industry Building, the Smithsonian Castle and associated art museums, the Freer Gallery of Art, and the Department of Agriculture Building. Year Three: Everything on the north side of the West Potomac Park between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, plus the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Included will be the Lincoln Memorial, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Constitution Gardens, the German-American Friendship 4 Gardens, the Lockkeepers House, and the World War II Memorial.
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Completed 1
Washington Monument
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Freer Gallery
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Smithsonian Castle
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Sackler Gallery
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Haupt Gardens
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African Art Museum
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National Museum of African-American History and Culture
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National Museum of American History
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National Museum of Natural History
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National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden
Under Construction 1 Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building
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National Gallery of Art West Building
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National Gallery of Art East Building
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Hirshhorn Museum
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Union Square Capitol Reflecting Pool
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National Air and Space Museum
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Capitol Hill
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National Museum of the American Indian
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House of Representatives Chambers
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National Botanic Garden
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Senate Chambers
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People
Rocco Buttliere:
Building Small Scale on a Large Scale! Article by Joe Meno Photography by Rocco Buttliere
Rocco Buttliere graduated from the Illinois Institute of Technology with a degree in architecture in 2017. Since then, he has been pursuing LEGO work fulltime as a freelance artist. He may have started school with the idea of one day becoming an architect, but he was fortunate to have landed several exhibition opportunities over the years as his body of work grew. These opportunities have allowed for the type of exposure he needed in order to receive commissioned work. There is still quite a lot of work to do in order to make it a truly viable and sustainable option for him, but it’s never lost on him just how lucky he is to have been offered the opportunities that have come his way thus far. BrickJournal was able to chat with him between displays at BrickUniverse, a traveling brick event. BrickJournal: When did you start building? Did you have a Dark Age? What got you out of it? Rocco Buttliere: I have been building with LEGO for as long as I can remember. I first started building sets back when the original Harry Potter line started in 2001. I also went through a Star Wars phase and eventually became interested in architecture early on during high school, when the modular buildings series started. It was around that time that I first started my current body of work, Landmark | Landscape, which now consists of more than fifty consistently-scaled models of landmarks from around the world. It’s been ten years since I started this body of work, and it’s safe to say that my architectural education and professional relationships with other LEGO artists have helped immensely in refining my skills, both as a builder and as a practicing artist.
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What got you into constructing architectural buildings? Having grown up in a suburb of Chicago, the years of visiting the city left an impression on me. I wanted to learn more about the variety of distinct architectural styles Chicago boasts. When I began to have the desire to express my fascination, LEGO was the natural medium of choice. Even after ten years of such relatively cohesive subject matter, I have never lost interest in continuing to discover new solutions and parts usage. The great thing about landmarks is that every corner of the world has them, and the potential to continue learning about new places and cultures is boundless! What’s your favorite theme, if it isn’t Architecture? I hold the modular series partially responsible for my architecture interests, so naturally, I would say this series has been a steadfast favorite. The only other sets I tend to collect are the skyline sub-theme of the Architecture line. I also have quite a bit of respect for the LEGO Ideas theme. There’s certainly a lot to be said for the value of fan community input on official LEGO sets; and some of the one-offs from Ideas have ended up being all-time favorites of mine.
BUILDING LONDON This layout started with the buildings in the foreground: (front) Westminster Abbey, (white chapel to the left of Westminster Abbey) Saint Margaret’s, and (center) the Palace of Westminster. This section consists of approximately 15,000 pieces. An expansion including the London Eye (which rotates), County Hall, Westminster Bridge, and the River Thames increased the part count overall to over 50,000 pieces!
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Building
Blake Foster’s
Ugly Duckling Article and Photography by Blake Foster
The M:Tron Magnet Factory, Blake’s largest project to date.
I’m Blake Foster, software engineer by day and LEGO Space enthusiast by night. I’ve been building spaceships for about 32 years, punctuated by only a short spell in high school and college when I was building less frequently and only MINDSTORMS. MINDSTORMS kept my love for LEGO alive in the time that would otherwise have been a Dark Age. One of my favorite creations of that era was a pair of stair-climbing robots that I raced to the top of the stairs at my parent’s house. I also had a particular fascination with bipeds and built one that could turn and follow a line. While I still think MINDSTORMS are really cool, I program computers all day and I prefer to focus on strictly artistic projects in the evening. My AFOL career got started one afternoon in 2007, just after college, when I decided out of boredom to build a LEGO spaceship. I was proud of it, so I went looking for places to share it on the Internet. I stumbled upon the Classic Space forum. There I found a community of AFOLs building spaceships that made mine look dumb. I shared it nonetheless with a title along the lines of “Ultimate Spaceship” (which felt a bit disingenuous having seen what other builders were doing), and promptly received feedback along the lines of it needs more greebles (details added to the surfaces to make it appear more complex) and too many studs showing. I was humbled, but I knew I wanted to build the kind of thing that the talented builders on that forum were making. Two weeks later I was working on my first SHIP (an acronym for Seriously Huge Investment in Parts—a model [usually a spaceship] that requires, well, a seriously large investment in parts and money).
I started building the Ugly Duckling around March 2015, with a sketching phase before that. This model was very much a reaction to my previous MOC, the M:Tron Magnet Factory. I loved M:Tron as a child, and while I enjoyed paying homage to it, I had also grown weary of the constraints imposed by rigidly adhering to a subtheme. Once I was free of those constraints, I wanted to build something as weird as possible. The Ugly Duckling has a motley assortment of colors, the structure is deliberately bent and lopsided, and there are masses of greebles poking out in every direction. There are no clean lines or graceful sweeping curves. I wanted it to look like it was built by engineers with no regard for aesthetics, but be beautiful in spite of itself. That is how I came up with the name Ugly Duckling. I made up a backstory to fit the name later: “The Ugly Duckling is a scientific research ship intended to explore the distant corners of the galaxy in search of new habitable worlds. It got its name after the Earth government failed to learn from an incident involving a boat in the early 21st century, and held a contest on the galactic network to name the ship. Ugly Duckling won, and considering it karma, the Earth government honored the contest results.” When I am designing, I have trouble visualizing what I want to build before I have the physical bricks in my hands. While I do start by sketching, I do so only to get inspiration, because my plan inevitably changes when I start building. In this case, after a few evenings of building, I scrapped the rough sketch of the front of the ship I’d been following, and repurposed what I’d built to fit a new sketch that I would follow for the rest of the build. The sketch only really captured the overhead profile, leaving most of the details and nuances of the shape to be figured out with the physical bricks. I work kind of hierarchically to figure out those details. I start with simple mock-ups of sections of a model that capture only the basic shapes, and then refine those shapes until the eventual form of the model has revealed itself to me. I’ll iterate until I feel inspired, or scrap an idea to try something different. Sometimes that inspiration works in strange ways—for example, when I built that section near the back of the ship just above the main engine with the illuminated windows, I was actually building it for the bottom of the ship, but then I rotated it 180 degrees and put it on top. In doing so I ripped out everything I had already built for that part of the top of the ship, scrapping at least a few evenings of work. In terms of building, the front section was the most challenging, because it’s made up of three heavy, bulky sections surrounding a hollow tube. The walls connecting those three sections are slim, and greebled inside and out, which leaves very little room for supporting structure. The left and right parts of the ship aren’t actually connected on top until behind the yellow area. There is a connection on the bottom, but it’s only about four plates thick. I got it to hold together by building the frame studs-forward, which made the skinny walls much stronger, but the two sides of the ship would flop and sag, forcing me to figure out how to tightly pack greebles into a space of uncertain dimensions. I had to build temporary supports to hold parts of the ship in alignment, and in one of the earlier photos, the right side of the ship is propped up by a block of wood.
The Ugly Duckling, seen from the right front.
A rear view of the Ugly Duckling, showing the engines.
One of the Ugly Duckling’s two side bays.
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You Can Build It MINI Model
USCSS Nostromo Design and Instructions by DanSto
The USCSS Nostromo spaceship appears in the famous horror/science-fiction movie Alien, directed by Ridley Scott in 1979. With a crew of seven people, it operates as a hauler for the transportation of a huge refinery between the Earth and outer colonies. During its final travel in 2122, it was landed on the moon LV-426 in order to explore a crashed derelict and was infected by an alien creature which killed most of the crew. A large part of the action takes place aboard the Nostromo up to its self-destruction before the end of the movie. As a fan of the movie, I wanted to build models inpired by it. After having built the creature at different stages of its growth, some based on the Arvo brothers’ creations (see https://www.flickr.com/photos/77709542@N06/27662860880/), I am now trying to build some of the ships appearing in the movie. The present microscale model of the Nostromo is the first achieved vessel. As a guide for the build, this iconic spaceship is detailed on several websites with blueprints and pictures from the movie, and the 3-D model by Starrigger was also very helpful. The microscale Nostromo model pulling the refinery by RemcoRohaan on Flickr was another source of inspiration, but my version is finally completely different from his. The main challenge was to include the two pairs of lateral square propulsors and the four small back propulsors, in addition to the three large truncated conic ones. These details explain the final size of the model. Including the forward sensor pylon was another challenge: It is solved by combining a black droid arm and a new black wand. The size of the model allows to display the cockpit, three landing gears, and a detailed docking arm clamp connector with the atmospheric intake port represented by legs. Finally, a trans-clear stand displays the 32 short model nicely.
Parts List (Parts can be ordered from Bricklink.com by searching by part number and color)
Qty Color 1 Trans Clear 1 Trans Clear 1 Trans Clear 4 Dark Bl. Grey 1 Dark Bl. Grey
Part 3960.dat 4070.dat 30359a.dat 3024.dat 15573.dat
Description Dish 4 x 4 Inverted Brick 1 x 1 with Headlight Bar 1 x 8 with Brick 1 x 2 Curved Top Plate 1 x 1 Plate 1 x 2 with Groove with 1 Centre Stud, without Understud 2 Dark Bl. Grey 25269.dat Tile 1 x 1 Corner Round 2 Black 3024.dat Plate 1 x 1 2 Black 6141.dat Plate 1 x 1 Round 1 Black 26047.dat Plate 1 x 1 Round with Horizontal Handle on Side 3 Black 33286.dat Brick 1 x 1 x 2/3 Round with Scala Base 1 Black 36752a.dat Minifig Tool Wand 1 Black 59230.dat Minifig Mechanical Arm Straight 2 Light Bl. Grey 2431.dat Tile 1 x 4 with Groove 4 Light Bl. Grey 2555.dat Tile 1 x 1 with Clip 3 Light Bl. Grey 3020.dat Plate 2 x 4 4 Light Bl. Grey 3021.dat Plate 2 x 3 4 Light Bl. Grey 3022.dat Plate 2 x 2 17 Light Bl. Grey 3023.dat Plate 1 x 2 6 Light Bl. Grey 3024.dat Plate 1 x 1 4 Light Bl. Grey 3069b.dat Tile 1 x 2 with Groove 5 Light Bl. Grey 3070b.dat Tile 1 x 1 with Groove 9 Light Bl. Grey 3623.dat Plate 1 x 3 2 Light Bl. Grey 3666.dat Plate 1 x 6 2 Light Bl. Grey 3700.dat Technic Brick 1 x 2 with Hole 5 Light Bl. Grey 3710.dat Plate 1 x 4 1 Light Bl. Grey 3839b.dat Plate 1 x 2 with Handles Type 2 6 Light Bl. Grey 4070.dat Brick 1 x 1 with Headlight 2 Light Bl. Grey 4081b.dat Plate 1 x 1 with Clip Light Type 2 2 Light Bl. Grey 4274.dat Technic Pin 1/2 4 Light Bl. Grey 11477.dat Slope Brick Curved 2 x 1 1 Light Bl. Grey 15535.dat Tile 2 x 2 Round with Hole 1 Light Bl. Grey 15573.dat Plate 1 x 2 w/Groove w/1 Ctr Stud, without Understud 2 Light Bl. Grey 24201.dat Slope Brick Curved 2 x 1 Inverted 2 Light Bl. Grey 26047.dat Plate 1 x 1 Round with Horizontal Handle on Side 2 Light Bl. Grey 32028.dat Plate 1 x 2 with Door Rail 5 Light Bl. Grey 34103.dat Plate 1 x 3 with 2 Studs Offset 2 Light Bl. Grey 36841.dat Bracket 1 x 1 - 1 x 1 Down 1 Light Bl. Grey 41879a.dat Minifig Hips and Legs Short w/o Hole 1 Light Bl. Grey 47905.dat Brick 1x1 with Studs on Two Opp. Sides 2 Light Bl. Grey 52107.dat Brick 1 x 2 with Studs on Sides 6 Light Bl. Grey 54200.dat Slope Brick 31 1 x 1 x 0.667 2 Light Bl. Grey 59900.dat Cone 1 x 1 with Stop 2 Light Bl. Grey 60478.dat Plate 1 x 2 with Handle on End 2 Light Bl. Grey 61409.dat Slope Brick 18 2 x 1 x 0.667 Grille 1 Light Bl. Grey 61678.dat Slope Brick Curved 4 x 1 2 Light Bl. Grey 63864.dat Tile 1 x 3 with Groove 2 Light Bl. Grey 75535.dat Technic Pin Joiner Round 2 Light Bl. Grey 85984.dat Slope Brick 31 1 x 2 x 0.667 2 Light Bl. Grey 87580.dat Plate 2 x 2 w/Groove w/1 Centre Stud 3 Light Bl. Grey 98100.dat Brick 2 x 2 Round Sloped 2 Light Bl. Grey 98138p06.dat Tile 1 x 1 Round w/Headlight Pattern 1 Light Bl. Grey 99207.dat Bracket 1 x 2 - 2 x 2 Up 1 Light Bl. Grey 99780.dat Bracket 1 x 2 - 1 x 2 Up
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You Can Build It MINI Model
The Justice League’s Hall of Justice Design and Instructions by Amado Pinlac Building in microscale is less forgiving than system scale because there is almost no room for error. Either your creation resembles the reference object or not, so piece choice is very critical to give life to the build. Instead of real structures, these two iconic buildings in the comic super-heroes universe have been given the microscale treatment. The Hall of Justice was constructed by the Justice League of America a year after the destruction of the previous Justice League Watchtower, and located in Washington, D.C. The Hall was designed by John Stewart and Wonder Woman, financed by Batman, and built from scratch by Superman.
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Parts List (Parts can be ordered from Bricklink.com by searching by part number and color)
Qty 6 2 4 14 4 1 16 2 5 4 2 4 4 4 2 7 2 3 2 12 1 8 1 2 3
Part Color 2412b.dat White 2431.dat White 2877.dat White 3004.dat White 3005.dat White 3020.dat White 3023.dat White 3028.dat White 3069b.dat White 3070b.dat White 3666.dat White 3710.dat White 4162.dat White 4865b.dat White
Description Tile 1 x 2 Grille with Groove Tile 1 x 4 with Groove Brick 1 x 2 with Grille Brick 1 x 2 Brick 1 x 1 Plate 2 x 4 Plate 1 x 2 Plate 6 x 12 Tile 1 x 2 with Groove Tile 1 x 1 with Groove Plate 1 x 6 Plate 1 x 4 Tile 1 x 8 Panel 1 x 2 x 1 with Rounded Corners 6231.dat White Panel 1 x 1 x 1 Corner with Rounded Corners 6636.dat White Tile 1 x 6 15712.dat White Tile 1 x 1 with Clip (Thick C-Clip) 30055.dat White Fence Spindled 1 x 4 x 2 30565.dat White Plate 4 x 4 Corner Round 48092.dat White Brick 4 x 4 Round Corner 87079.dat White Tile 2 x 4 with Groove 3005.dat Trans Med. Blue Brick 1 x 1 6141.dat Trans Med. Blue Plate 1 x 1 Round 54200.dat Trans Med. Blue Slope Brick 31 1 x 1 x 0.667 15573.dat Light Bl. Grey Plate 1 x 2 with Groove with 1 Centre Stud, without Understud
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Building Since the release of the M.O.D.O.K. LEGO Minifigure, something has been missing from the LEGOverse. In order to explain, we have to examine the backstory of M.O.D.O.K. He started out in life as an average technician by the name of George Tarleton. Ultimately, poor ole George found his fate forever changed thanks to a random selection by his boss, the Scientist Supreme of Advanced Idea Mechanics (A.I.M.). The Scientist Supreme needed a unique, bio-engineered “living computer” in order to plumb the mysteries of the Cosmic Cube. George was subjected to hideous experiments, mutating his body into a massive-headed being possessing superhuman intelligence and extraordinary psionic powers, all created by a process that drove him madly insane. Given the code-name M.O.D.O.C. (“Mobile Organism Designed Only for Computing”), George instead turned on his superiors, slaying them all and declaring himself Scientist Supreme. Moreover, he changed his name to M.O.D.O.K., with the “K” standing now for “Killing.” As Scientist Supreme, M.O.D.O.K. is in need of his confederates, his LEGOverse missing A.I.M. Agents.
M.O.D.O.K. – Photo and custom chair by Jeff “Octopunk” Cross
Minifig Customization 101
Usurping a Theme: Evil Soliloquy Article and Photography by Jared K. Burks 58
For those unfamiliar with everything in that first paragraph, I hope I at least have your attention. A.I.M. (Advanced Idea Mechanics) is an organization of brilliant scientists and their hirelings dedicated to the acquisition of power and the overthrow of all government by technological means (i.e., Evil Tony Stark types). A.I.M., organized during World War II, was the scientific research division of the subversive military organization Hydra; however, they seceded from Hydra in the late ’60s because of political differences and began independent operations. A.I.M. first came to public attention when it was incorporated as an international cartel dealing with the development and marketing of new technological products. It supplied hardware and weapons to governmental and quasi-governmental agencies. Sometime after this, Colonel Nick Fury of S.H.I.E.L.D. exposed A.I.M. to be a subversive organization. Since then, all of A.I.M.’s activities have been covert. In the Marvel world, A.I.M. has only had three major achievements: the Super-Adaptoid, the Cosmic Cube containing an Infinity Stone, and M.O.D.O.K. Thus, M.O.D.O.K. needs to meet his makers! [Footnote: M.O.D.O.K. and A.I.M. biographies were modified from Marvel.com]
A.I.M. Poster – Don’t call us, we’ll call you, by Mike Mahle: AIM Recruitment Poster: https:// www.deviantart.com/mikemahle/art/A-I-Mrecruitment-poster-304721029
M.O.D.O.K.’s A.I.M. Agents wear a very distinctive yellow outfit with a beekeeper’s-style helmet. Before proceeding, we need to discuss the elephant in the room: The color. I took a bit of creative license following LEGO’s lead, which was to substitute the Yellow color for Bright Light Orange, just as LEGO has done with the Yellow Lion from Voltron. This makes other possibilities, which will be featured in the second act of this evil plot. The main required element will be the beekeeper helmet, which does not exist in LEGO, so I set out to create it for this article. I have been wanting to use my 3-D printer for more things so I started by learning to
use Autodesk Fusion 360 software. This software is free for makers and widely touted as the best option, and I have long wanted a project to learn it, so what better than the A.I.M. Agents’ helmet?
Using Fusion 360 to create an A.I.M. Helmet
1. Create an outline of the Helmet in the Sketch mode. Note that I only drew ½ of the design and the helmet features a collar, which I included.
2. Use the Revolve option under the Create Tab to take the basic sketch and turn it into a solid object.
3. Select the Fillet Tool under the Modify Tab to round the top and bottom edges of the helmet.
4. Did you notice from the inspirational images a small clipped triangle from the front of the collar? Draw this on the Sketch option.
5. Next, we have to move this out from the center plane and extrude the triangle.
6. Subtract the triangle by using the Combine Function under the Modify Tab. Select Subtract from this function.
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