Tag Archives: Community

Carbon Fiber Lego Wheels

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Carbon Fiber. (Or ‘Fibre’ if you spell it correctly. Ed.) The wonder material from which Formula 1 cars, the Ferrari F40‘s bodywork, the Lexus LFA‘s tub, and fancy road bikes are all made.

Which also means that, inevitably, carbon fiber fakery is everywhere too. Car interior trim, vinyl wraps, even wallets, laptops and suitcases can all be found in finest farbon ciber, mostly looking terrible.

But today we have the real deal, because this is the world’s first genuine carbon fiber Lego wheel. It may not look much, but it’s bona-fide carbon fiber, and its maker PlasticGear has detailed how he constructed it.

Take a look at PlasticGear’s pioneering project in the video above, you can join the discussion at the Eurobricks forum, and don’t even think about wrapping your wing-mirrors/spoiler/centre console in fake carbon, because we’ll laugh at you.

Bleugh! Ads!

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Running a world-famous Lego website has its perks. Fame… Girls… Riches… Probably. Still, running this shed in the corner of the internet also has its perks, and we do earn a little from all your eyeballs and the ads they linger on.

Except for the last few days the ads have gone berserk. Now it might be because our equipment and operating systems are older than some of our readers, but nevertheless ads started to appear over images, over post text, and – in delicious irony – even over other ads.

If you’ve been affected by this ad explosion, rest assured we changed nothing to prompt it. But we have summoned all our technical prowess to correct things. Which basically means we’ve turned off advertisers’ ability to place ads anywhere they like.

This might mean that TLCB treasure chest is a little emptier than usual, but seeing as we give its contents to those who need it more than we do, and there won’t be any contents if you all get annoyed and leave, it’s the right thing to do.

Anyway, we hope it’s all fixed now. Let us know if not. And do please linger on the ads that do appear – it makes it all worth it.

TLCB Team

In Remembrance of Luca Rusconi

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Writing for The Lego Car Blog is mostly a happy thing. Occasionally however, it isn’t, and with much sadness this is one of those times.

Multiple bloggee, TLCB Master MOCer, and one of the most talented vehicle builders anywhere in the world, has placed his last piece.

Famed for his spectacular historic Formula 1 cars, Luca Rusconi, aka RoscoPC, was tragically killed in a motorcycle accident just outside of his hometown Milan. Aged 54, he leaves behind his wife, three children, and a Lego Community that will miss him terribly.

His incredible Lego work remains on Flickr, his website, and via archives such as our own, and we encourage you to take a look – we have no doubt it will forever be amongst the finest ever built.

BuWizz Gathering 2025

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The BuWizz Team is thrilled to invite you to the annual BuWizz Gathering, a two-day paradise for all LEGO Technic fans with competitions and fun activities for all ages.

Regular readers of The Lego Car Blog will know that some of the most impressive remote control creations to appear here are powered by BuWizz. Bringing programable bluetooth control to Lego creations, BuWizz earned a coveted 5-Star Review when we tested their awesome 3.0 Pro system.

If you’re a BuWizz builder or a fan of seeing what remote control Lego can do, the BuWizz Gathering 2025, held in BuWizz’s beautiful native Slovenia, is coming this July 18th-20th.

The 2025 event will include five vehicular competitions, daily prizes, conferences, and a social dinner, with tickets on sale now for €50 (competitors) and €20 (spectators).

Find full details and tickets for the BuWizz Gathering 2025 here

 

BrickCon 2025

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The longest-running Lego fan convention in the world is back for its 24th year! Last year, BrickCon broke a record for most AFOL attendees ever, and they want to do the same this year.

BrickCon 2025 will commence at the Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue, Washington September 4-7, with the public viewing days taking place September 6-7. This year’s theme is “Full STEAM Ahead”, symbolising the event’s mission to support science, technology, engineering, arts, and math (STEAM) skills in children.

Join the fun!

BrickCon attendees can enjoy enormous Lego displays, games, builder presentations, prizes, as well as displaying their own models, plus one of the biggest draws to BrickCon is the people; attendees come to meet other AFOLs and make new friends, with an insight available via the Why Come to BrickCon as a Builder webpage.

Registration for BrickCon 2025 is now open, with tickets for the full convention available for $85, and virtual attendance available for $25. Visit afol.brickcon.org for full details, special hotel rates, and some sneak peeks as to what’s coming.

Brickshelf Stay of Execution

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A few weeks ago we published the news that due to the passing of its founder, Brickshelf – and the two-and-a-half decades’ of Lego creations it stored – would cease to be available on March 1st 2025.

Unchanged since the turn of the millennium, Brickshelf was a time capsule for both the Online Lego Community and the internet itself, with both the site and the creations it housed being rather basic, right-angled, and unsophisticated. And it was excellent.

Admirably the estate handling Brickshelf’s cessation took the approach of alerting its users to the impending closure*, a message sites like this one could amplify (which we duly did on January 30th), allowing users to retrieve their images, and maybe even a new owner to be found.

Just two days on from our post, and Brickshelf’s alert was amended to include the following update;

“The initial notice generated many responses, including people interested in purchasing Brickshelf. Based on this response the estate will plan to keep Brickshelf online through mid April as discussions move forward with interested parties to purchase Brickshelf”

Whether or not new ownership is successfully established, this reprieve does provide users with a longer period to retrieve their images should they wish to, but of course we hope that this news means that the first (and last remaining) dedicated creation-sharing website may yet live on…

*See Sean Kenney, it’s not hard.

Fairwell Brickshelf

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As of 1st March 2025, Brickshelf is dead.

Older than YouTube, Facebook, Amazon Prime, and some of you reading this, Brickshelf has served the Online Lego Community for two-and-a-half decades.

With almost five million files across 430,000 albums, countless creations are hosted on Brickshelf and nowhere else. In particular these date from decades past, giving a glimpse into a time before unlimited parts access, digital designer, high resolution photo editing, and even many LEGO piece types themselves.

Many creations on Brickshelf therefore look rather right-angled, basic, and poorly presented by today’s standards, but – dare we say it – they were probably more fun. There was no pressure to find the perfect pieces, pay an extortionate price for them on Bricklink, nor spend hours in a home studio getting the lighting just right. You built, you published, and that was it.

That really was it too, as Brickshelf had no comments function, no html, no messaging, no groups, and not even the ability to use the spacebar in folder titles. It was simply a giant library of creations, and has stayed that way over the last twenty-five years. If you’d like to see not just what Lego creations were like at the turn of the millennium, but websites too, take a look at Brickshelf!

Time to do so is short however. Sadly Brickshelf’s founder Kevin Loch passed away last year, and thus his estate has begun the process of closing the site. Unless a buyer offers to take it on, access to Brickshelf and the five million files within it will cease on March 1st 2025, whereupon it will join MOCpages in the graveyard of creation-sharing websites.

Unlike MOCpages however, Kevin Loch’s estate have notified Brickshelf users ahead of time, providing the opportunity to retrieve files, maybe find a buyer, and meaning that even a dead guy has managed to do a better job than Sean Kenney did.

For us here at The Lego Car Blog it means one fewer place to send our Elves in search of the best Lego vehicles the web has to offer, and that from 1st March 2025 any links to Brickshelf will no longer function, including those in this post.

Until then, we’d like to say a big posthumous thank you to Brickshelf’s creator Kevin Loch, and to his estate for handling its cessation with thoughtfulness and care. And to our readers; click here take a look at Lego-building circa-2000 whilst you still can!

2024 | Year in Review

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It’s the start of a brand new year! Which here at The Lego Car Blog means it’s dark at 4pm, the adverts are all for holidays, and we look back on the last year with an image of the current one, which makes no sense but we’re a decade in so we’re not changing it.

Anyway, on to what happened at TLCB in 2024!

Stats

We published almost exactly the same number of posts in 2024 as 2023, with 347 hitting the front page. These generated 16% fewer visitors however, with the site now around half its peak of over a million several years ago. That still means that hundreds of thousands of you are turning up to read our gibberish though, something to which we remain astonished.

2024’s most viewed posts were the new LEGO set reveals, with Speed Champions coming out on top of the pile. The Review Library and our new A-Z of car manufacturers (plus bikes and trucks) were next in line, along with the most viewed individual creations (‘That’ Toyota Supra, Nosing Ahead, and ‘Oh My gosh, It’s Oshkonoggin!‘, none of which were actually posted in 2024).

Likes for 2024 were down 56% year-on-year yet comments were up 18%. As these were (mostly) nice ones, it seems people are perhaps over ‘liking’ things. Good. Social media is poison.

Which is a bit of a pain, as more and more creations are appearing there only. These are often suggested to us, but to ensure our readers don’t have to create an account and hand over their souls to Meta, Musk, or the Chinese Communist Party, we only publish creations that are free-to-access. Thus if you do use socials to publicise your works and you’d like them to appear here, do consider replicating your images on a free-to-access platform such as Flickr, Eurobricks, Bricksafe, or Brickshelf – that way we can direct our readers to them without fear of a ‘Create an Account’ gateway appearing.

That said, thousands of you still joined us from Facebook, and hundreds-of-thousands from Google. Whether you found what you were looking for or found us by accident, you’re very welcome!

The USA easily remained the top visiting country  in 2024, followed by Germany, UK, and Netherlands, whilst there are just four countries on earth remaining with an all-time visitor count of one. Hello to the four people from St. Helena, Christmas Island, Cocos Islands, and Palau!

2025…

We’re here to continue publishing the best Lego vehicles the web has to offer, unless you get bored of this (or we do). Expect more cars, trucks, motorbikes, ships, and even sci-fi builds throughout 2025, and if enough of them arrive from an as-yet-un-listed manufacturer, said car maker will join those already in the A-Z, where you can find every creation to feature here categorised by the badge on the bonnet.

We’ll also continue to publish (and assess) the brand new LEGO sets due to reach stores during the year, along with brick-based vehicle news, builder interviews, and probably a few Your Mom jokes.

Thank you for taking the time to join us here at The Lego Car Blog, it’s your views and clicks that keep this site running (and enable the advertising revenue to be donated to causes more noble than this one), and we hope you’ll enjoy what we publish in 2025.

TLCB Team

Merry Christmas!

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It’s a few nights before Christmas
All through TLCB Towers
The Elves are back in their cages
Counting down the hours
‘Til they’re released once again
After the festivities are over
And TLCB Staff return
…Hopefully sober

Here at The Lego Car Blog we’re taking our customary Christmas break. We’ll be back (hopefully sober) before long. Until then, we wish you the merriest of Christmases, and encourage you to put down your phone, switch off your computer, and enjoy what’s most important.

Happy Christmas!
TLCB Team

Black Friday | Nothing to See Here

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Black Friday

It’s the most wasteful time of the yearWith credit cards loadedHousehold debt has exploded
‘Cos discounts are hereIt’s the most wasteful time of the year
It’s the shallowest season of allThere’ll be fighting in Walmart
To fill a shopping cartBut it won’t fill that holeIt’s the shallowest season of all

 

Buy nothing. You probably have everything you need already.

We Will Remember Them

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Lego Poppy

Lest We Forget

Image courtesy of Fujiia

TLCB is a Teenager!

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Today is a momentous day, albeit one fraught with uncertainty, unpredictable outbursts, mood swings, and mild horror. No not Donald Trump’s Presidential comeback, but our birthday, because today The Lego Car Blog became a teenager!

Well, not quite today, as in typical teenager fashion we got up too late, but it’s better than last year when we forgot entirely.

Since our first post thirteen years (and one day) ago, nearly nine million of you have joined us here at the Online Lego Community’s most ramshackle website, with the most viewed pages of the past year being the new set reveals, the Review Library, our new A-Z of Lego Cars (plus bikes and trucks too), and a recreation of a certain Toyota Supra.

So whether you’re here for the first time or have been with us for all thirteen years, thank you for joining us. Expect more Lego-based vehicular ramblings as we enter our thirteenth year, only perhaps with worse skin, braces, and added moodiness.

TLCB Team

The A-Z of Lego Trucks

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If you want to find all the best Lego models of your favourite car brand that the web has to offer, then look no further than our A-Z of Lego cars. A multitude of manufacturers from Alfa to Volvo are present, which admittedly doesn’t quite get the list to Z yet, but a few more Zastavas and we’ll be there.

We don’t stop at cars either. If you prefer your vehicles with two wheels and a predisposition to make you an organ donor, the A-Z of Lego motorbikes packs in everything from BMW to Vespa.

But what if you’re reading this from your cab in a truck stop, or you just like really big Lego vehicles? Well here at The Lego Car Blog we haven’t forgotten you… this is the A-Z of Lego Trucks!

…

DAF

We kick off our truck list not with A, but with DAF. Which at least has an A in it. Dozens of DAFs are in the Archive, with most from just a single builder. Find them all via the link above.

Freightliner

Famously flat fronted, except when they’re not, the American heavy-duty truck maker has appeared here half-a-dozen times so far. Click here to find all the brick-built Freightliners in the Archive to date.

GAZ

Mostly Soviet-era military off-road trucks designed to go where the roads end. Many of the models we’ve featured have been designed with that in mind too, being powered by a suite of motors, and you can find them all – motorised or static – by clicking here.

Hino

Toyota’s truck building subsidiary has appeared here at The Lego Car Blog only a fraction of the times of its car-making parent company, but the brick-built Hinos are excellent nonetheless. Find them here.

Isuzu

Fellow Japanese truck maker Isuzu bank rather more entries, including fire trucks, flatbeds, and of course Lego versions of their box trucks that are prolific the world over. Find them all in the Archives here.

Iveco

The fifty year old Italian truck maker’s products have featured here around a dozen times over the years. Find every Iveco to appear via the link above.

Kamaz

Back to the USSR, and a Soviet brand which surprisingly isn’t almost exclusively military. Kamaz are a modern success story too, and you can find an array of their trucks old and new in the Archives here.

Kenworth

Some of the largest and most visually stunning trucks ever built in Lego are those of the century-old American brand. If you’re into Lego trucks at the absolute peak, click this link and gawp.

Mack

Aircraft haulers, garbage trucks, movie trucks, and even official LEGO sets, all manner of Mack models have appeared here to date. Find them all via the link above.

MAN

A vast variety of MAN models reside in the Archives, with the brand’s tippers, wreckers, heavy haulers, mobile cranes, and even off-road racers all represented. Find every MAN at the link above.

MAZ

Back to the Soviet Union, which of course means that many of the Archival entries are trucks designed to blow things up. But not all of them. Find trailers of cabbage alongside ballistic missiles here.

Mercedes-Benz

As famous for their trucks as they are their cars, over one-hundred Mercedes-Benz truck images are in the Archive to date. About 80% of which are Unimogs. Find them all, including several official LEGO sets, by clicking here.

Mitsubishi

Trucks don’t get any more workday than these. As white-goods as the brand’s air-conditioners, yet just as important to everyday life in East Asia, you can find each Mitsubishi truck to appear via the link.

Peterbilt

One of the most numerous brands in the Archive, there are some spectacularly detailed creations wearing the Peterbilt logo. Lights, chrome, and even a trailer full of beer are available here.

Renault

France’s national truck maker is most famous for one particular model, named after a champagne bottle. Or an ice cream. Or a condom. Find all the Magnums (plus a few other Renault trucks too) by clicking here.

Scania

Europe’s most stylish truck brand. So we’ve picked something square from the seventies for the thumbnail… Find a huge quantity of Scanias past and present by clicking these words.

Tatra

The highest average wheel-count of any truck manufacturer in the Archives, most Lego Tatras have eight. And nearly as many electric motors. A truck-trial favourite, join the off-road fun here.

Volvo

Dozens of Volvo trucks have appeared here to date, plus a whole array of construction equipment to wear the iron logo too. Find fan-built models and official LEGO sets alike by clicking here.

Ural

Named after the mountains in their Russian homeland, most Urals in the Archive are – unsurprisingly – of a military flavour. They’re also really very good indeed. Click the link above to see them all.

ZIL

We couldn’t start with A, but thanks to ZIL we have Z in the bank! Tipper trucks, tankers, Arctic expedition vehicles, and – of course – weird Soviet military contraptions are all available here!

…

That’s Lego creations representing twenty of the top truck manufacturers from DAF to ZIL, where there are sufficient entries in the Archives (and that we could remember when writing this…).

Of course if we’ve missed the one you’re looking for you can search for any truck make or model via the search function on every page. Plus a whole lot more besides. Happy trucking!

Creations for Charity 2024!

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Creations for Charity 2024 is Here!

The wonderful Creations for Charity fundraiser – where fantastic Lego creations can be bought, funding the provision of LEGO sets for underprivileged children – is here for 2024!

How to get involved

There are several ways you can join in Creations for Charity 2024;

  • By donating a creation to the Creations for Charity store
  • By buying a creation (the store for 2024 will open next month)
  • By giving a monetary donation to the charity

You can take a look at the creations and building instructions already donated to the Creations for Charity store by clicking the link below, with lots more to be added over the coming weeks – you could even donate your own.

Do something amazing, get involved in Creations for Charity 2024, and bring some joy to a child who really needs it.

The Creations for Charity store is open. You can see what’s available or donate your own model to a great cause by clicking here

Humbly Reading

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If you’re into reading about LEGO as well as building it (and you must be to some degree, as you’re reading this), then our friends over at No Starch Press have a seriously good offer available, all for charity.

No Starch Press’s digital Humble Bundle brings you up to twenty of their Lego titles in digital form, for a ‘pay what you want price’, with the profits going to the It Gets Better charity.

Over 2,500 bundles have been sold so far, containing books including the TLCB-recommended titles The LEGO Lighting Book, The Unofficial Lego Technic Builders Guide, The Art of Lego Scale Modeling, and Tiny Lego Wonders.

You can take a look at the twenty No Starch Press titles available to be bundled via the Humble Bundle store here, and if you can’t decide on which ones to pick you can find many of them in our Review Library by clicking here.