Building Hogwarts

Almost 2 years ago now, my family went on a trip to the US and this included a visit to Legoland California. It was great fun, but at the end when I was browsing the shop I decided to buy a couple of the new Harry Potter sets as my souvenirs.

They were great sets, with all sorts of cool details. My son and I actually built the Great Hall set in the hotel room that night, despite knowing we'd have to pull it apart again for the flight back to Australia. Somewhere along the way I was left deciding that I wanted to expand on the sets a bit. I think the size of the main tower in the Great Hall set underwhelmed me a bit. I felt the rest of the detail warranted a bit of an upgrade. Anyway, when we got home I was still keen to do this, and made the mistake of hopping onto Bricklink for the first time. And things basically spiraled out of control from there...

This is my most recent complete picture of my Hogwarts build. Some elements have been added since then, but it's hard to get a complete picture of it all at once in its current room.

Weekly Challenge Builds weeks 2 and 3

Well, the whole posting each week thing sort of fell apart didn't it...
Anyway, here are the builds for weeks two and three of the daily challenge build:

Day Eight: The Boat that Floats. Well, long enough for the photo anyway. I didn't leave it long enough, but I think it would've sunk eventually.

Day Nine: A castle. Not having enough parts for a castle, and it being a Saturday I decided to build a watch tower instead.

Here we see Balthazar the Spiffy, master of the magic arts visiting his chum Sir Gui De Somgui.

Day nine was a horse. I used slightly modified instructions from the original 1978 castle which I found online.

Day ten: build a maze.

Day Eleven: Build a picture frame. Since I don't have any hard copy photos and all my art is best displayed without a frame, I decided to build.a minifig scale picture frame.

Day twelve: build a train. I don't have enough train wheels, so I used wagon wheels instead. I liked the design, so this was photographed, uploaded and quickly rebuilt into a space train.

Day eleven: a venus fly trap. Thanks to a luck op-shop find some months ago, I happened to have way more bright green thn I thought, including exactly the right parts for the 'jaws'. 

Day Twelve: Unicorn. I was working from school this time, so I just quickly added a horn to the horse from day nine.

Day Thirteen: Pirate ship. I'm particularly happy with the broadside being fired.

Day Fourteen: Build a scene from a favourite book. Here we see the heroes of the picture book Trumpets in Grumpetland by Peter Cross and Peter Dallas-Smith in their bunny buggy pulled by the noble Hercules.

Day Fifteen: Build an ice cream truck. I'd like to revist this one with a slightly better roof to allow more space for a server.

Day Sixteen: Build a dog house. The mighty and mightily flamboyant Hercules is seen here pondering the great questions of his life - is he a good boy and when will his master realise he's a bulldog, not a pug and build him a bigger house?

Day Seventeen: Build a flying saucer. Parts availability played a major part int he design, but I knew I wanted it hovering over the microscale town.

Day eighteen: Build a sports arena. I'd just demolished some creator sets which used lots of dark blue, so I decided to use that colour for the stadium.

Day Nineteen: Waterpark. Not something I would choose to build, and not something I would choose to keep around once build. Pretty quickly stripped for parts.

Day Twenty: Build a shark. Or in my case, build a set of power armour for a shark. I do want to revisit this one and update the arms a little, I ran out of time on the day.

Day Twenty-One: Build a bridge.

On Monday Victorian schools are starting to transition back to on-site learning, meaning that I won't be able to build Lego during recess like I have been during the remote learning we've been doing. I still hope to complete the daily challenges (there's only a week left) but the builds are likely to get smaller.

Snotblox in isolation: A week of Daily Challenge Builds (week 1)

I've become involved with my school's Lego Club (which is a new, virtual club we're running while in remote-learning mode. One of the main things we have been doing is a daily challenge build. I found a calendar online with 30 challenges on it, and we've been working our way through. I tend to build during what would normally be recess if I was not working from home. Anyway, I thought I'd post the daily challenge builds in weekly batches. Of course, I did not think of this until Day 10... The cycle actually starts and ends on Thursdays, so the next batch will go up on Thursday.

Day One: Build a Roller Coaster - most of the rock work comes from another project, so I did not need to build it all for this one.

Day two: build a town. I went microscale here due to lack of time and parts. Note the light house - those are white bricks! They're just so old and discoloured they almost match the tan ones.

Day three was Rocketship. I did start out trying to build something a bit more rocket shaped, but it ended up as another space pirate ship. It's okay, the kids in the club all went with more spaceship shaped builds than rocket ship shaped builds anyway.

Day four was The World's Tallest Tower. I know it meant to try to build the tallest tower you could, but that's really a build to do with kids, and since I have none, I decided to build a vignette showing two kids building the world's tallest tower.

Day Five was Aeroplane (spelled wrong as the calendar is American). I decided to rebuild a kit from childhood, but could not find all the parts (they're probably at my brother's place) and ended up using different colours. There's also some slight redesign as I couldn't find the engines or the vital 4x4 hinge plate used in the middle of the wings.

Day Six was The Perfect Pizza. I was working from School that day, supervising the handful of children of vital service workers who are coming in every day, so I took some parts with me. I knew I did not have parts to make anything like a Pizza itself, so I made another vignette. Here, Dad uses his shovel to pull the perfect pizza from the new pizza oven he's just built.

Day Seven was Robot, so I build this Mk.Ib Light Maintenane Trundler. It was also Wednesday, which is virtual online AFOL play date day, so I built a vignette to go with him later on.

Well, that's the first week's worth of challenge builds. I'll be back on Thursday to post the next batch, including Castle, Horse, and Boat That Floats!

Snotblox in isolation

Snotblox is still here. Sort of. We have not shot any video in ages (actually, Owen has the files for two shows somewhere, but right when he was gearing up to edit them, the education department decided he needed a new laptop, which turned out to be a downgrade from the old one, and that sort of killed his mojo...) but we're still active despite the current trying times.

• We've both joined the MUGs (Melbourne Lego User Group) on Facebook and will be posting stuff there.
• Owen's helping to run a Lego Club at his school which currently mostly means posting a daily build challenge and then going and building it while working from home.
• Greg's notorious Hogwarts has actually been fully assembled, transported and displayed (only once, and at a private function) so we finally know how big it is when it's all together.
• Owen's been indulging in virtual play dates with other local AFOLs and their CFOLs.
• Greg's house is having some renovations done which get in the way of the build area.
• Owen built this vignette showing what a normal Saturday night used to look like and has become all nostalgic. (That's Elliot on the couch with the Pizza and Greg's wife doing yoga. More importantly, Gracie the cat is supervising our shenanigans...)

More BrickLink Studio experients

I've been mucking about in BrickLink Studio some more which has been giving me some ideas for projects I want to make in real life. Mostly I'm just using the software to get an idea of what parts I'll need to acquire so I can muck about with the real bricks and get the design right.

Here's an early version of the hover ice cream truck with forward prongs in the style of the red truck.

I decided I wanted wheel arches, so it evolved into this. The proportions still looked wrong to me, so I've been experimenting with a slightly shorter version.

This is the sort of thing I have no chance of making for real with my current collection. I want to make big fancy space ships, but I don't really have the parts. The Rynocore Hercules here is the beginnings of a design I want to turn into reality. It will probably end up looking a bit different, but this is helping me work out the sort of parts I need for big space ship projects like this.

This render was done with POVray instead of Eyesight - this is quicker but gives a less photo real result. It shows the completed container tug.

Here's the tug with two containers attached - the eight prongs sticking out the front are the clamps which hold the containers together. There are technic pins for strength, but the clamps are the 'fictional' way the whole thing works. The tug also attaches via clamps.

An area I really want to work on is making large space ship engines. I don't have that many things which work so I want to spend time experimenting in software so I can work out what to buy.

Here's a close up on the tug with the containers attached. It's currently about 60 studs in total, meaning that if I was to fit four containers I'd be in S.H.I.P. territory. I like this idea because I can stagger out the costs by getting the containers one at a time.

I also finally had a chance to make a lego version of the Snotblox logo - I always wanted to do this, but I didn't have the right sort of parts in the right sizes. This log is technicaly impossible to build since you can't get one of those diagonal tiles in pink...

I'm going to start using this in upcoming videos and blog posts.

BrickLink Studio experiments

I've recently downloaded BrickLink's Studio software, which is very similar in concept to Lego's Digital Designer. The advantage is that you can convert models into wishlists on BrickLink so that you can buy the pieces needed to build them (much like LDD was originally designed to do before the Lego Designed By Me program was cancelled). It can also do a nice 3D render of your designs.
Naturally, I decided to have a go at designing some sort of hover car.

Since I like to display my cars infront of my collection of modular buildings, and since I've tailored my collection of modular buildings towards looking like a small American town in the 1950s, I decided to build a retro hover truck. I am thinking of modifying my buildings to give them a sort of 1950s dirty future look. This design is based on a wheeled truck I built to go with the town in it's normal 1950s state.

I've also been mucking around with a flying ice cream truck, but it's not really ready yet. The body needs a fair bit of tweaking to get the shape right and there's no interior at all yet. I do plan to order some of the parts to build these soon - I already have some of what I need.

Lego Galaxy Trucker

Recently Elliot has gotten very keen on the board game Galaxy Trucker. After playing it on Saturday I was struck by a thought - at some point I had seen a version of Galaxy Trucker built from Lego. So I told Elliot and we decided to have a go at making our own. This is the result.

As a result of what is in Greg's collection, we didn't end up building anything like the version I'd seen on Board Game Geek, and it's not an accurate recreation of the game pieces at all, but everything is recognisable as what it's meant to be. 

The modules are (reading from left to right, starting at the front of the ship) 

• Double cannons (which really should be purple, but Greg does not have much purple)
• Brown Alien Life Support (the only Macaroni pieces available were shades of brown so we built this instead of a crew module)
• Hazardous Cargo storage (with removable hazardous cargo pods under the grilles)
• Core (As far as I can tell, Greg's only got one of those hollow cone pieces so we're never going to be able to build another core in a different colour.)
• Double Battery
• Engine (It's impossible to build modules beside the engine due to the manoeuvring thrusters sticking out the sides - might need to change that)

 We did start a crew compartment, but dinner intervened. Elliot has been challenged to try to add more modules during the week. On Friday and Saturday I'll be going back and we might work on some more parts.

Owen Points At Things With Sticks Ep.1: Microscale Spaceships

Gasp! It's a new spin-off thing in which Owen shows off some of his MOCs. In this case, it's the pirate frigate Someone Else's Problem; captained by Eurydice Angle, consort of Hebredeese Iconoclast, the most feared pirate in the sector (if you don't count Flint Thunder!) and the RynoCore Oni  heavy lift cargo barge Indolent Tycoon under the command of Radcliff Pappas.
These are all perfectly sensible names and I shall fight you in the car park if you say otherwise.

Snotblox Ep.3: Creationary

Joined by international man of mystery Pete, the lads take on classic Lego game Creationary - it's like Pictionary but with Lego. This is Owen's family's enhanced copy; loaded down with extra parts after his mum spat the dummy when she had to build a snake and couldn't find the right parts. It's been loaded with tons of extra bits liberated from Owen's childhood (which explains why they are so grubby!) Can the lads not only build but also work out someone else is building such things as a house or a reindeer? Will they be defeated by washing machines or ambulances? Only by watching this video can you learn the truth!

Owen's MOCs - Spaceships

Now that we've got the blog running it gives me a convenient place to post some photos of some of my MOCs. These were built a few years ago, and all make extensive use of my childhood collection (which my mother did not immediately throw out when I left home, and which now lives with me once more) with a few more modern parts. Most of my modern parts are tied up in my extensive collection of Lego Town trucks which I don't really want to dismantle for MOC parts, so here we are. Although the parts are vintage, I've tried to use a lot of techniques which I never used as a child - extensive sideways building, different angles, and hiding studs with smooth tiles where I can.

This is the M:Tron Prospector. It was the first Lego spacceship I bought after leaving the Dark Ages. I had heaps of M:Tron as a kid, and I still love the colour combo. This started out as a fighter, but the engines just got bigger and bigger until I realised it was some sort of scout ship shuttle deal.

There's a magnet under the back for lifting containers and other things. It's not the best placement, but I never got round to improving it.

The base is needed to keep everything off the ground when the cargo magnet is in use. Not the big boat bow pieces used for the fuselage.

Head on you really get an idea of how big those engines are.

The Prospector can also carry the Hunchback Scrabble scout walker (which is inspired by an old Futuron robot from my childhood) and the mobile habitation pod (a sort of high tech tent)

With the M:Tron ship done, I decided to build a bad guy, so I dipped into Blacktron 2 (I had one Blacktron 1 kit, and the minifig from it was my favourite minifig for my entire childhood - I was a bit young when Blacktron 1 came out and missed a lot of it) to build the Reaver medium fighter. I mucked around a lot with angled wings as a kid, but never anything as extreme as this.

The whole body is built at angles which gives it a very interesting shape.

Oh dear. The first hover car. Of course I wanted to build hover cars! Hover cars are cool! Not sure why a Spyrius robot is driving it...

I used some car doors for fins at the back. I'd use this technique more if I had more doors...

I needed something to go between the sideways build fenders and decided to mimic the immortal Edsel by Ford. 

This is some sort of Blacktron dragster-y thing. I had a lot of cylinders, but unfortunately the nose piece was not something I had in anything other than Aquasharks markings or M:Tron or Ice Planet 2002. I try to ignore the clashing markings...

This is a very long vehicle for that dragster-ish feel since ti can't have the huge wheels at the back and tiny ones at the front, I wanted to emphasise the dragster look by stretching it and having the biggest possible engine-y looking area.

And there certainly are a lot of engine-y cylinder things!

I was running now on black by this point, so I decided to have a go at classic space colours. I never had classic space - it was before I was born. My cousins had some, and passed some of it on, and I had all of Ice Planet 2002, so no problem with the blue parts there. This is some sort of heavy lift shuttle I came up with.

The pod tucked in under the back is removable.

I wanted the canopy to fit like this, which was not easy. It took a lot of work to get it to fit securely - it was very fragile throughout most of the builf.

One thing I am very interested in now that I am back into Lego is building engines for spaceships out of different parts. Here I tried out some technic wheels.

With the cargo pod removed, you can see the load master's window and the clamps used to hold the pod.

I didn't have many vintage space men to pilot the machine, but I found this one and gave him a glorious piratical moustache.