Lego: Stairs

Trish modelling the new stairs to her rooftop vege patch

Stairs became an ongoing experiment the minute Bosley discovered how ridiculously out of scale the ‘proper’ one is.

He had Drew illustrate the problem with the regular one …

Drew, trialling a regular tread height stair mock-up with treads three plates high. Since he couldn’t get his leg up far enough to reach the next step …

… the crew decided on treads two plates high rather than three

Two nights to go …

I have two nights more at this place. Thursday afternoon I go to a little motel to stay the night.

Friday at 7.30 AM the removalists are arriving to pack up and drive approx ten kilometres down Old Cleveland, take a right at Carindale, a couple of lefts past the mall and a right into my new street. Then the unpacking.

I’m being saved from all this as I happened to pick up a virus somewhere, and will be completely useless without having somewhere to frequently sit or lie down.

My job for the last few days has been to pack up the Lego. Well, there are definitely going to be a few changes happening in how I store things. Luckily thebrickarchitect.com is rejigging their label system which will be a wonderful resource.

And there will have to be some serious rebuilding, because of course several builds did not take kindly to being packed up. Unfortunately, as you can see below, Jed has stormed out of the scene, taking Jackie’s crane on his truck out of the picture!

Lego: Mapping

My original plan was about four times larger than I have available … my tabletop is four baseplates wide (baseplates are 25 cm/10 inches a side.)

The first thing that told me I’d be biting off more than I could chew was realizing I’d need about 45 baseplates.

The sheer work involved in building them and the cost were the next considerations. I reminded myself of the premise.

“Bosley and Co are building their accommodation on an island that nobody wants, surrounded by wetlands.”

The cost of the wetlands alone would’ve been beyond the scope of the project. Transparent light blue 1×2 tiles are 22 cents each in my scene.

I decided to go back to my original idea. Instead of covering seven baseplates with swamp, I’ll make one, at most two, swamps and move them around as needed.

I’m not sure yet what I’ll do about the deep water river channel. Two baseplates already but including with the channel, places for large ships and small boats to dock. As seen below:

Lego: MILS Again

I’m sure Lego fans will get sick of me posting about MILS plates. They’re great but I don’t have the dollars to make eight or twelve of them and only then add landscaping.

So when I decided to raise my town to above so-called sealevel, I built a Duplo + Lego foundation plate in the MILS format.

Tomorrow another one …

Representing Water …

Laying down ‘water’ using Lego elements is not as easy as for example, using paint …

Water: Experiment 1

Below is a scrap of a painting, surf. Stand away from it and it’s not hard to imagine the breakers rolling in. And I painted that in the first year that I’d started in watercolor painting. Representing water using Lego elements is going to be a lot harder.

Lego: MILS Base-plate

The minute I saw a Lego base-plate, I knew I’d have to find an alternative.

Underside of Lego base plate in green, my version of a MILS plate in blue etc

Most of the building I’m doing is on my smallish round dinner table. When I have guests stuff has to be able to be moved easily to shelves. Just how weak and bendy the original base-plates are was amply illustrated to me by Darryl of Bevin’s Bricks on Youtube cutting one up with a box cutter.

I already searched through possibilities like glueing base plates on cardboard and building on ordinary plates and joining those with other ordinary plates. Neither of which attracted me. The first because it’s hard to stay accurate. The second because of heavy and awkward builds springing apart when you least expect it. I’ve read about builds grievously falling apart while being transported from one table to the next. Not ideal, in other words.

Then, on one of the FB groups I joined, I saw mentioned the MILS plate as the next development in the search for a strong base plate. Following that up, I saw a good explanation on Bevin’s Bricks. [Though I have again forgotten what ‘MILS’ means. I have a life-long memory glitch in relation to acronyms.]

Me constructing a ‘proper’ MILS base plate right now would’ve meant ordering the required parts, and weeks of waiting on covid-struck postal services in several countries. Even getting supplies by post from my local brick resales outlet a few suburbs away, usually takes a couple of weeks.

Not helped this week that I’m house-bound again, waiting to be told whether I have covid or another lurgy. Well, I know I have a lurgy. Ten days of coughing.

But … I have six alternate-lego base plates, lots of blue 2×2 bricks and red 2×2 bricks that I have no idea where to use, a few 30-year-old Technic 1×6 bricks, and a bunch of blue sun-damaged plates of all sizes. Can I achieve something with them?

I could. Very likely the ordered honeycomb of professionally built MILS base plates is not present in the internals of my sandwich base plate (below) because I spaced the reds and blues according to need, not design. I’m very happy with it and am aiming to put another one together tonight.