On my to-do list for a long time, this was my first attempt at a modular style building on more than one baseplate. It is built so that you can separate the baseplates for transport. It has the car dealer show room, parts department and two bay shop on the ground floor and the second floor contains four vacant apartments. I’m working with a leasing agent to get some tenants so the place can look a little more lived in.
This was my first modular building after emerging from my dark ages. Built entirely in LDD before buying a single brick. This took me over a year to bring together. Inspired by that little zig-zag arrow piece that I found in a bulk lot of LEGO purchased online, this building features 2 truck bays, a small shop, reception area, payment desk, grid control room, board room and a small call center. I love this building from its strong art deco shapes to it’s vibrant color. In my Brick Island this will go between the industrial area and the Art Deco beach front.
So I created this great Art Deco Inspired Car Dealership in the Stud.io application. I made a huge order on Bricklink a few weeks before Brick Universe came to town. I wanted to display it at the show. The order didn't show up. I took the bricks I had and built this version of the dealership loosely based on the digital model. It's not the best, but it really pales in comparison to what I wanted it to be. The order arrived the last day of the show but it was too late. I took this building apart to build the model I really wanted. I'm putting this up to remember this version. RIP.
So this is the building you will find our LUG display in at the Fair. Once it was decided that the LUG was going to do things for the fair, it was the only choice for me. The black parts on the buildings are really all a dark green in real life, but I had to switch to black just because of the parts I needed to make it. I’m very happy with the way it came out. Figuring out the construction on the roof was the most difficult. Yes it is sitting on a 3x4 baseplate area. That makes it huge!
The LUG challenge build was to build your favorite Samuel L Jackson scene. There were so many to choose from and I really wanted to go someplace I knew no once else would. Yep, a snail. Not his most well known role or even too popular of a movie, but it sure made for a challenging build. I’m still not super happy with the eyes. Someday I will try some other things for those. Buy the way it took home the top prize for the build at the LUG meeting.
When I got my first Octan Station set 60132, I knew that it just wasn’t going to cut it for my city. There was all this great detail and the pizza place too, it was so close to so many stations that we have around us but it just wasn’t big enough to fit. I set out to figure out what would fix it. After getting another set just to have all the thing I wanted to duplicate in my station I set out to build it the way I wanted it in my city. My favorite part was the solution for the double sided big sign.
While my wife was spending time in the hospital, I took one of my son’t favorite Matchbox trucks and tried to turn it into LEGO. This is what came out. I tried to cram as much as I could into it and overall I’m happy with how it turned out. It was the first model that I built after I joined the local LUG. I had finished in LDD prior to that but just never ordered the parts since it was so hard to get them from my LDD Mac file to Bricklink.
I had needed a car carrier to go with the dealership since I started the idea of building it. I wanted it to look like the trucks I saw around us and I just never got the trailer looking right. Inspired by the trailer build technique of the LEGO set 60060 I was able to come up with this design that I was finally happy with. Delivering the sports cars to the dealer is a tough job.
A bit of history with my Classic Space inspired MOCs started in my childhood.
This was the third large Lego Space Ship that I built back when I was little. My first was a hodge-podge of colors and shapes. I took that apart once I had more sets to try again. That second ship met a terrible ending...I dropped it in the kitchen. It worked out as I built a new ship to replace it. I had gotten the number 3 bricks you see near the wings so I added them to the build. Over the next 5 years more and more was added until it reached what you see here. I battled with it until my teenage years fighting for good in the galaxy. It hung above my bed at my parents house from a hook in the ceiling until i moved into my own house. I finally took it apart in my 30's when my new wife became pregnant with our son and we converted the display room into a room for our new arrival.
I spent a lot of time as a kid watching Robotech and my narrative I told around my Lego ships borrowed heavily from it. One big part of the story was that there was a group returning from distant space and planned on taking over the worlds that my ship protected. I never got around to building the ship when before my teenage years started and I headed off to other things. I revisited the Lego box in my college years to finish the quest. This ship represented the returning force to battle the other ship. The battle never actually happened but the ships lived together from then until that fateful day in my 30's when they both were destroyed by the threat of a little boy.