Behind the Iron Curtain

After the many tanks and fighters let's see something more peaceful. There is no Iron Curtain for a while, but many of us still remember it. April's heme of the month on LUGNuts was "Behing the Iron Curtain". As my old Trabant proves this theme was one of my favorites.

Mad Physicist has built a quite recent police car from Moscow. As one of the commenters says "Ugly car in reality, and yours is true replica :)". Well, there is quite a bit of truth in that.

This fantasctic Ural motorcycle by Lino M was featured on Brothers Brick too. I have not seen this in real life a lot. The Soviet flag gives it an extra charm.

This ZISZ 110 from rabidnovaracer is pretty cool too. To me this car model represents one of the darkest ages of communism as it was used during the 50s during the most avid terror by the the highest ranked people in the party in several countries.

This is a somewhat friendlier piece, the luxury car from Chechoslovakia with a V8 engine: the Tatra 603 from lego911:

Rolic has built this Latvia RAF-2203 (yes, RAF stands for Riga Autobus Factory in this case). I have seen plenty of these as a kid.

Of course I could not stand not to build something. The Trabi has existed for a while, but the LUGNuts challenge made me realize that I did not take any photos yet. Yet another problem to solve was proportions: the old model was simply too flat. Luckily I have found a way to inject two layers of plates to make it taller without a major rebuilt. I am much happier with the result now:

I wanted to build something truly new too. As during last month I used up most of my Bricklink budget already, this Ikarus 260 was built on the computer only:

The front is quite similar to some existing Ikarus builds, not too different from the solution of ainex. I tried to build the doors, windows and the rear lights a bit more special. Hope you like it!

Clicking any of the images above will bring you to more photos.

2012

There is nothing to be proud of: 2011 was not particularly fruitful in the life of the blog. Yes, we have new design and I have also fixed the old links and even more, we got a new MiG-15. But I did not provide a lot of new content.

It is not because I don't have anything to write about. I don't promise daily updates in 2012 either, but I will go after some of the hotness.

Some hints of what will follow:

• It's not a secret that I am a big fan of cars from Mad Physicist. The Lead Sled replica is on my shelf for a long time, but now it sits next to a Ferrari Testarossa. More details will follow soon.
• The last piece from the big Technic cars, the 8860 is also on my shelf for some time now. It's time to share more details about it.
• I got several new Lego sets. For example a 5867 Creator car. I am very excited about this because Nathanael Kuipers built about 15 more variations, so now I can build those as well.

Gran Turismo from Nathaniel Kuipers-től. Now I have all bricks to build it :)

• I also got a 21011 Brandenburg Gate. I have always liked the Architecture series, I am happy that I own the only European building so far. It is so nice that I started thinking about other buildings I could build in a similar style. Born in Hungary, I have started building the Parliament of Hungary. We will see soon how far I get.
• I have found a serious problem with my Trabant. On its own it looks quite alright, but next to its friends it is obvious that it is not tall enough. It is just taller than the Ferrari Testarossa which does not look good. I hope to find somt time to fix that. It may need a substantial redesign though. At the moment I don't even dare to think about more cars.

I wish everyone a Happy New Year Rich in Lego!

East Block begins - Trabant

I am a big fan of small LEGO cars, especially the creations of Mad Physicst. For a long time I have planned to build cars that were prominent during my childhood. Of course in 1/22 scale. Not surprisingly, these cars are from the Eastern Block: Trabant, Wartburg, "Small Polski", Škoda and the others.

This is the first part of the series, a Trabant 601 from the 80s. I have rendered this on a computer for a start, I hope you like it. I plan to build it from real bricks as well.

The road was slow and is to become even slower. First I got the scale wrong. The real Trabant 601 is 1504 mm wide, it is almost exactly 8 and a half bricks (1504/22/8 = 8.54). The first version I have built in LDD was 8 bricks wide but I have realized that it is too small and the proportions are wrong. To build it one brick wider - well, I could start from scratch. Then I have put it into BrickSmith, I have converted it with L3P so that I can render the image in MegaPOV. And I have spent quite some time playing with the rendering settings, mostly based on Koyan's tutorial.

Well, this is the result, I hope you like it. The next one will most likely be a Škoda 120 because one of my friends is a big fan, or maybe a Small Polski. A few more images in the album.