My LEGO®-related Rambles
What happens when you give a load of London AFOLs 400 Brick Separators (630) to play with?
This was my pretty feeble attempt – a Romulan Death Fish.
However, there were some amazingly creative builds from other people – here’s a little selection:
And here’s the Spinning Death Wheel in action!
All in all it was a pretty fun evening.
The London AFOLs were sharing a stand at the London Model Engineering Exhibition with Brickish at Ally Pally over the weekend. Several of our members had built GBC modules and they were all put together to make a ridiculously pointless ball-carrying contraption, including two of mine. The punters loved it! Here’s a video of the circuit:
I was helping to run the machine all day, and heard many complimentary comments. The two best ones were:
This is the best LEGO model I’ve ever seen!
and
This is the best model in the whole show!
High praise indeed… Anyway, here are my two contributions merrily shifting balls.
And the public clearly loved it – there were loads of questions from young and old alike.
I was allowed out for a little while to look at the rest of the LEGO on display, here is a selection of photos of other builds:
So all in all my first experience at exhibiting was a good one, great fun and excellent company. When’s the next one?
We had a fun evening at the London AFOLs meetup today, where we did a team build of the awesome Ninjago City (70620). Each table got a selection of parts bags and the relevant instructions to put together their own bit. The folks I was building with got parts of the second floor above the balcony.
I had seen photos of the set before, and thought it would be a great one to own. But having seen it in person now, I really want one. It’s spectacular! My favourite bit (loads to choose from) was the working sushi conveyor on the roof.
Each month the club has a swaps box where, if you bring along some bricks you no longer need, you can take out something which takes your fancy. I put in some larger pieces which I wasn’t sure I would need for my own builds, and picked out these bits for my own use:
I’ve only been to one London AFOLs meetup so far, but have been made very welcome indeed and now feel part of the AFOL “family”. Today was their Christmas Party, which I had been looking forward to for ages.
The first excitement was the Secret Santa table – there was a budget limit of £15 and if you brought along a gift you were allowed to choose one to take away.
I chose this one with stags on the wrapping paper as my present to take home. You will have to wait until tomorrow to see what I got!
The contents of the raffle table nearly made my eyes pop out of my head. So many great sets up for grabs.
I had my eye on this box – which would have been my favourite choice if it worked that way.
The big ted was built by Fairybricks, I believe. And I loved the little NCS spaceship put together by Alec Hole. I bought a fistful of tickets but sadly wasn’t lucky at all! Oh well, maybe next year…
There was LEGO-themed food to eat too – this Minifig Jelly went down very well…
…and I can recommend these chocolates in the shape of LEGO bricks – delicious!
Plenty of other party food too, and lots of chat amongst us all. We also played Pass The Parcel with little gifts dropping out of the wrapping paper we tore into when the music stopped. I won a little City Polybag, so at least I wasn’t completely empty-handed.
The group gathered for a party shot at the end, this one thanks to Jonathan Gale.
All in all it was a splendid do, which I enjoyed very much.
I’ve only just emerged from my Dark Ages, so I was surprised to learn that AFOLs were a thing – Adult Fans of LEGO. Yay! I immediately looked up where my nearest group was – London. OK, bit of a hike each month, but I signed up for their November meetup and today was the day.
I started off with a quick trip to the LEGO store in Westfield at Stratford on the way in, where I picked up a few bits from the Pick-A-Brick wall. There weren’t too many pieces of use for Microscale stuff as it was mainly bigger bricks, but I stuffed a large beaker full for my money. Clearly, I need to work on my technique, though! When I got home I separated it all out and this was my haul – which included two baubles with some gold 2×2 bricks inside. I can see them being used in a fancy MOC at some point:
Anyway, on to the meetup… which was in the function room of a pub near Euston. Today’s event was a little unusual in that the good folks from the New Elemetary blog had brought along large quantities of some new pieces for us to play with, as well as using the stash of bricks owned by the club. We spent 20 minutes building something with the bits and then moved around to another table (with different elements available) so we got to chat with lots of people while we were building. It was a nice way to get to know a few folks. Here’s what I made during my 4×20-minute builds… I’m quite out of practice with MOCing, and compared to what some people managed, they weren’t very exciting, but I enjoyed it anyway.
I’m already looking forward to the December meetup and Christmas Party.