Brickley's
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Sometime last year, I was sharing a very nice chinese meal with a couple of fellow AFOLs. There was some alcohol consumed, but that’s probably irrelevant. Sometime during the evening, the conversation turned to LEGO. Well it probably did many times actually. But this particular time, the idea was put forward of a new space (space!) faction.

Well most of you probably know, I don’t build space. But maybe because of the company, maybe because of the wine, I agreed to build something for this faction. So we had to come up with an idea. And as we were in a restaurant, and all fans of the Muppets, all we could come up with was the Swedish Space Chef Consortium.

Well we talked about it for a bit, and thought “what kind of ships would chefs build?”. And the answer was, of course, ships that look like kitchen implements. Mixers, rolling pins, various types of cutlery were all mentioned, as well as a “silver champignon”, and a couple of other food-related items. But I decided to do a corkscrew.

So I went home and did it. One of my co-conspirators kindly supplied a rock-raiders drill piece, which I felt would be vital, and didn’t own, but I supplied the rest. And it was with glea that I showed off the resulting MOC to the others.

But when I asked “where are yours???”, all they could do was mumble excuses like “I don’t have enough parts” or “I’m working on some other super fantasmagorical space thingy”, so I said I’d hold off posting pics for a while. But a year or so later, it appears the SSCC is indeed a consortium of 1.

And here it is.

For some time now, our customers have been asking for more options with our cranes. To this end we have secretly been working on a telescopic boom for our BRE-550M mobile crane.

And it is finally at a stage where we can show a sneak peek. It will have 3 telescopic sections, and we are also working on a Sideways Super-lift (SSL) option. So without further ado, here are 3 very early shots of the prototype.

Enjoy!

Edit: Three more early pics added 8 Aug 2005

When I was in high school, we had a PDP11 mini-computer which was used in various classes for lots of interesting stuff. Well actually, when I say “we had” I actually mean “we had access to” – the computer itself resided elsewhere, we just had a couple of terminals and a line-printer connected to it.

Anyway, 2 of the games available on it were Super Star Trek (sst), and Colossal Cave Adventure (advent), both of which I used to play quite a lot.

Then, many years later, I decided to teach myself the Perl programming language. And it just happened that I came across the original Fortran source for advent around the same time. So I decided porting advent to Perl would be a way to learn the language while having fun too.

So the result was this Perl program (remove the .txt after downloading). It mostly worked, except for a couple of bits, like the wizard, which works a bit but not fully. But the game itself works fine, and you can save game positions.

However, it must be said that it was ported on a pretty old version of Perl (4 point something I think), so it is unlikely to work with more recent versions without some tweaking.

It also requires the original advent.dat file, which I’ve made available here.

Anyway, here it is, for what it’s worth, and if you get something out of it, well that’s just a bonus!

OK this isn’t new apparently, but I’ve never seen it done in LEGO before so it’s new to me 😉

The idea is to motorise vehicles on a town layout. The method has been pinched from model railroading, where this seems to be reasonably common. Basically, you stick a battery and motor in the vehicle, and metal wire or strips under the road around the path you want it to follow. Then you add a magnet that activates the steering, and voila!

So I’ve come up with a basic chassis, too big for a car, but should be OK for a truck or bus. I think to do a car, you’d need to use non-LEGO parts, probably commercially available internals. My chassis is all LEGO, 7 studs wide, and length is easily adjustable. Vehicle must be long enough for a battery box, plus a couple of studs for the drive and about 6 studs for the steering.

The next thing to think about is stopping at level crossings. In scale layouts this is achieved using an electromagnet under the road which activates a reed switch cutoff in the vehicle. That will be difficult with LEGO, but we may try it eventually. For now I guess they’ll just go round & round.

Anyway I’ll let you know how it goes.

Well another train show appears to have ended up ok. We were hoping to break even, but as it was the first show at that venue, maybe our expectations were too high. But anyway, the layout worked well modularized (mostly), so we will probably stick with that concept.

But man, we need some more members with cars. I guess that means me…

Some other things to look at (in no particular order):

1. Remote controlled points
2. Backdrop
3. More coherent “zones”
4. Switchable “dead” track zone for more control

Also looking at reducing the size, I think we all agreed this layout was bigger than we really need. TD suggested 2 2×3 module “end sections”, with bridges connecting them. That way we can adjust the size a bit by changing the length of the bridge section, and we still have a fair bit of space at each end. Maybe limit to 1 loop though.

But all in all, a pretty good show. Here’s hoping the Morwell show is even better!