Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Bricks on a beautiful weekend

Am I that crazy to do 2 ..YES 2 LEGO events on the same weekend?
The Camp Combe LEGO Carnival on Saturday, April 25th and Lyndhurst LEGO Fun for the entire weekend. What a rush!

At The carnival I had robots, some city and minifigure stuff and a bunch of interactive displays. I had my Final Fantasy chicken walker series there as my true originals and only one of my dragons, zero. I had a usual table full of bionicle stuff, mostly old ones and even had a few rahkshi out! Bohrok, Muaka and Kane-ra were there along with the Droid developer kit - too bad batteries fried my microscout though. I brought out the black creations car and the white convertible only to be topped off with the big Ferrari GTB 599. The Cafe corner and market street were tabled with a circle of train track which had the BSNF Locomotive pulling a few cars. Inside was the 'centerpiece' ferris wheel, which, without a little fiddling with, would get stuck.
The big hits were the rhotuka spinners, BT RC robots and free play areas. Tops using the pull back motors were great, but i dont get how they were so complex for the kids. I had some gold brick to play with (much to my chagrin) but the kids made some fun stuff out of that. There was a great chunk of knights kingdom figure parts and just loose brick from everything.
Everything got mixed up so i really have to sort now!

Lyndhurst had my usuals for Lyndhurst. Bionicle table, this time with the six glatorians, Loci, my two battle angels, the bounty hunter and kikanlhikanalo. I tried pulling out Infinitus, but i think i'm just going to have to rebuild it. I brought out some starwars stuff, everyone loves the Hoth scene. The UCS Naboo starfighter just really gleamed in the sun.
My GBC was really something else this year, and i get better at it everytime i have a run at it. I used philo's instructions for a Jigsaw with a Star justice theme and a generic dumper module. I also made a conveyor belt with a Space Skulls color scheme, but the theming never really got off, i was just happy it worked. My coup de gras was this dozer module, it had a construction theme and used an inverted track to bring the balls up and then drop them to a little off ramp towards the front, minifigs were used structurally to keep balls from popping out. It was great and really really reliable. Lastly, theres always one that doesnt work, a Mars Mission base themed giant tower. It was truly ambitious, the major problem was that the balls would stay on the chain even after they flipped upside down. I tried using a 2x3 plate in between to help the balls jump off, but they'd still stay or the 2x3 plate would come off at the bottom of the conveyor. I did manage a clever mechanism to help catch the balls though. Maybe next year i can make it bigger still and make it more reliable.
On sunday i brought my original chicken walkers since i think they were cool.

As usual Arthurs sculpted buildings were great, the Naboo Castle Really stood out in my mind, since it was his only non real building. Also the LeGo-Bots lady was there with some awesome RC robots and demonstrations, can you believe she told me she bought 7 (YES 7) Black NXTs!

Well till next time