2002
| | Cool LEGO Site of the Week
August 4-10, 2002
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LEGO Model Trucks
-Evert van Wichen
| | Evert, a Construction Engineering & Management student in The Netherlands, loves building construction equipment with LEGO, and has built several 1:13-scale trucks, a loader, and a working crane which extends more than 3 meters upward.
The photos shown on the site were taken outside among grass and dirt, giving the models an extra realism. Check out the photos on the MAN 48.422 Tipper and Volvo L90D Wheel Loader pages, for example, and notice how easy it is to forget for a moment that these are LEGO models...(the only thing missing is the operator). It’s a very nice touch to see these beautiful vehicles actually moving dirt!
(Reviewed by Todd Lehman)
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| | Cool LEGO Site of the Week
August 11-17, 2002
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Mechanized Brick
-Chris Churchill
| | Technically, this is a commercial site, since Chris sells “kits” of the original models he has designed, but you can still enjoy the photos and perhaps discover some new building techniques. In striving for realism, Chris has positioned elements at all sorts of interesting angles using hinges and other connections and has included a large variety of hull details such as gas cans, tools, spare tank treads, opening tops and rear access hatches, even retractable landing gear on the fighters.
It’s especially interesting to note, by the way, just how realistic these World War II models are, given that The LEGO Company produces no military green color (as some of its competitors do). LEGO has long had a “no military” policy. As Chris illustrates, however, many elegant (and ominous!) designs still look just fine in grays.
(Reviewed by Todd Lehman)
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| | Cool LEGO Site of the Week
August 18-24, 2002
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Amy’s LEGO® Projects
-Amy Hughes
| | Amy loves windows and diagonals in archtechture, and uses both ingeniously. Here you’ll find three tasty architectural models: two churches and an office building. The smaller church uses 1000 windows. The larger Abston Church, unfortunately, is no longer available for viewing on the web. (Amy removed the photos from her website after its traffic allotment was exceeded during a period of extreme popularity a few months ago.)
Don’t miss the flap-winged Ornithopter Mk I model, and be sure to check out Amy’s 40-square-foot, 150-pound project table with a base made from 1/2” steel pipe. Curiosly -- and probably no coincidence -- the dimensions of the table match the given dimensions of Abston Church.
(Reviewed by Todd Lehman)
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| | Cool LEGO Site of the Week
August 25-31, 2002
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Steven’s LEGO Extravaganza
-Steven McDonough
| | Over 50 pages of Space, Castle, and Town creations are here for your viewing enjoyment. If you’re in a hurry, some suggestions to start with are the Deceptimech, the McSollen Turbo Bike S7600, the Maintenance Truck, the SM 300 Combat Jet “Peregrine”, and the DracoMech 5000 pages in the Space area and Mandrake Longfellow’s Tower of Sorcerers Sundries, Temple of the Creator, and Vultures pages in the Castle area. Also don’t miss the Other Creations page for some good humor.
Image quality varies quite a bit from page to page, so don’t give up if the first page you choose shows blurry images; some of the photos are quite excellent. Several of the models also feature innovative uses of hinged elements to create very interesting wall structures and collapsable cars.
(Reviewed by Todd Lehman)
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| | Cool LEGO Site of the Week
September 1-7, 2002
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Minimundo!
| | Minimundo! is the most complete reference to LEGO Mini-Figures (“minifigs”) on the Internet today, spanning virtually every LEGO SYSTEM play theme. Also included are LEGO SYSTEM creatures and animals. a huge assortment of minifig tools and weaponry, and a number of castle- and pirate-themed creations by creator of the website.
For a special visual treat, hover your mouse cursor over figures wearing masks or helmets. (Hint: visit the Star Wars, Aquazone, and Insectoids pages.)
(Reviewed by Todd Lehman)
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| | Cool LEGO Site of the Week
September 8-14, 2002
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Stephen Wroble Castles
-Stephen Wroble
| | If you’ve never seen animated building instructions before, head straight to the People page and click on The Baker. Then click More and then the right “play” arrow. Wow!
This is, as the site’s name implies, a site about LEGO castle creations. The photography and the presentation are both beautiful, and the models are lively and detailed. It’s a little easy to get lost, though, and miss a few of the offerings. Make sure to click the More People, More Places, and More Things links along the bottom as you explore! For example, don’t miss the Fortified Town buried in the More Places section of Places; the clickable top-view feels very natural.
Warning: This site relies heavily on Macromedia® Flash™ for its interactive effects. If your web browser does not support this, you will not be able to view the site in its entirety.
(Reviewed by Todd Lehman)
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| | Cool LEGO Site of the Week
September 15-21, 2002
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Castle Element
| | A dozen or so jawdroppingly cool creations grace the pages of this Castle-themed website. The buildings, everything from a water mill to a magic laboratory, a church to a farm, are set against gorgeous greenery and steep rock cliffs with waterfalls and are built atop large, square baseplates for maximum modularity. Every photo is excellent, and many creations are shown from multiple angles, so it’s quite a treat to browse through.
An additional Free Material section of the site includes several pages of cute and useful GIF images for download.
(Reviewed by Todd Lehman)
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| | Cool LEGO Site of the Week
September 22-28, 2002
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The Moonbase Project
-Jon Palmer
| | The Moonbase Project demonstrates a revolutionary advance in shared thematic building projects. Each participant in a building project can independently design and build a unique module, adhering to a few simple specifications. Any module conforming to the specification will interconnect with other modules, and because of this flexibility, large displays can be assembled on-location in a relatively ad-hoc manner.
The Moonbase Project arose from an in-personal brainstorming session of adult LEGO builders at BrickFest 2002 (July, 2002). Though the project is only barely two months old, you can already browse a large collection of completed modules by various builders.
(Reviewed by Todd Lehman)
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| | Cool LEGO Site of the Week
September 29-October 5, 2002
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le site de BaronSat
| | If you can find your way through the banner ads, there are a lot of great models at this site. The gallery area features models from several “guests” to the site as well as the site’s own creator (who calls himself or herself “BaronSat”). Notably in the gallery area, science fiction fans will get a kick out of the Aliens, Star Wars, and Star Trek themed pages, but you can also find many castle and ancient themed creations, including three or four fantasy sets (LEGO box mock-ups for sets that don’t really exist but which one wishes existed) and several custom minifigs based on popular comic book and video game heroes.
Surfing tip: Many of pages at this site contain only a single photo, and you must click “next” to get to subsequent pictures in the gallery.
(Reviewed by Todd Lehman)
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| | Cool LEGO Site of the Week
October 6-12, 2002
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Southern California LEGO Train Club
| | SCLTC (the Southern California LEGO Train Club) is a small group of LEGO train enthusiasts who build large train layouts for public display and for their own entertainment. Their website contains hundreds of photos from several train shows, and from these you can get a good sense for the enormity of the projects they’ve undertaken. One recent layout encompassed an area 992 studs by 1248 studs, or about 1.2 million sq. studs. (That’s about 900 sq. ft. or about 80 sq. meters.)
HTML geeks: don’t miss the interactive “layout explorer,” a really cool way to show a top view of a large layout while giving additional information.
(Reviewed by Todd Lehman)
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| | Cool LEGO Site of the Week
October 20-26, 2002
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LEGO Set Inventories - Dan & Jennifer Boger
| | If you ever have needed to know which LEGO set (or sets) a particular part has come in, this is the site for you! Here you’ll find parts inventories of nearly 2,000 LEGO sets, painstakingly recorded by dozens if not hundreds of individual contributors. The site is updated almost daily, and everything is cross-referenced for your convenience, using a simple and easy-to-use text-link interface. You can even view inventories “visually” by clicking the Show pictures link on an inventory page.
Please note that these are unofficial inventories of official LEGO sets; the LEGO Company does not publish parts inventories for the vast majority of the sets it sells. Every effort has been made to ensure the highest quality of data presented to you, and the data is checked by many sets of eyes.
(Reviewed by Todd Lehman)
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| | Cool LEGO Site of the Week
November 3-9, 2002
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Rolling Bricks -Dirk Meier
| | Cool train designs abound here, with several engines, passenger cars, and freight cars. A few of the designs even come with building instructions. Of particular note is the delicious use of 1x2, 1x4, and 2x2 tiles on the sides of the cars. Don’ miss the 9-wide Deutsche Bundesbahn BR 101 locomotive with 2x2 tiles along the whole side, and the Swiss wine freight car (SBB).
There’s also a few pages of train exhibition photos, and a helpful Brick metrics page, and a small page of “SNOT” (Studs-Not-On-Top) building tricks for advanced building.
(Reviewed by Todd Lehman)
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| | Cool LEGO Site of the Week
November 10-16, 2002
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Cerebrus Industries -Alex Blount
| | When you get to the Cerebrus Industries home page, click the little icons (no text links) along the left frame to enter the various sections of the site, and find cool aerospace and land vehicles and several mecha, all with a variety of viewing angles and downloadable building instructions.
Don’t miss the spinning ray-traced animation on the AU-22402 Courier II page.
(Reviewed by Todd Lehman)
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| | Cool LEGO Site of the Week
November 17-23, 2002
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The Brick Testament
-Rev. Brendan Powell Smith
| | The Brick Testament was first announced in October of 2001 with six stories from the book of Genesis. Since then Brendan has completed the entire book of Genesis and has been diligently working on much more of both the Old and New Testaments, all visualized with LEGO.
Bible stories come to life here in an easy-to-follow picture narrative with comic-book style word balloons. The photography is excellent and high-quality throughout the hundreds of pages. The settings are compelling, and the models are lavishly detailed.
Subtle touches of dark humor abound, contributing to the site’s somewhat controversial reputation... but it’s arguably all in good fun... and educational.
As Brendan put it in his initial announcement to the community, “Due to the fact that this is the Bible, there is some content which might not be suitable for all viewers.” Each story has been given its own rating for possible objectionable content, however, so you can use your own judgment.
Media journalists have taken notice, by the way, and really seem to enjoy the idea that there are adults who still “play with Legos” [sic]. Brendan has a FAQ about The Brick Testament and a Press page giving a lot of interesting background information and listing media sightings. It also mustn’t go without noting that The Brick Testament has been written up in both Spin Magazine and Time Magazine!
(Reviewed by Todd Lehman)
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| | Cool LEGO Site of the Week
November 24-30, 2002
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Brick Tales
-Bruce Hietbrink
| | Brick Tales is a fun site with LEGO-enacted versions of several classic stories. Most notable of these is the Lord of the Rings trilogy, about half of which is covered so far, totalling approximately 90 webpages of story and 300 photos, with many additional pages of detailing characters and locations.
But the site is actually more than just stories. Look around and you’ll find many nice photographs taken at LEGO theme parks.
(Reviewed by Todd Lehman)
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| | Cool LEGO Site of the Week
December 1-7, 2002
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MichLUG
| | MichLUG (the Michigan LEGO Users Group) is a group of about two dozen members in the Michigan (U.S.A.) area who get together to build and play with LEGO and participate in train shows. MichLTC (the Michigan LEGO Train Club) is a sub-club of MichLUG but is essentially the same group of people (for now).
What makes their website exciting is the amount of fun you can see they’ve had through their picture galleries. It’s a relatively new user group, but there’s a lot to enjoy if you dig. What’s nice about the pictures on the meetings pages is that you can dig into one or more “overall picture directories” (basically full dumps of digital cameras) contributed from different cameras, or you can look below at a selection of favorites in a presentation arranged by the site’s webmaster.
Space fans: don’t miss the moonbase modules on the Sep 7, 2002 meeting page! Train fans: don’t miss the cargo container stack on the Sep 7, 2002 meeting page! Town fans: don’t miss the buildings on the Oct 5, 2002 meeting page and the Oct 27, 2002 show report page! (How’d they do that, anyway? with the 1x2x2 classic white windows on the corner of that building? Woohaa!)
(Reviewed by Todd Lehman)
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| | Cool LEGO Site of the Week
December 8-14, 2002
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Tony’s Creations from Japan
| | Hundreds of photos of spacecraft and historical military creations adorn this high-energy Japanese website (also slightly translated to English). The photography is outstanding, and all of the models show great attention to detail. If gray is your favorite LEGO color, you’re probably going to love visiting this site.
Check out the Steyr 1500 A for an excellent example of a highly non-juniorized five-person vehicle and the BMW with Sidecar for one beauty of a bike. Futuristic car fans: don’t miss the multiply-hinged yellow minifig-scale Sports Car.
(Reviewed by Todd Lehman)
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| | Cool LEGO Site of the Week
December 15-21, 2002
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Avalonnia, l’univers du prisme
| | Avalonnia is a gaming universe based on the LEGO Castle theme, but richly expanded. Dozens of characters, several castles, and a large number of maps and other details are provided. The website is currently all in French, but the introduction has been translated to English. If the game catches on, no doubt it will be translated to other languages.
The website is a bit unweildy to navigate, due to a bountiful use of pull-down JavaScript menus, but with patience it is possible to get through all the pages. Note that the majority of the website is text. Those who just want to see pretty pictures should go straight to the Divers>Lego and Société>Navires sections.
(Reviewed by Todd Lehman)
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