Author Archives: Dr Asp Menace

Blue on Blue

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Skymaster

Given the USAF’s propensity for shooting its allies and own forces, painting “Don’t Shoot” in large letters on your aircraft isn’t as silly as it first seems. During the Vietnam War era, when precision systems such as GPS weren’t invented and other electronics such as IFF were unreliable, it was a very practical thing to do. Forward Air Control  was, and still is, a high risk business.

Whilst the custom stickers might be the first thing that catch your eye on Henrik Jensen’s Cessna O-2 Skymaster, there’s other stuff to see too. Henrik has added some military stores under the wings and changed the windscreen from the trans-clear of his civil version, to a toned-down trans-brown. Take a look at Henrik’s MOC on Flickr and then see Danny Glover flying the real thing in the highly fictionalised, BAT*21.

Volksrods

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VR01

Everyone here at The Lego Car Blog enjoys a good hotrod*, so we were charmed by this pair from Tim Henderson on Flickr. Both cars use the ready-made LEGO car nose, angled to get the look of Volkswagen’s classic Beetle. The thing that really grabbed our attention are the nicely greebled engines, which are different for each car. Click this link to see more details in their Flickr album.

VR02

*Yes, and so does your Mom.

Well Groomed

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Piste Basher 01

“Well Groomed” is an epithet hardly ever applied to The Lego Car Blog Elves. Bickering, fighting and speaking a strange guttural Elvish language often leaves our workforce looking as though they’ve been asking for directions in Wales.

However, Samuel Wharfe has produced this very nicely turned out Snow Groomer (Piste Basher if you’re British) using just the parts from the 42038 Arctic Truck. Samuel has produced a neat, good looking vehicle from possibly one of the strangest and ugliest Technic sets of all time. He has also included several of the most important working functions.

There’s a raising & lowering tail, to produce the smooth “corduroy” lines in the snow that early bird skiers enjoy. There’s a lifting & lowering bulldozer blade, which can also be swivelled in order to sculpt the features in the snowpark. Lastly, there’s a winch to enable the machine to wind itself up the steepest of slopes. In reality, the cables on these winches can be over 1.5km long and swing about a lot. Piste bashing is done at night (when nobody is supposed to be skiing) and the cables make moonlight skiing in modern resorts a high risk sport.

Click these links to see more photos and details on Flickr or to join in the discussion on Eurobricks.

A Bolt from the Blue

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Lego Saab Viggen Fighter

For many years Saab advertised their cars as being built by the only company which also built aeroplanes. Both the cars and ‘planes were esoteric products with cult followings. Be it the sci-fi styled Drakken, the tank-like 900 or the canard-delta Viggen, the designs were certainly individual. The Viggen (Thunderbolt) was designed with some very specific requirements of the Swedish Airforce in mind. It had to be capable of operating from short, rough airstrips but also capable of Mach 2 performance. This led to an unusual wing layout for short take offs, coupled with automatic thrust-reversers for short landing, which enabled the aircraft to almost handbrake turn, as shown in this video.

Sweden’s Stefan Johansson has posted this very nice model of the original AJ-37 version of the Viggen on Flickr. Its grey/natural metal finish is very similar to the last flying example, operated by the Swedish Airforce Historic Flight. Stefan has done a great job of capturing the Viggen’s compound delta wing and area-ruled fuselage in bricks. The model also includes working landing gear. To see more photos of this and Stefan’s other models of Saab fighter jets, you can visit his Photostream at this link.

Lego Saab Viggen 01

“Like a Bat Out of Hell…”

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Mitchell

“…I’ll be gone-gone-gone.”; just like most of this B-25J’s brothers have gone to the great hangar in the sky.

Despite a production run of nearly 10,000, which would be impressive for many of the marques of car that we feature here, there are fewer than 50 B-25 Mitchells left flying today. The B-25 first flew in 1940 and finally retired from military service in 1979. Being an unglamorous, workhorse, medium bomber, the B-25 didn’t get the fame of the fighters or the heavies such as the B-17 or B-24. However, it was famous for being flown off an aircraft carrier in Lt Col Jimmy Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo. Modern audiences will know it as the aircraft of Capt Yossarian in Joseph Heller’s classic “Catch-22”.

The version featured here was built by Florida Shooter on MOCpages. He has built it in the markings of the 499th Bomber Squadron – “Bats Outta Hell” and we like how the squadron’s distinctive nose art has been brick-built, rather than applied with stickers. The particular mark is the B-25J2, with the “strafer nose”. Click this link to view the detailed photos and see if you can spot all 18 of the aircraft’s Browning M2 machine guns.

MEDIC!!

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Ambulance

“Medic!!”, is a cry that can often be heard screamed in Elvish across the TLCB executive editorial penthouse. Our research team enjoy every possible opportunity to smush each other into the deep shag carpet. Well, we assume that’s what they’re shouting. To be honest we’re a monoglot lot and haven’t a clue what they’re saying. We tend to conduct negotiations with our crew in terms of the carrot and stick (Mr. Airhorn and Smarties).

If Elvish paramedics were to respond to the call, they’d do well to turn up something like this vintage VW Splitscreen Barndoor Ambulance from redfern1950s on Flickr. Included in its description are details of how these vehicles differed from the minibuses from which they were converted. Redfern’s photostream is well worth a visit. It also contains fire engine, pick-up and hearse versions of this classic vehicle, plus his interpretation of Colin Furze’s hoverbike.

Trouble At Mill…

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DD

Regular readers will be all too aware of how our workforce enjoy using their finds of Lego machines to attack and smush each other. Unfortunately it looks as though this sort of behaviour is spreading, as witnessed here in Gary Davis’ Duelling Diggers.

Gary was commissioned to build these and other models for this animated advert, encouraging people into careers in the construction industry. The film is short and fun and well worth watching (a bit like our Elves). Whilst you’re doing that we’ve got to mend the TLCB photocopier, as one of the cross beams has gone out of skew on the treadle…

Micro Machines

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Micro 01

The tiny minds of The Lego Car Blog Elves are often attracted to tiny things. Today they’ve returned with two vehicles. First up is a Micro Scale Rat Rod from Primoz Mlakar. The car has been photographed on a neat, forced perspective background. Second is an even tinier motorbike. The Velocitech Vortex has been built by Dylan Denton and features a minifgure hand kick stand.

Remember, you don’t need loads of Technic and expensive Power Functions motors to be featured here. Think about what components you have in your collection and how you might use them creatively and you never know, our Elves might pay you visit.*

micro 02

*Please note that TLCB declines responsibility for damages caused by Elves attempting to breach any security measures that you might use to protect your Lego.

A Long Time Ago…

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BB CS Speeder

…in a galaxy far, far away, smiling spacemen were busily carrying out various tasks, exploring a planet with all sorts of new rovers and spaceships. It was 1978 and they were totally unaware that a year earlier the evil Darth Vader and his cohorts had exploded onto the big screen. Nearly 30 years later and TLCB regular Billyburg has fused the two genres together perfectly in his Classic Space Landspeeder. Click the link and zoom into the full sized photo on Flickr to admire the greebling and economic building style. We just hope that those innocent looking spacemen are prepared for their visit to Mos Eisley, as it doesn’t rate well on TripAdvisor.

Well, Do Ya Punk?

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Punk Car

We’re feeling quite lucky here at TLCB Towers. Having found a very nice Blower Bentley yesterday, we’ve found this British Racing Green, steam punk roadster today. Moko is its creator and you can see more of the car and accompanying mech on his Photostream and even more on his blog.

Colouring the Apocalypse

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Karf Apoc

There seems to be a convention that following any variety of apocalypse (atomic, global warming, asteroid impact, alien invasion, zombie outbreak, massive Elf-fight, etc..), the overall decor will be rather drab. Tones of brown, black and grey will predominate, with the occasional beige camper van. Fortunately Flickr’s Karf Oohlu has decided to cheer everyone up with a pair of brightly coloured post-apoc vehicles. Click this link to his Photostream to enter his weird world.

Not a Car

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Tug 01

“Not a Car” is The Lego Car Blog’s default title for the ‘planes, trains, boats, spaceships and other stuff that we occasionally feature here which is not a car (or truck, or lorry, or other motorised thing with wheels). JPascal Taipei has created this tug boat, only it’s not a tug boat, it’s sort of a spaceship. Only it floats in the air, so it’s an airship but it doesn’t have a gas bag, so it’s not an airship. You begin to see why sci-fi causes chaos and confusion in the TLCB editorial suite. Regardless, we think that it’s rather nicely designed and we like the clockwork winch play feature. You can see more of it and its Lego siblings from the strange world of Ian McQue by following this link to JPascal’s Photostream.

tug02

Transformers…

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Yellow Lorry 02

…are actually pieces of electrical equipment. Regular readers of TLCB will know of the Elves’ obsession with the Transformers franchise. Finding the best Lego cars on the internet provides Smarties and meal tokens but happiness involves explosions, robots, more explosions and Megan Fox. You can imagine their excitement at finding Jakeof_’s latest build. The smoothly modelled DAF XF95 tractor, towing a Nooteboom Pendel-X trailer with a large transformer as its load is typical of Jakeof_’s style. You can also imagine their disappointment once they realised what sort of transformer it actually was. Still, we’re happy with our find and recommend that you visit Jakeof_’s Photostream to see the details.

Yellow Lorry

Baby Bumble Bee

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Sam C BB 01

As we have previously noted here, here, here, and here (oh, and here), The Lego Car Blog Elves love Transformers. Well actually they love the noise, violence and explosions of the films and have established a small shrine to Megan Fox behind the photocopier. Both they and we couldn’t resist this cute, Chibi-Bee from Sam Cheng on Flickr. The car mode looks great, with some NPU of silver bars on the bonnet and the robot mode is extremely cute, with its bewildered cross-eyes and banana ears. All of this happy cuteness put us in mind of this song.

Sam C BB 02

Mini Mercedes-Benz Arocs Review

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arcos 01

No this isn’t a review of Lego Technic’s monster machine, we’ve already done that. This is a review of Andy L’s mini version, which packs almost the same functionality into a chassis that is just 8 studs wide. It steers, has fold-out stabilisers, it tips and has a very manoeuvrable arm. Andy has also made his own grabber bucket, rather than use Lego’s ready made part. Watch the stop-motion video below and then click on this link to MOCpages to see all of the details.