Family photo

I still have pretty ambitious plans to build, but not so much time recently. Until I manage to carve out more, this is a family photo of two of the planes built so far.

Ikarus in all quantities

Although many years old, the Ikarus buses are still one of the most recognizable products from Hungary. The KLIKK blog has recently published a nice summary of the LEGO versions (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4). The text is in Hungarian, but the models are international :)

Although it exist on computer only, my personal favorite is this Ikarus 280 articulated bus created by gabor1980 alkotása. It looks simply fantastic:

It is worth checking out the other ones too.

I am into LEGO again. What next?

I have several friends who have started buying and playing LEGO recently. Assume you are one of them: you have bought a few sets, built them, built the B-Models too and you find it cool. The obvious question is: what next? You can buy more and do the same. Apart from financials, there are other bottlenecks: you will have to store them somewhere. And unless you are one of those LEGO Investors, this is going to become a problem.

So besides buying more, what other options do you have? Let's take a look. Some of the options is biased towards Technic, but I hope non-Technic fans can also get some starting points.

First, I would recommend watching the hilarious keynote by Hillel Cooperman from BrickCon 2012. It's 25 minutes, but worth it. (Not for your kids though.)

Ok, now that you have realized where you are on your path, let me show you some pointers. (Just in case you are wondering: AFOL = Adult Fan Of Lego, MOC = My Own Creation.)

Most importantly I recommend you try to build things yourself. Some of these places may give you inspiration:

Rebrickable. This is a site for people to share their creations. While it is not necessarily easy to navigate, the best thing about this site is that all creations have building instructions available, so this is a great way to get started. (Yes, some instructions cost money, but many don't.) For many creations you are able to download an LXF file that allows you to investigate a virtual model in Lego Digital Designer.

It may be helpful to look at what others have created. There are several sites specializing in this:

• The good old Brickshelf is probably the oldest site doing that.
• Mocpages is a bit more modern, but has good content too.
• Finally, the most vibrant place is certainly Flickr. Yes, I know, Flickr sounds a bid oldschool in todays Web many-dot-o world, but that's how things are. A good way to start is picking an interesting community and browse around. For example LUGNuts is all about cars, or this group is mostly about aircraft.

There are also some really good books around building that may give you more inspiration. My favorites:

• The unoffical LEGO Technic Builder's Guide from Sariel explains you how to do suspensions, gearboxes and all sorts of LEGO Technic magic.
• If you are wondering about non-Technic magic, The Unofficial LEGO Advanced Building Techniques Guide is a free download that sheds light on some of the magic.

There are some pretty cool magazines too:

• Hispabrick is a free magazine that is available in English, with really good content.
• Railbricks is all about LEGO trains. Premium content too.
• BrickJournal is something you have to pay for. But it's only a few bucks and really worth it.

TechnicBRICKs is a blog you may be interested in. It is mostly about LEGO Company products and specacular Technic creations. On the other hand Technicopedia is the encylopedia of our childhood's favorite Technic sets.

There are probably 1000 others that I have left out, but I am sure these will get you started.

It can be built by anyone

I had a plan was to share some of my own creations. In my opinion Rebrickable is a really great site to do this, so I started uploading. Luckily the past few days gave them just enough time do review all the stuff, so here they come.

First, I have the classic Mustang about which I even made a Youtube video a long ago. I was surprised to find out recently that someone else has downloaded it to make another one too :)

I managed to publish the micro MiG-15 and MiG-21 too:

Finally I have completed the upload of the MiG-15 too:

The instructions have been made with Digital Designer so they are not the best of my artistic career, but they contain just enough to build the models.

Happy building and don't forget to let me know if you build one of them, or you use them in a YouTube video! :)

Swiss, but not cheese

I may have an affiliation with Hungary, but I do live in Swizterland. Coincidentally, the Bf-109G has served in both the Hungarian and the Swiss Air Force. Hence, I decided to build a Swiss Air Force Bf-109 as well. The aircraft is almost identical to the previous one except for the color scheme.

More photos on Flickr as usual. Enoy!