The Boo Boo Bus

The 1972 Collins ‘Crusader’ Type-II Ambulance – or ‘Boo Boo Bus’ – was Ford Econoline-based ambulance produced for domestic use by America’s emergency services.

We love humble, useful vehicles like this here at The Lego Car Blog, and this one has been built beautifully by regular bloggee 1saac W. of Flickr. Everything is LEGO, including the decals used to create the window frame and (parts of) the red stripe, and there’s more to see of 1saac’s Boo Boo build at his photostream.

Click the link above to dial 9-1-1 in 1972.

Acceptable in the ’80s

Things were different in the ’80s. Shoulder pads, ‘greed is good’, florescent clothes, cassette tapes, and Russian totalitarian oppression. Wait, that last one’s making something of a comeback…

Ferrari were big in the 80’s too, but whilst we’re glad they’ve stuck around today (unlike Russian totalitarian oppression), we still think they were better in the decade of parachute pants and the mix tape.

The reasons for this are three-fold; 1. Ferrari were more interested in selling cars than merchandise, 2. they hadn’t even thought of making an SUV, and 3. their cars were fabulous.

The 308 GTB, Testarossa, and – of course- the magnificent F40 graced countless ’80s bedroom walls, and Flickr’s Laszlo Torma has recreated all three beautifully in Speed Champions scale.

Laszlo has used the same cockpit piece for all three, yet with clever building techniques and smart attention to detail, each car resembles its real-world counterpart brilliantly.

There’s more of the classic Ferrari trio to see at Laszlo’s photostream, where a link to building instructions can also be found so that you can recreate these iconic ’80s supercars for yourself!

Tranforma Porka

Brilliant though the Porsche 911 is, it can be criticised for looking, well… almost exactly the same for the last six decades.

What lies underneath the repetitive exterior however, has evolved hugely over the years, with turbo-charging, all-wheel-drive, and soon even electrification packaged inside the iconic body shape.

And that’s sort of the point of the 911 we suppose; a myriad of different engines, drivetrains, and technologies united by a common exterior.

And that’s never been truer than with today’s creation; this epic G1 Transformers ‘Jazz’, a ginormous funky robot hidden completely within the official Creator Expert 10295 Porsche 911 set by the sheer force of Adrian Drake’s considerable building talent.

Using the 10295 set as a base, Adrian’s ‘Jazz’ Transformer unfurls out of it via a brain-busting manoeuvre of folds and hinges, all of which is unfathomable to the minds here at TLCB.

You can see if you can figure it out at Adrian’s photostream, where there’s more of his amazing creation to view; click these words to watch a Porsche 911 become a robot.

My Other Car’s a Pick-Up

This quirky classic cabriolet is a Panhard Dyna Junior, a car about which we know absolutely nothing besides that it’s French. And therefore probably weird.

Built by previous bloggee monstermatou, this lovely ’50s two-seat convertible is constructed from the parts found within the LEGO 10290 Creator Expert Pickup Truck set, and like its donor set includes working steering, opening doors, hood and trunk.

There’s more of monstermatou’s excellent alternate to see at his photostream on Flickr; click the link above to head to ’50s France.

Coaster Noordborg

This is the Noordborg, a 49 metre coaster built for the Dutch shipping company Wagenborg in the 1960s. Well, this one isn’t, being 1.25 metres long and built by Eurobricks’ Jebbo, but it’s every bit as wonderful as the real thing.

1:40 scale makes Jebbo’s coaster approximately mini-figure scale, with it requiring 26,000 LEGO pieces to create.

Spectacular detail is everywhere, and there’s more to see of Jebbo’s beautiful brick-built boat at the Eurobricks discussion forum. Click here to climb aboard.

Maximum Mundanity

We’re half-way through the Festival of Mundanity, in which we’re looking for the most boring vehicles built from brick!

There are some awesome prizes on offer including the ace BuWizz 3.0 Pro, a package of iDisplayit stands for LEGO sets, and any Game of Bricks lighting kit!

Hoping to score said loot, two entrants previously featured here have recently maximised the mundanity of their creations to increase their scores, after we said “this could only be more boring if…”.

That ‘if’ for 1saac W., who had built the default for motoring mundanity (and his own car), involved recreating the tedium of interpreting parking restrictions. In a white Toyota Corolla. Now that really is mundane.

Another builder on the hunt for more mundane points is iBrickedItUp, whose Cozy Coupe manages to span both our Vehicular category and our partner BrickNerd‘s Object category. It was pictured in a rather delightful garden scene, but outside, in the rain, next to the bins… that’s a whole heap more mundane.

IBrickedItUp has also recreated the sea of dull that is a rental car lot, with a choice of ‘white, off-white, pale-beige‘, BHBricks has built a Scion xB – a car that tried so hard not to be mundane it’s the very thing it became – and the tedium of loading a box truck, whilst Sergio Batista has built the Fiat Multipla, which is a quandary for us, as it wasn’t mundane at all, but its purpose absolutely was.

There’s still half the competition to go, and we’d love to see your boring vehicles, built in any scale, whether Town, Creator, Technic or anything in-between. BrickNerd are after your mundane objects; a few of the fantastic entries received so far are pictured above!

You can see many of the entries to date in the contest Flickr group, and we’ll end this competition update with an extra link to surely the most mundane object in the history of mankind… Bravo Tim Inman, bravo.

Check out the full Festival of Mundanity Competition details here.

Where’s Our Facebook Page Gone?

For those of you who follow us on Facebook, The Lego Car Blog is no longer visible on the platform. It looks like we’ve been ‘unpublished’ due to our stance on the war in Ukraine.

Hopefully this is an error, as Facebook battle to remove disinformation surrounding the conflict (a good thing). It would be very odd if not, as we’ve mocked Trump regularly and that’s been fine. Maybe Putin’s more powerful than we thought!

Hopefully we’ll reappear soon, but if not thanks for following us there. If we have been unpublished for raising Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (and the threats we have received when we’ve criticised the Russian Premiership), we’ll stand by it, and with Ukraine.

TLCB Team

Ukrovery

The news from Ukraine is heartbreaking. Almost eight decades of peace in Europe has ended, and the human cost is going to be enormous.

We’ve pilloried Putin before (and received threats as a result), but the mask is off now, and what lies beneath it is monstrous.

As such we hope blue and yellow vehicles might feature here a bit more prominently for a while following our recent call, which Flickr’s Frost has answered, rounding off Febrovery with his final lunar rover looking wonderful in Ukrainian colours.

So that’s it for Febrovery 2022, but sadly not Putin’s ‘Special Military Operation’, which – thanks to the heroism of those defending Ukraine – looks far from being over. If you’re one of the 5,000 TLCB readers from Ukraine, or indeed one of the 17,000 from Russia and are as dismayed as the rest of us, a special welcome to these pages to you.

If you’re looking to help the situation in Ukraine but don’t know how, check out the Red Cross Ukraine Crisis Appeal and the UN Refugee Agency Appeal where donations are now open.

Alright M8

This rather excellent Technic Supercar is a BMW M8 Competition, BMW’s 600bhp, twin-turbo V8, all-wheel-drive flagship.

Constructed by IA creations, this recreation of BMW’s super coupe includes a wealth of Technic functionality, with both traditional mechanical ‘supercar’ elements and motorised remote control.

A working V8 engine, all-wheel-drive, steering, and double-wishbone suspension take care of the former, whilst a BuWizz bluetooth battery powers twin drive motors, servo steering, and three sets of LEDs for the head and tail lights, enabling programmable bluetooth remote control.

It’s a fantastically well engineered creation and one that you can build for yourself too, as IA has made instructions available. Head to the Eurobricks forum for full details, plus you can find the complete image gallery of IA BMW M8 Competition on Bricksafe.

Finally, you can win an awesome BuWizz 3.0 Pro like the one powering IA’s magnificent M8 by entering TLCB and BrickNerd’s Festival of Mundanity competition! This M8 Competition is definitely much too interesting of course, but a grey 320d… that could do very well indeed!

Under the Mask

Most LEGO pieces can be used in almost infinite ways. It’s the very purpose of LEGO. However there are a few parts that seem to be defiantly single-use. The Primo ride-on elephant. Anything from the awful Galidor range. And the wearable Bionicle mask.

Designed so that kids could pretend to be defending Mata-Nui or something, the mid-00’s were clearly a difficult time for LEGO. And yet out of adversity comes triumph, in the form of Scott Wilhelm‘s magnificent ‘Mobile Reactor Transport’.

Wearing the life-size Toa face like a tortoise wears its shell, the until-now-pointless-part looks purpose-made for Scott’s half-track rover. Delightful greebling is visible through the mask’s orifices and there’s more to see of the build, including the epically inventive parts usage, at Scott’s photostream.

Click the link above to see what’s under the mask.

Theory of Evolution

LEGO’s Speed Champions range has evolved a bit over the years. Jumping from six studs of width to eight has upped the realism, as has a the more widespread use of decals, allowing for the recreation of real-world liveries and sponsorships.

Previous bloggee Fabrice Larcheveque has moved with the times as well, updating his Peugeot 206 T16 rally car to fit LEGO’s latest Speed Champions aesthetic, with it looking rather wonderful a as result.

Fabrice’s original 205 T16 featured on this site half a decade ago, and The Lego Car Blog has evolved a bit since then too, with the standard of presentation required to appear here considerably higher than it was back then. The incompetent writing and woeful site management remain though…

Fabrice’s significantly upgraded and perfectly presented Peugeot 205 T16 is available to view on Flickr, where building instructions are now available too. Click here to join the evolution.

Build in Blue & Yellow

We published a post last year in which some famous lyrics were mildly amended to highlight a certain murderous rat-faced tyrant. In it we wrote, but then left out, a verse about his intent to invade Ukraine. It was too provocative and an unnecessary addition we thought. We thought…

Perhaps we should build only in yellow and blue this week.

Clearly Roving

2022’s Febrovery is drawing to a close, in which Lego builders from around the world have united in their creation of other-worldly transports. Today we round out the roverest of months with four intriguing space-based builds, each of which has deployed a few of LEGO’s more unusual pieces in the pursuit of roving brilliance.

First up is Robert Heim‘s ‘Spaceport Fire Rover’, which features so many LEGO pieces of which we know nothing it’s making us doubt we can do this job. The wheels look like cupcake cases and the rotating cockpit appears as if it’s made from a kid’s sand bucket. We have absolutely no idea what sets they’re all from, but you can find out more at Robert’s photostream via the link.

Next we have martin.with.bricks‘ impressive eight-wheeled rover, which actually looks rather like something we could well see in our lifetime. A determined-looking mini-figure sits at the controls inside the same clear buckety-brick cockpit, whilst a minimalist brick-built lunar surface passes beneath the tyres. Centre articulation and an opening rear hatch add to the fun and you can see more of Martin’s rover on Flickr at the link above.

No longer used as the cockpit, but still featuring prominently in the design, Frost‘s colourful ‘Biotron Corp Spaceplant Relocation Rover’ utilises the same transparent buckets, this time for some sort of lunar re-wilding project. A trans-lime half-dome continues the funky cockpitting however, and there’s more to see of Frost’s space-based conservation via the link above.

Today’s final Febrovery creation takes a rather more utilitarian approach, and is very possibly the reason that Frost’s ‘Spaceplant Relocation Rover’ above is required. Andreas Lenander‘s ‘Dome-rover’ is smoothing its way across a lovely brick-built moon-scape, thanks to some genius tracks and a wonderfully pink classic spaceman sealed within a transparent orb. Andreas has used said orb in other cunning ways during Febrovery ’22 too, and there’s more to see of this and his other Febrovery builds at his photostream via the link above.

And that completes our Febrovery 2022 round-up, which took on quite a transparent theme this year. Febrovery will be back in 2023, but until then there is still a whole month to go in TLCB and Bricknerd’s ‘Festival of Mundanity’ competition, in which we’re looking for vehicles that are rather more earth-bound. What better way to move on from other-wordly oddness than a white Toyota Corolla looking for a parking space…

Topless Curves

1saac W.‘s superb classic Volkswagen Beetle has appeared here before, but – unlike this TLCB Writer – it looks even better topless. 1saac’s 1950 Hebmüller Cabriolet also allows for a title that’s sure to snare a few newcomers expecting to see something entirely different. There’s more to see on Flickr via the link above!

Automotive Cool

’60s Italy was, in the mind of this TLCB Writer, the peak of automotive cool. The Vespa, the Fiat 500, Ferrari, Lamborghini, Lancia, and – of course – Alfa Romeo.

This glorious 1965 Alfa Romeo Giulia Sprint GTA takes us back to Italy’s golden era, having been wonderfully recreated in brick form by 5eno of Flickr.

A realistic interior is accessed through opening doors, a brilliantly detailed engine resides under the opening hood, and there are more images of the model to see at 5eno’s Alfa Romeo Giulia Sprint album.

Head back to ’60s Italy via the link in the text above, when every vehicle was infinite cool.