Mike Walsh’s LEGO® Blog

No LEGO news but I did update this web site with the latest version of Wordpress (2.5.1).  I went ahead an installed some of the plugins as well.  Most of them run behind the scenes so readers won’t see anything.

Not much new on the LEGO front.  I am not doing anything meaningful other than playing with the couple mini sets I have on my desk at work.  I am seriously considering packing my stuff up for a while and putting it away.  I had lunch with Cary Clark last week and he is in a similar situation.  No real enthusiasm to do anything new but not really interested in unloading everything either.

Last Friday I stopped by Tinsel Town to take down the last of the NCLUG/NCLTC Christmas Tree.  While it was fun to decorate the tree, it really took a lot of abuse.  Apparently some people feel that since the tree was decorated with LEGO ornaments and LEGO is a toy, it was ok for their children to play with it.  The train in particular took a lot of abuse.  Each time I stopped by to check on it, it was in some state of disassembly.

If we do a tree again next year I don’t think we’ll have the train, it is too tempting for little hands to play with and parents are unwilling to tell their children not to touch.  To be honest, I expected some level of deconstruction because of the accessabilty of the tree, but not the level it received.  Live and learn - it certainly was the best looking tree when it first went up!

Now to try and put all of the ornaments back together and get them to their respective oweners.  I have some and Carin Proctor has some.  We’ll get it straightened out at some point!

A few weeks ago when I was doing some digging around on 2008 Star Wars sets, I found the 4837 Mini Trains set on BrickSet.  I haven’t purchased much LEGO in the past year but I have a soft spot for these mini sets (I have posted about it before) and I buy them from time to time and keep them on my desk at work.  A train mini set?  Had to have that so with 2008 sets starting to appear at Toys-R-Us in the US, I stopped by last weekend to have a look.  Sure enough, they had two of them so I bought them both!  I sent one to my dad as part of his Christmas gift and kept the other.  It is a cool set (other then I stil think they are too expensive at $6.99) and would make a great Christmas ornament.  So far I have only build the primary model, it is sitting on my desk at work.

The question on how to add a motor to the 10173 Holiday Train has come up through the ILTCO Feedback link a couple times this holiday season.  LEGO sells a kit which combines the 9v motor and the 10173 Holiday Train but the included instructions don’t show how or where to add the motor.  I ran into this myself when we set up the NCLUG tree at Tinsel Town.  I knew I’d seen this done somewhere but I was in a bit of a rush when I set up the train so I replaced one of the bogies on the passenger wagon with a motor and removed the undercarriage and was good to go.  This isn’t a great solution and when I got the most recent e-mail asking how to do it, went searching for the correct answer.

It turns out you can download instructions from LEGO.com to modify the tender with the 9v motor.  I found this information in this long thread discussing the Holiday Train on LUGNET.

A small group of us (Sabrina, Carin, Joe, and myself) from NCLUG and NCLTC have committed to decorate a Christmas tree at Tinsel Town which is located inside the Koka Booth Amphitheatre near Regency Park in Cary.  I found out about Tinsel Town last year when my daughter Renee was invited to a birthday party held at Tinsel Town.  It was too late to decorate a tree last year but this year I contacted them and they still had a few available.  After a quick e-mail out to the group gauging interest, we committed to build ornaments and decorate a tree.

I like building Christmas ornaments and have built a few for our own tree each of the last 4-5 years.  They also make nice Christmas gifts and I made some for my mom last year.  This year I, along with help from my children, made about 15 ornaments.  Some were original but most were not.  Sabrina, Carin, and Joe came through in flying colors, Sabrina in particular had some really neat ideas.

I have documented some of the ornaments and will post instructions for them shortly.  If you have a chance, go by and see the tree, it will be decorated until the end of December.

NCLUG recently had a sorting thread and this interesting WikiHow article came to light.  Sorting and storage has always been one of the things which has frustrated me with LEGO.  I never seemed to have the right answer.  Right now I am using Plano boxes and LEGO tubs for most of my storage and have some large RubberMaid tubs for some larger things.  There always seems to be be something to sort though and something which doesn’t fit in the current storage system!

I was asked to judge the LEGO category at the NC State Fair again this year.  Fortunately Joe Meno was in town this year and was able to join me.  The Fair changed their entry submission process this year and required all exhibitors (for all categories, not just LEGO) to preregister.  Unfortunately it appears that many people didn’t read the submissions guidelines very well because entries are waaaaaay down this years (again - for all categories, not just LEGO). 

The entry process is now computerized as well so there is no chance to “fix” an entry if a parent or child has filled out their entry incorrectly.  Unfortunately, this resulted in a number of kids having their entries disqualified or judged in the wrong category.  In particular, a nice model of the Fair itself was not entered under the NC theme category where it would have won first place.  Instead, it was judged in the Original category where it won a 3rd place ribbon.

This is the second year the “kit” category hasn’t existed yet several kids still submitted kits.  We DQ’d four entries because they were just kits.  I am sure some visitors will wonder why the beautiful model of the Wright Flyer didn’t win the blue ribbon in the NC theme category but it isn’t original.  The woman who runs the fair really appreciates that Joe and I know which are kits and which aren’t.

So until next year, judging is complete and unfortunately, the Fair isn’t going to add an adult category as we had requested.  I guess that makes it easy for us to judge -it would be hard if I had to judge my own entry!

October 1, 2007 was a sad day for LEGO Trains.  LEGO announced (see LUGNET thread) that 9v trains will no longer be produced.  While disappointing, this is not really a susprise.  LEGO has for the most part, ignored the train line for several years and the LEGO Hobby Train was simply not enough to generate new interest in Trains.  So what many people have speculated will indeed come to pass.  Like the 4.5v and 12v before it, 9v had a great run and really supported the growth of LEGO as a viable medium for model railroading.  I have been expecting this since the day Steve Barile, Holger Mathes, Huw Millington and I participated in a conference call with the LEGO Train team where they shared their IR plans with us.  They had asked for some feedback and were so far down the commitment path with IR that none of the things we suggested were ever implemented.

Part of the announcement talks about a new LEGO Power System.  It will be interesting to see what comes from this.  Right now it looks like the current IR trains may be short lived as well.  Only time will tell.

Here is the box as I opened it although the baseplates were not stacked so nicely.


I pulled the baseplates out first and set them aside.  I had specifically asked for baseplates because the last time we had the NCLTC layout set up, we were really short of baseplates to cover the open areas of the layout.  It looks so much nicer when everything is covered!


Now you can see what is left to sort.  I have no idea why they couldn’t put each element into a separate bag but they didn’t.  I guess this is a good problem to have but it is still a daunting sorting effort.


This is as much as I got done yesterday.  While I was on a conference call I sat there and picked all of the bright green large plant leaves out of box.  I had requested both large and small plant leaves and they were sent in two different colors!  The smaller leaves are the traditional darker green, the larger ones are the bright green.

This morning as I was sitting at my desk the DHL delivery truck arrived and had a present for me.  I received a K8 of assorted bricks from LEGO for working on the UTB (Hobby Train) project.  For those unfamiliar with the term “K8″, LEGO has several standard box sizes which them ship elements in.  I have personally seen K8, K6, and K4, I assume there are other sizes as well.  A K4 is a little bigger than a shoe box and if you visit a LEGO store, you may see the Pick-A-Brick stock in K4 boxes.  A K8 is 16″x24″x12″ - a pretty big box!  A K6 is in between the two.  A K8 of LEGO elements weighs quite a bit as you can imagine.  The box I received was about 2/3 full, maybe a bit less.

Very late in the project we learned we would receive some “compensation” for our efforts and it would include a selection of bulk elements.  We assumed it would be from the online Pick-A-Brick but it turns out we could request pretty much anything but there was no guarantee it would be available.  So we each filled out a spreadsheet with our wish list and sent it in.  How much we would receive and when we would receive it was rather vague - it really wasn’t clear how this process would work.

I decided to focus on some of the darker colors (dark green, dark red, and dark blue) which I don’t have much of.  Unfortunately dark green wasn’t available but I was able to get a fair amount of dark red and dark blue from my wish list - at least that is what I am expecting based on the feedback I got from my wishlist.  I also asked for a bunch of the new 1×3 curved element which we tried hard to include in the Hobby Train and some other items like plant leaves, grey tiles, and baseplates.

Now that the box has arrived, I get to see what I really got from my wish list.  At first glance, it looks pretty good - it is certainly a lot of LEGO!  Unfortunately it isn’t sorted.  Why they simply dumped all of the elements in one big bag is beyond me but there is some wonderful stuff in the box so I imagine it is worth it.