The Grinch

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Green, ugly, and ruining beloved institutions, the Grinch and the Lamborghini Urus are, in this writer’s eyes, effectively the same thing.

Of course Lamborghini will sell more hateful Uruses than the rest of their range combined, such is the current automotive fashion, but this writer still violently dislikes every fibre of the damn thing.

Not so TLCB Master MOCer Lachlan Cameron (aka loxlego), who has recreated the automotive grinch in Technic form. And he has – begrudgingly – built an awesome model as a result.

Powered by the BuWizz 3.0 bluetooth battery, Lachlan’s Urus features remote control steering and all-wheel-drive, a V8 engine, working suspension, opening doors, hood and trunk, and – just like many real Urus customers, who somehow don’t consider Lamborghini’s travesty obnoxious enough – custom wheels and ‘carbon fibre’ bodywork accessories.

Further fantastic photography and a link to building instructions can be found at Lachlan’s Lamborghini Urus album on Flickr. Click the final link to see more of the vehicular Grinch, or those above to learn more about the builder of this model, and the excellent third-party battery that’s powering it.

I Predict a Riot…

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There’ll be no tenuous Christmas links in this post! No, this writer is altogether more gloomy, as COVID sweeps back across Europe, several nations have imposed strict lockdowns once more and – as is the want of a small but very vocal minority – that will mean some noisy protests. Because the main aim of this global conspiracy is clearly to stop people drinking in groups larger than six.

Sigh.

The Dutch look prepared though, at least if Ralph Savelsberg‘s Mercedes-Benz Vario riot van is anything to go by. Wonderfully constructed, Ralph’s riot van features opening doors, some really trick building techniques, and pair of suitably protected riot police officers.

Join the protest against, er… masks, maybe – we’re not sure – via the link above!

*Today’s title song.

Flying Home for Christmas

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Travelling home for Christmas is one of the great human experiences. All over the world people have boarded planes to visit relatives and friends from whom they have been separated. Mountains, deserts and oceans will pass underneath them, no longer a barrier to their passage, and a smiling hostess will announce ‘chicken or fish?’ before presenting them with a little tray of mostly edible content. They will stand together to watch gift-filled luggage circulate, before the festivities of Passport Control await.

OK, travelling home for Christmas sucks, but the ‘home’ part makes the ‘travel’ part entirely worthwhile. British Airways’ Boeing 777-300ERs are some of the countless aircraft that make the great Christmas migration happen, and BigPlanes 1:40 recreation captures the real airliner spectacularly. 25,000 pieces, working landing gear, flaps, and an astonishing complete mini-figure interior mean we can almost feel the Christmas-excitement in the cabin. Fly home for Christmas on BigPlanes’ British Airways Boeing via the link above. It’ll all be worth it once you’re home.

BRX(mas)

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Desert travel before the steam or combustion engine was a slow and sometimes dangerous business. The wise men may have taken a very long time to reach the baby Jesus, with no thanks to meeting a megalomaniacal king on route.

Today desert crossing could even be considered easy, thanks to vehicles like this; the Prodrive BRX Hunter. A purpose built Dakar rally buggy, the BRX is designed specifically to cross the desert as quickly and easily as possible, thanks to carbon-fibre construction and a mid-mounted V6 engine.

Inspired by the BRX is Martin Vala’s ‘BX T1+’, a stunning desert-crossing buggy complete with gull-wing doors, a gold roll cage, and the best brick-built chassis we have ever seen.

Due to our Christmas break, The Brothers Brick beat us to posting this (it’s a Christmas miracle!), but the Elves are now back on their travels once again, so normal service should be resumed. And their search shouldn’t be delayed by any megalomaniacal kings.

There’s more to see of Martin’s incredible Prodrive BRX-inspired ‘BX T1+’ on Flickr by clicking here, and we’ll be back soon with more tenuous Lego-based links to Christmas!

Merry Christmas Everyone!

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All is quiet here at TLCB Towers. The Elves are locked back in their cages, the TLCB staff have gone home for the holidays, and the only sound is the tapping of this TLCB writer’s keyboard echoing through the office.

We’ll be back in a few days, but if you need to get your Lego fix in the meantime, a few suggestions can be found below;

  • All our past posts are available in the Archives (you can search for pretty much anything and something will probably come up!)
  • The Review Library contains over one-hundred LEGO set, book, and third-party product reviews.
  • You can read interviews with some of the best Lego vehicle builders around by clicking here.
  • Proper Lego blogs, and a lot more besides, can be found in the Directory, which is full of useful links.

We’d recommend doing none of the above though. Switch off, take joy from the little things, and see what you can give back this Christmas : )

Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas

TLCB Team

Moggy Christmas

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It’s only two more sleeps ’til Christmas! Which means as the Elves have returned to TLCB Towers they’ve been placed back into their cages for their enforced Christmas ‘break’. They don’t mind working over Christmas of course, but we’d rather be down the pub, er… we mean ‘working at the homeless shelter’, so they’re confinement is necessary if we aren’t to come back to the office to find all the glue sticks have been eaten.

Seriously though, Christmas is far more important than this dumpster fire of the internet, so this is the last creation to appear here before we pause for a few days. It’s a really good one though!

Built by previous bloggee Wigboldly/Thirdwigg, this brilliant Mercedes-Benz Unimog U430 is everything we like to see in a Technic creation. There’s working steering and suspension, all-wheel-drive, a 4-cylinder engine underneath a tilting cab, a tipping load bed, and front and rear power-take-offs with the option of pneumatic attachments.

All in it’s really not far off the much larger official Technic 8110 Mercedes-Benz Unimog set, so if you missed your chance to buy that when it was on sale, Thirdwigg’s U430 is an excellent alternative you can build at home. Yup, he’s even made instructions available too.

There’s more of Thirdwigg’s build to see at his ‘U430’ album on Flickr, and you can check out his equally good Technic Unimog U500 and Unimog U400 models that have appeared here previously via the bonus links.

Click the coloured words in the text above to make the jumps to all things Unimoggy.

Ho-Ho-Ho

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Don’t worry kids, that’s not the real Santa. But the title still applies, and we expect his ‘elf’ is definitely going to do some stuff on the Naughty List.

Lasse Deleuran owns the mind behind this, er… Christmassy scene, and there’s more to see of ‘Santa’, his ‘elf’, and the mobility scooter upon which he’s riding on Flickr. Ho-ho-ho!

что-то странное в окрестности

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If there’s something strange
In the neighbourhood
Putin’s gonna call…
Ghostbusters!

If there’s someone gay
Or gender misunderstood
Putin’s gonna call…
Ghostbusters!

He ain’t ‘fraid of no ghost
He ain’t ‘fraid of no ghost

But he’s hearing things
That should not be said
Putin’s gonna call…
Ghostbusters!

A political threat?
Then you’ll end up dead!
Ow, Putin’s gonna call…
Ghostbusters!

Have we butchered the classic Ghostbusters theme song by Ray Parker Jr. just to tenuously link to Vladimir Putin’s human rights record? Yup! But to be fair it’s been ages since we received a good death threat.

Plus, of course, this rather wonderful creation is a VAZ/Lada 2104 estate that has been brilliantly converted into a Soviet Ecto-1, which makes re-writing that song almost mandatory.

We also happen to think it might just be cooler than the original Ghostbusters’ Cadillac ambulance. OK, no it isn’t, but it is a Lada converted into an Ecto-1, which does probably make it the coolest Lada ever.

Flickr’s Tony Bovkoon is the builder who has brought Ghostbusting to Russia, and there’s more to see of his fantastic Lada Ecto-1 on Flickr.

Click the link to call…
Ghostbusters!

Lightailing Light Starter Kit | Review

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It’s Christmas, the time of family, giving, food, and – most importantly, if this TLCB writer’s better half is to be believed – twinkly lights.

An industry devoted to lighting up LEGO sets has boomed in recent times, with many lighting kits for official LEGO sets already reviewed here at The Lego Car Blog.

But good as some of these kits are, what lights us up is builders designing their own creations. It’s what LEGO is all about, and yet there hasn’t been a product allowing builders to easily light up their own vehicular designs. So we asked LEGO lighting specialists Lightailing to make one…

This is what they sent us, the Lightailing Light Starter Kit, containing a power source (USB or coin-cell batteries), two expansion boards, connecting cables, and two bright white LEDs, two red LEDs, and a white self-adhesive strip light, all neatly packaged using the components readily available from Lightailing’s other kits.

So is the Lightailing Light Starter Kit any good, and what creation did we light up? Read on to find out! Continue reading →

Monotone Mixer

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We’ve nearly reached our Christmas closedown here at The Lego Car Blog, but we still have time for a few more creations before we turn off the lights and get drunk.

This one has amused us immensely, being perhaps the single least Christmassy creation that it’s possible to conceive.

The gloriously grey Volvo FM12 cement mixing truck pictured here comes from regular bloggee Damian Z. (aka thietmaier), who has applied his usual brilliant attention to detail to create a model that looks much, much larger than it actually is.

It’s also wonderfully mundane, and we like that. Because we’re weird. Weird enough to encourage more boring builds in 2022…

Was that a hint for a ginormous 2022 Building Competition?…

Moving on, there’s more to see of Damian’s excellent Volvo FM12 cement mixer truck at his photostream – click the link in the text above to jump into the mix.

The Car of Choice

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Car choice seems to be shrinking of late. Despite manufacturers creating ever more models, they mostly seem to be crossovers of marginally different sizing but uniform monotony.

Engine choices are shrinking too, with many cars in TLCB’s home nation available with just one. Thankfully the Germans, although very much on the make-everything-a-crossover bandwagon, do still offer a bewildering array of engine options.

However even that’s a bit of a ruse, as they’re pretty much all the same engine, only you have to pay extra for the software to release more power (which the engine already has, locked behind a paywall). Urgh.

Fortunately Wigboldly (aka Thirdwigg) of Flickr is railing against the current miserable new car situation with this, his ‘Ionos Sports Sedan’ Technic Supercar.

A good old-fashioned executive saloon, Wigboldly’s creation can be had with three different engines, rear or all-wheel-drive, and a manual or sequential gearbox, just like real cars used to be.

Of course if it were real, Wigboldly’s Ionis would totally bomb in today’s new car market, as it’s not a boring one-engined crossover with power-behind-a-paywall, but we’d still choose it!

Luckily Wigboldly isn’t trying to make money out of his design, what with it being Lego, but that even extends to the building instructions, which he has created and published for free.

We rarely publish direct links to instructions here at The Lego Car Blog, but we will today.

Click here to jump to the Ionis’s free building instructions on Rebrickable, where there’s more drivetrain choice than many cars on sale today, and give Wigboldly a thumbs up on Flickr via the link in the text above.

My Other Car’s Also a Classic Truck

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This is a UAZ 452-3303, one of many imaginatively named Soviet off-road van truck thingies designed during the Communist era.

The UAZ 452 was launched in 1965 with a 75bhp 2.45 litre petrol engine that could run on fuel as low as 72 octane (basically spicy water), and it’s still in production today, with nine different variants available.

This one, the 3303 dropside pick-up truck, is affectionally know as the ‘tadpole’, because it looks rather like one, and has been recreated beautifully in brick form by ArtemyZotov of Eurobricks.

It also continues our run of B-Models, being constructed entirely from the 10290 Creator Pickup Truck set. Opening doors, dropping bed sides, and a load of fruit and veg all feature, and there’s more to see – including a link to building instructions – at the Eurobricks forum via the link above.

Don’t Have a Cow, Man!

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¡Ay, caramba! This isn’t a car. But seeing as more of us reading this will have been on a skateboard than in a Pagani, it’s perhaps a more relevant than much of what we post!

Flickr’s grubaluk owns the mind behind this marvellous skateboarding Bart Simpson, which deploys LEGO’s Pull-Back Motor in excellent fashion.

Skate through Springfield via the link above!

My Other Car’s a Porsche

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LEGO’s excellent 10295 Creator Porsche 911 set has produced some wonderful alternates to date, and this might be our favourite so far.

The Chevrolet Corvette C3 was America’s answer to the Porsche 911 of the time, and is – at least in the eyes of this TLCB writer – still one of the best looking American cars ever made.

Capturing the C3 Corvette brilliantly, and using only the pieces from the 10295 Porsche 911 set to do so, is Lego-building legend and TLCB Master MOCer Firas Abu-Jaber.

Firas’ expertly presented creation recreates the iconic classic Corvette in T-bar form, with pop-up headlights, opening doors and hood, a superbly detailed engine bay and interior, and a removable targa roof.

It makes for one of the finest alternates from any set that we’ve seen yet, and best of all if you own the 10295 Porsche 911 set you can turn it into a Chevrolet Corvette C3 yourself, as Firas has produced building instructions too.

Head over to Firas’ ‘Corvette C3’ album on Flickr for the complete gallery, you can find the building instructions at his website here, and you can click here to read Firas’ interview in the Master MOCers series if you want to find out more about how he creates his amazing models such as this one.

My Other Car’s Also Really Small

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Fiat’s original 500 was really small. But back in the 1950s you could go even smaller.

Microcars, often dubbed ‘bubble cars’, were popular in post-war Europe, thanks to limited metal supplies, a need for cheap transportation, and a population that was still largely moving itself about by motorcycle. Or horse.

This is one of the most well known bubble cars, the BMW Isetta. Less well known is the fact it was actually an Italian design by ISO Rivolta that BMW produced under license, so it’s fitting therefore that this one is also built from the bits of an Italian car.

The work of previous bloggee Tomáš Novák (aka PsychoWard666), this beautifully presented BMW Isetta is constructed only from the parts found within the official 10271 Creator Fiat 500 set, although such is its accuracy you’d never know. Unless you see it alongside the 10271’s rather pointless easel of course…

Building instructions are available and there’s lots more of Tomáš’ BMW B-Model to see (including that give-away image) at both Eurobricks and Flickr – click the links above to take a look.