Passing wind never smelt so good. Elven* adventurers Eol Skydiver and Kaledor Tesliar are traversing the atmospheric circulation in their magicanical botanical airship. We know not how it works, not where they’re going, but we’re delighted to float alongside them. Dwarlin Forkbeard is the director of this aeronautical adventure and you can join him, Eol and Kaledor via the link above.
*TLCB Elves must be a different sort. Their wind makes your eyes hurt.
This year’s Febrovery is just over half-way through, with interplanetary oddities of all shapes and sizes appearing by the dozen. This one comes from martin.with.bricks, rocking a Neo-Classic Space aesthetic, swing-arm mounted wheels, and a giant roof-mounted ray gun. Oh, this is Classic Space – we mean ‘scientific research device’. There’s more of Martin’s Febrovery entry to see on Flickr, and you can join the roving via the link above.
Are you an ostentatious wealthy douchebag but your name’s Tanner rather than Al Mahmood? Then have we got the vehicle for you!
Powered by a 700hp V8, and with two extra wheels because… more, this is the Hennessey Ford Velociraptor, the perfect vehicle in which to win America’s ongoing pick-up truck arms-race.
Built by previous bloggee Rolic, this excellent Model Team recreation of the pointless pick-up features opening doors, tailgate and hood, a detailed interior and engine, working steering, and suspension on all six wheels.
There’s lots more to see at Rolic’s ‘Ford velociraptor’ Flickr album and you can one-up that guy in the Dodge Ram 3500 via the link above.
Nowhere has the pace of development through conflict been faster than in early aeronautics.
Less than a decade-and-a-half after the first ever powered flight – in which the Wright Brothers climbed 10ft into the air and travelled 120ft at 6.8mph – pilots could climb to 19,000ft and fly for 300 miles at well over 100mph. At least, you could if you were piloting a Sopwith F.1 Camel.
In service from 1917, the Camel scored more enemy kills than any other Allied aircraft during the Great War, and was a formidable fighter in both dog-fights and ground attacks. Until a year later, when it was obsolete.
Today just eight Sopwith Camels survive, but you can take a closer at this one courtesy of Flickr’s _Tiler, who has recreated the famous First World War fighter beautifully in brick-form, and presented it rather nicely too.
Head into the skies over France in 1917’s top fighter aircraft via the link above.
The Lego Car Blog Elves – being simple creatures – see an orange digger, and they like it. We, The Lego Car Blog Staff, are far more sophisticated; the Elves brought us an orange digger, and we liked it.
Constructed by kralls_workshop, this neat skid-steer loader features a mechanically-operated arm elevation and bucket tilt (via knobs at the rear), opening doors, plus interchangeable attachments. Free building instructions are available (one hundred TLCB Points Krall!) and you can find full details and imagery at both Flickr and Eurobricks.
Remote control all-wheel-drive, gearbox operation, steering, and all-wheel suspension, are features normally associated with large Technic Supercars with thousands of parts. Today however, they’re all present on a model with fewer than a thousand pieces. Plus opening doors, hood, and a full interior. Which is some kind of magic.
Slovenian builder Zerobricks is the engineering wizard responsible, and you can find out how he’s squeezed a suite of Powered-Up and BuWizz components invisibly into his 1:12 green wedge-shaped racer at the Eurobricks forum. Click the link above to take a look, and play the video below to watch his creation in action.
YouTube Video
After two decades mucking about in cars, and a global audience of millions, Clarkson, Hammond and May have finally hung up their driving gloves. Well, May has. The others probably didn’t wear them.
Their final episode of ‘The Grand Tour’ – Amazon’s monstrously expensive continuation of BBC Top Gear – aired last year, in which the team returned to the location of their first ever road-trip adventure, undertaken some twenty years earlier.
A 1970s Lancia Montecarlo, Triumph Stag, and Ford Capri starred alongside the human trio, likely also completing their last ever drive, such is the nature of television production.
They live on in Lego form though, courtesy of NV_Carmocs (photographed by Studworks), who has recreated each car beautifully in Speed Champions scale. Accurate registration plates, 3D-printed wheels, and a brick-built animal skull on the Lancia enhance the accuracy, and NV_Carmocs has made building instructions available too, should you wish to relive ‘The Grand Tour’s last adventure at home. Have One for the Road via the link above.
This TLCB Writer doesn’t understand feet. Sure they’re there to hold you up and everthing, but to him they are functional only. Like a trachea. Or a spleen.
But not today, because today’s he’s so into them, courtesy of Caleb Ricks and this fabulous space freighter ‘The Antipodes’. Caleb’s design is a rhythm of angles, with some truly inspired techniques deployed to create the triangulated hull. A stunning interior features too, with jaw-dropping detail throughout, yet the most brilliant parts of Caleb’s masterpiece are the landing feet, which deploy in mesmerising motorised scnyhrinoscity via the ingenious mechanisms hidden within.
Like a hydropneumatic Citroen, we could watch The Antipodes’ feet gracefully rise and fall on loop, and you can join us and our foot fetish on Flickr via the links above.
Febrovery’s weirdness continues, and this is right up there in the weird stakes. Entitled the ‘Hexapod Rover’, Pascal‘s spindly spider design is probably eliciting some primal emotions in some of our readers. Place a glass over it and slide some paper underneath, or scream and smash it with a tea-towel, depending on your persuasion, at the link above.
Back in the ’80s, motorsport rules were… loose. Group B rallying created monsters beyond anything seen before, and Dakar… well that was even wilder. Entered in the late-’80s, DAF’s unbelievable eleven-ton TurboTwin 95 X1 was powered by two engines with three turbochargers each, producing a combined 1,200bhp, and which – as this infamous helicopter footage from the 1988 event shows – made it so fast it could overtake the leading cars.
Piloted by Dutch legend Jan de Rooy, the TurboTwin won the truck category in 1987, before an awful 180km/h crash killed one of Jan’s teammates the following year, causing DAF to immediately halt all motorsport activities and withdraw the TurboTwin mid-competition.
Sadly we’d not see its like again, but we can still get up close to DAF’s astonishing Dakar racer courtesy of previous bloggee Nanko Klein Paste, and his spectacular brick-built replica.
Constructed in 1:16 scale, Nako’s TurboTwin recreation includes those two triple-turbo engines, complete with intake pipes, radiators and intercoolers, pressure vessels and ancillaries, a removable body liveried with superbly replicated decals, a hugely detailed interior behind opening doors, and full LED lighting from Brickstuff.
On display at the DAF Museum in Eindhoven later this year, there’s more to see of Nanko’s amazing creation at his ‘DAF TurboTwin 95 X1’ album on Flickr, and you can overtake a Dakar-winning Peugeot rally car at 200km/h in an eleven ton truck via the link above.
This is an X-28 Landspeeder, and… um, that’s all we know. We’re not Star Trek Wars people. But we do like racing stripes and rooster-tail dust-clouds, and this has both! Ordo (Fabian B.) is the builder behind it and you can take a look via the link above.
The Lego Car Blog can be accused of many things. Incompetence. Wilful ignorance. Childish humour. But Only-Blogging-Thousand-Brick creations isn’t one of them. Proving that point today is Nikolaus Lowe‘s delightfully simple half-tracked Febrovery entry, complete with a smiling Benny the Spaceman and a Storm Trooper at the handlebars. Which is an interesting play on these sorts of machines’ original drivers. Join in the space Naziism via the link to Nikolaus’ photostream above!
The chances are that the item on which you are sitting, reading these words, or wearing travelled at some point in the back of a truck like this.
Founded in San Francisco in 1969 (with its name being an initialism of the founders), DHL is now a subsidiary of German state-owned Deutsche Post AG, and forms part of the largest logistics company in the world. Billions of items are delivered every year, with DHL trucks such as this Volvo FH 750 and Schmitz Cargobull trailer common sights on the roads across Europe.
This excellent brick-built recreation of what keeps the world moving comes from Keko007, who has captured the truck, trailer, and iconic DHL font brilliantly. There’s more to see at Keko’s ‘Volvo FH 750 & Schmitz Cargobull Trailer’ album on Flickr, and you can click the link above to be delivered there.
Despite not even being a sperm at the time, this TLCB Writer is of the opinion that seventies cars were all vastly better than anything made today. A point proven by the Ford Capri, which was once a superb coupe for everyone, and is now an insipid electric crossover for people trying to pay less company car tax.
This splendid ’70s Ford Capri RS2600 comes Versteinert, whose yellow Mk1 Capri appeared here earlier in the year, and who has now updated his original model into the high power twin-headlight derivative of Ford’s classic European coupe.
Immaculately presented, there’s more to see of Versteinert’s beautiful RS2600 on Flickr, and you can jump back to when the Capri badge wan’t on the boot of a tragic electric crossover via the link above.
Today, Lancia make just one car; an electric / hybrid supermini based on a Peugeot with as much dynamic ability as your Mom. And she’s really fat.
But back in the ’70s Lancia had rather more verve, with a range of dynamic drivers cars capped by this, the wild rally-engineered and Ferrari-engined Stratos.
This lovely 1:16 brick-built example comes from previous bloggee danielsmocs, and includes opening doors, front and rear clamshells, a detailed engine and interior, plus working pop-up headlights.
There’s more to see at the Eurobricks forum and you can jump back to when Lancias were cool via the link above.
