Tag Archives: Buggy

That Was Febrovery That Was

Here at The Lego Car Blog, we pride ourselves on being a serious journal. We’ve chronicled and curated a high quality collection of Technic vehicles, Town & City minifig-scale machines and micro-scale builds. We would never demean ourselves with a photo feature on such a silly group as this year’s Febrovery. Oh, go on then: here’s a spaceman driving a giant caterpillar…

Two of this year’s most prolific contributors to the group were Crimso Giger and TF Designs, both of whom produced a rover for each of the 28 days of the month. Featured above is Crimso’s “Caterpillar Rover” from day 23 and below is TF Designs’ “A.D.U. Rundown”. Each of TF designs’ vehicles was built from parts from Lego’s space themes from Classic Space to the present day.

TLCB regular Billyburg’s style is ideally suited to the Febrovery theme and we featured one of his builds in our Valentine’s Day Special. Using many smaller pieces and slices of Lego tubing Billyburg produced a selection of rovers, featuring his trademark blue spaceman. The Elves particularly liked the playability of his Lunar R.O.V.E.R.

The month also featured many impractical and dangerous designs from another TLCB bloggee, David Roberts. Fortunately these were all built in LDD and with nothing for the Elves to sink their teeth into, they didn’t meet our Submission Guidelines. Also in the useful but probably impractical category was Halfbeak’s CS Ravine Rover, apparently enabling spacemen to, “Cross that ditch without a hitch!”.

We featured Tyler Sky’s very practical contribution to the Febrovery group almost a month ago. He went back in time, both to Classic Space and possibly to the Stone Age to create his Primitive Rover. A practical manual power back-up or a throw back to the Flintstones: you decide!

A newcomer to both Febrovery and The Lego Car Blog was French builder, Pirate Cox. We featured his charming, Morgan-like Rover #7 earlier in the month. The Elves also liked his Rover #5 monowheel, with its clever arrangement of cogs and control pedals for the driver.

Lastly, it’s worth mentioning another prolific builder of slightly silly space rovers, David Alexander Smith. He raised the intellectual tone of the month with a thoughtful and thought provoking article on his philosophical Lego blog, “Building Debates“. Visit the Febrovery Flickr group by clicking this link and see David Smith’s thesis in action that, “Lego builders do it best, when we do it together.”

On that high-brow, cultural note, it just remains for us to finish with another build from the man who started it all: Crimso Giger. Here’s a spaceman driving a giant snail.

Valentines Day Special

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Today we’re calling upon the collective experience of the entire TLCB staff to bring you some top quality dating advice this valentines day, in Lego form.

First up is the beautiful classic yacht above, built by TLCB favourite ER0L. There’s nothing more romantic than a luxury boat, and if we were a mini-figure this would be our vehicle of choice with which to woo the limited supply of LEGO womenfolk. ER0L’s even added mood lighting by the way of Power Functions LEDs, and you can see more via the link above.

Our second love-inducing creation is probably at the other end of the romantic scale being, well – what looks like a hospital bed with a steering wheel. Still, it’s got some plastic flowers and there’s a camera to capture the ‘special’ moment, and that works for your Mom every time.

Billyburg is the builder and you can see more of his Lunar Love Buggy on Flickr.

At Your Convenience

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This year’s Febrovery is producing some wild flights of fancy, some strangely silly machines and even one or two practical bits of space surface transportation. Falling somewhere in between the very silly and very practical is Tyler Sky’s “Lunar Worksite Maintenance Bio-Break Rover”.

Naturally this appealed to the Elves’ sense of humour and has left them rolling around the floor in fits of smirking giggles for most of the day. We, of course, are mature, sophisticated bloggers and appreciate the build for its features. The double banked, rubber CS wheels; the greebly plumbing on the rear of the machine and the compactness of the cubicle. Click this link to see Tyler’s full width presentation, plus his other marvellous Febrovery machines.

Baja Buggy

Print-a-Buggy!

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Well, parts of one…

We usually only publish posts that feature genuine LEGO pieces here at TLCB (in fact it’s one of our submission criteria), however today’s creation warranted a closer look.

Built by TLCB regular Sariel, this Technic dune buggy features a few parts that you won’t find with an official LEGO logo on. That’s because they’ve been created using the relatively new phenomenon of 3D printing, which enables a Computer Aided Design (CAD) to be realised for real via plastic moulding.

Over the past few years the price of 3D printing has tumbled, meaning unique parts production is now within reach of many amateur designers and engineers (or morally-bankrupt individuals who think that the ability to print-your-own firearm is something the world needs…).

Fellow previous TLCB bloggee Efferman has put his design skills to use and created a range of custom components that LEGO themselves have yet to officially produce. These include a 5 stud long steering arm (vs. LEGO’s 6 stud long version), a heavy-duty differential, and some wonderfully bouncy suspension springs, all of which Sariel has fitted to his excellent remote controlled dune buggy.

The custom components appear to work beautifully with the standard LEGO Technic used in the rest of Sariel’s creation – especially the springs, which we’d love to test out ourselves (hint!) – and Efferman has designed a wide variety of other custom LEGO-compatible components that are available to purchase online. These include suspension and steering parts, pneumatic tanks, custom wheels, excavator buckets, plus a lot more that we’re not clever enough to understand.

You can view Efferman’s extensive range of unofficial 3D printed Lego components by visiting the Shapeways Store, plus you can see more of Sariel’s dune buggy demonstrating some of these parts in action via MOCpages at the link above, or by watching the ace video below.

YouTube Video:

Deadly Nightshade

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Don’t worry, you haven’t accidentally clicked on Gardener’s World magazine. This is still The Lego Car Blog and we’re still blogging the best Lego cars from around the interweb. Cars like this one, although it is indeed named after a highly toxic herbaceous plant.

It’s the work of Flickr’s Doc Brown, and whilst we don’t think licking it will do you any harm, it does look pretty mean. The Doc’s ‘Deadly Nightshade’ is powered by two Lego RC buggy motors and features some brilliant looking suspension – we think it’ll be killer off-road. You can see more of the poisonous buggy at the link above. Just don’t eat it.

Baja Bug

Trophy Truck

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Another day, another Elf, another meal token issued. Today’s lucky recipient found this superb remote control Trophy Truck on Eurobricks. Underneath the Technic bodywork sits some wonderfully bouncy suspension attached to a faithful RWD set-up, and it’s powered by LEGO’s out-of-production buggy motors that give it a surprising turn of speed. gsia17 is the builder, and you can see all the photos plus a great video of the truck in action at the link.

Green Machines

Super Sensor

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FebRovery continues apace, over on Flickr and with it has come this superb Neo-Classic Space build from Jon Blackford. Jon has updated the 6841 Mineral Detector from 1980 to include bigger sensors, two closed cockpits and that essential on an airless moon: a rear spoiler. All of this has upset the normally smiling driver of the older model, as you can see below. There are more photos on Jon’s Flickr and there are photos of the interiors of the cockpits on MOCpages.

Churn-O-Matic

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It’s FebRovery again! For the third year running builders on Flickr have been spending the dark February nights coming up with all sorts of weird and wonderful space rovers. As well as building the models, part of the fun seems to be in writing the stories about the function of the vehicles. The “Churn-O-Matic” has some very unusual “wheels”. According to its creator, halfbeak, these enable it to travel the surface of a planet which is basically covered in custard. You can see more FebRovery fun by clicking this link to the group.

One Small Step for Mini-Figure

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This beautiful shot comes from one of Flickr’s finest mini-figure scale builders, the brilliant _Tiler. We’ve featured _Tiler’s work here numerous times, and it’s normally of the loud and fast variety. His latest creation though, is pretty quiet and very very slow. And yet somehow possibly the coolest model he’s built to date, the awesome Apollo Luna Rover.

His latest build has also had the added bonus of turning the Elves into astronauts for the day. This means that although there are no boxes of any kind left in the office as they’ve all been appropriated for use as space helmets, it’s beautifully peaceful – as the Elves are silently and slowly moonwalking everywhere. A big whole-hearted ‘thank you’ to _Tiler from the everyone at TLCB Towers, and if you want to see more of his Apollo Lunar Rover you can do so via the handy link above.

Classic Space Pocket Money Contest – 2014

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The tiny minds of the Elves are often attracted to tiny, brightly coloured things. They also like the odd bit of sci-fi, especially buggies and spaceships and robots. It’s almost as though David & David, the hosts of the Classic Space Pocket Money Contest II, created their competition with our workers in mind. If they were ever given any pocket money (Pay the little swabs? Never!) then the builds in this contest are exactly the sort of thing that the Elves would spend I their loot on.

The contest took Lego back to its roots, with builders limited to 100 parts. Having built a hopefully winning MOC, builders then had to disassemble it and come up with two other MOCs, using just the original pieces. We seem to have forgotten that Lego used to actually encourage kids to take the model on the box-top apart and build something new, rather than having a TIE fighter sitting on the shelf, gathering dust.

This years contest set the competitors the additional challenge of inventing their own Classic Space style theme. It lead to some strange colour combinations and surreal back stories involving unobtanium and cheese mining. Andy L’s winning “Space Fire Response Unit” are, naturally, equipped to fight fires in the vacuum of space. Who cares about the science: just revel in the 1980s retro looks by clicking this link to the contest’s home on MOCpages.

Note: NEVER give a TLCB Elf any money. They WILL eat it and those big £2 coins get horribly wedged in their tiny tummies.

Beach Bum

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Flickr’s Lego Junkie has recreated the ‘Bifta’ beach buggy found in Grand Theft Auto V. With working suspension and a removable body, you can see more at the link. Prostitute in the passenger seat and AK47 on the dashboard optional.

Nerdy Acronym Of The Day*

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The online Lego Community is full of nerdy acronyms. Here at The Lego Car Blog, or ‘TLCB’, we try to avoid as many as possible, mostly because we’re not clever enough to work them out. Apart from ‘TLCB’ of course.

Anyhow, today we’re going to cautiously dip a toe in the murky waters of Lego Jargon because we’ve not seen a model that so perfectly sums up a particular acronym as this does. ‘NPU’, or ‘Nice Parts Usage’ is a term that frequents the comments on Flickr. It’s usually used whenever a LEGO piece faces any direction other than up, but really it’s for when bricks are used for a purpose that’s way outside of their intended function.

VolumeX’s latest work epitomises this philosophy, with the wheels alone featuring no less than three piece types that we’ve never seen used in such a way before. Check out all the ‘NPU’ at VolumeX’s photostream here; you’ll never look at a LEGO brick in the same way again.

*NAOTD?

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Tag Archives: Buggy

That Was Febrovery That Was

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Valentines Day Special

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At Your Convenience

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Baja Buggy

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Print-a-Buggy!

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Deadly Nightshade

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Baja Bug

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Trophy Truck

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Green Machines

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Super Sensor

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Churn-O-Matic

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One Small Step for Mini-Figure

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Classic Space Pocket Money Contest – 2014

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Beach Bum

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Nerdy Acronym Of The Day*

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