Attack of the Leviathan

When the LEGO Avengers Tower set was first announced, my attention was immediately drawn not to the tower itself, but to the Chitauri Leviathan model it included. It looked to be about the same size as my Flight of the Luck Dragon model, and thoughts of making it move in the same way started running through my mind.

As soon as the set was released, I downloaded the instructions, cobbled together a Leviathan with parts I had on had, and set out to recreate the scene from The Avengers where The Hulk faces off against a Leviathan on the Park Avenue Viaduct in New York.

You can see a demonstration of the model in action in the following video and find extensive build notes below if you’d like to build one for yourself. A full kit is also available from BuildaMOC.

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TRON Light Cycle Action Stand

I recently picked up the latest LEGO Ideas set, 21314 TRON: Legacy, and though it is a visually stunning model, I feel that it is a bit lacking in the display department. Specifically, the stand, and how the cycles are mounted, just seems a little too static to do justice to the action of the scene in the movie. I decided to see what I could do to breathe a little more life into the model, and designed an ‘action’ stand that allows you to change the angle of the light cycles while sweeping them from side to side. You can see it in action in the video, with a full description of how it works. Instructions and more info can be found below.

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Micro Ghost Millennium Falcon

Last week, I was in St. Louis for the FIRST Championships, showing off some robots in the LEGO Education booth. Unrelated to the robotics event, they had a table full of white parts, mostly from the Architecture Studio set, for people to build with. It’s a very interesting exercise to build using a single colour. You focus a lot more on the shapes of what you are creating, using texture to add detail instead of colour differences. I definitely wandered over to that table whenever I had a chance. Who can resist a table full of pieces? One model that came out of it was a micro scale Millennium Falcon. It wasn’t very accurate to the ‘real’ thing, as there was a limited selection of parts, but upon returning home I thought I would try to make a more accurate version at the same scale.

Ghost Falcon

Here are building instructions if you’d like to try to build your own. You can just use a regular 1×1 cone for the cockpit if you don’t have the squat cone that I’m using, which isn’t all that common.

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2017: A LEGO Odyssey

As I was thinking of projects to incorporate the PFx Brick into, one of the first ideas that popped into mind was to create a LEGO version of HAL 9000 from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Although it doesn’t exercise anywhere near the full capabilities of the PFx Brick, I felt HAL is such an iconic entity from the realm of classic science fiction that just hearing him speak from a LEGO model would be incredibly cool. I decided to have some fun with the video for it. Instructions for building your own can be found below.

If you are interested in the PFx Brick, be sure to check out the Kickstarter campaign we are currently running. If it is successful, I’ll provide instructions for integrating it into HAL, as well as the configuration I used for the lighting and sound.

https://youtu.be/qF7gChfsPig

The build is pretty straight forward, mostly using basic pieces for the interior. The red and yellow pieces can be swapped with any colour without changing the outward appearance of the model. The instructions include space for the PFx Brick and the XL Speaker behind the speaker grill, as well as some holes to run the wiring. Feel free to build up the entire interior with basic bricks if you’d rather, or fit in your own lighting.

I decided to name the LEGO version “HAL 0937”, for reasons which will be obvious to anyone who spent time writing words on their calculators in school.

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NCS Aries-K

If you’re not active in the online LEGO community, you may not be familiar with SHIPtember, wherein participants are challenged to build a large spaceship during the month of September. More specifically, the challenge is to build a spaceSHIP (Seriously Huge Investment in Parts) that must be at least 100 LEGO studs long. My friend Michael and I have long wanted to participate in this building challenge, but neither of us has been willing to commit the time and effort to it… until now.

One of the things that dissuaded us from participating in past years is that building a SHIP in a month typically means saying goodbye to all of your free time for that month. Michael suggested we tighten the timeline, turning it into a 24 hour marathon, and join forces with Kristal and Lucie, with the goal of building a SHIP over 200 LEGO studs long.

We started at 9:00 am Saturday morning, with the intention of building for a full 24 hours. Unfortunately, by the wee hours of the next morning it was clear our abilities were becoming severely hampered. Case in point, the core and exterior of the rotating habitat rings (my responsibility) have a bit of an unfinished look to them, and I would have loved to have spent the last few hours fleshing out the details of those areas. It just wasn’t happening though. We decided to call it a wrap after 21.5 hours and here is the result, the NCS Aries-K, serving all your Minifig’s needs on their trips to Mars!

NCS Aries-K Builders

It was a wonderful building experience, with a lot of fun, excitement and collaboration. Would I do it again? Probably not for 24 hours, but the idea of marathon building intrigues me. It really forces you to get to it, without spending hours agonizing over the little details.

If you are interested in seeing more of this ship and how it came together, I put together a couple of videos of the event. Here is one documenting the build session.

And an overview of the finished ship.

If you’d like to see the raw time lapse videos, Michael has posted them on his channel at brick dimensions.

Camera 1 – Camera 2

We broke down the building responsibilities roughly around our various areas of expertise, and this is how it worked out:

Michael – hanger bays, bridge and electrical engineering
Me – habitat rings and mechanical engineering
Kristal – engine and interiors
Lucie – interiors and crew

And here are the final specs of the ship:

– Dimensions – 237 x 90 x 90 studs (over 6 feet long!)
– Rotating habitat arcs powered by 2 Power Functions XL motors, with fully detailed interiors.
– Rotating crew accommodation ring powered by 2 Power Functions M motors.
– Rotating engine core powered by 1 Power Function M motor and illuminated by 3 RGB LED lights
– 2 forward hangar bay decks for receiving small spacecraft.
– 27 blinking navigation lights across the entire ship, including red/green port/starboard markers, white/red fore/aft lights on the arcs and white/red strobe navigation lights.

Motorized Micro AT-TE

I recently designed a six legged walking frame for another project and one of the first things that popped into my mind after designing it was that I could probably build a reasonable All Terrain Tactical Enforcer (AT-TE) from the Star Wars universe around it.

AT-TE

It’s built to a pretty small scale, maybe around 1/2 the size of a minifigure, but it’s still fully motorized, with a Power Functions IR receiver, AAA battery box and one M-motor crammed into it.  The basic frame I’m using for the AT-TE can only walk in a straight line, but as I demonstrate in the video below it can be extended to include 2 M-motors to achieve tank-style steering.

I also put together building instructions for the basic walking frame, which you can find here.

 

Enterprise Update

A 1:3250 scale LEGO model of the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D (Starfleet Galaxy class explorer) , from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

After building my Galor Class Destroyer I decided to revisit my Galaxy Class Explorer and give it a refresh.  The main goal of the update was to make the color scheme uniform, but I ended up tweaking some of the other details as well.