Lego Greebling, How to using Railway Tracks

 

Hey brick fans!

Today's little project is about how to make greebling for your space or lego star wars dioramas. I tried a simple solution of using railway track pieces as scaffolding.  Let's see how it turns out!

For this tutorial, I have used 4 railway track pieces, but you can use however many pieces you have on hand.  

Get yourself some plates that are 1 stud wide and attach them to the sides of the track.  Use two 1x2 pieces for the top and bottom and use a 2x2 plate to secure the middle.  As you can see, I've just used random length pieces for the sides.

Use some smooth tiles to cover the sides.

Now, you want to fill in the middle by using stud wide plates.  I'm using 2x16 plates, but again use whatever you have in your brick stash.  On top of the those plates, you will need 2 pieces of coaster track.

It's ok if you don't have any coaster track, just use whatever you have available to you.  Here's another example of what you could put in the middle.

Now let's do some greebling ...

To keep it simple, I start by taking dark gray plates that are 4 studs wide but can be any length.  Then freely add little bits and pieces to the plates.  Feel free to copy my design or come up with your own based on whatever bricks you have.  As you can see above, it's easiest to start greebling on a 4x4 plate. Then as you get more parts, try making a bigger greeble panel from a 4x6 plate, and so on.  Using this modular technique means you won't get overwhelmed by trying to do too much.   After you've made random greeble panels, experiment by putting them together in different ways to see what looks best.

The fun thing is, if you get bored you can pop all the panels off and put them together in a new way.  Here's how mine looks.

These greebled panels can then be displayed as a backdrop for your futuristic setups.

The panels look great both horizontally or vertically. 

Try making more panels once you get the hang of it and try using different pieces to get different textures.  As a tip, I try to keep all the coloured parts on a panel the same, except where you want to deliberately make something stand out like the yellow ladder on the dark gray greeble panel.

Most importantly, have fun and see what you can come up with. Anyways, feel free to leave a comment or question!    Thanks for looking, Bye!

How I made a Lego compatible Cyberpunk Style tower

 

Hey brick fans!

Here's some pics of a cyberpunk looking tower I made.  It was heavily inspired by the Lumibricks/Funwhole Cyberpunk Neon city set.   But I wanted a simple design that wasn't too hard to build.  So I came up with this stackable tower.  It's totally modular and you can build it as high as you want given the parts you have on hand.  

In this example, the tower consists of three cubes which I stacked on top of each other.  If you're ambitious, you could even add lighting to the tower, but that's optional.  

Here's what the tower looks like, separated into the three cubes.  You can start by creating one cube, and then continue to add cubes as you acquire more parts.

I actually re-used the rooftop from the Lumibricks Cyberpunk apartments with some adjustments, but you could come up with your own rooftop design if this doesn't suit your needs.  In the Blade Runner movie, I remembered that the city scape had flames shooting up into the night sky, so I tried to replicate that with the flames coming out of the roof.

In it's simplest form, the cube uses a 16x16 stud base, with girders on each corner.  I placed 2 corrugated wall panels and 2 window panels on each side of the cube.  Just repeat this design on all four sides of the cube.

To add some visual interest, I added screens using a fence piece to the inside of the window panels.

To make the cubes stackable, just top them off with smooth tiles and put 2x2 jumper tiles on each of the four corners of the girders.

For more visual interest, you can add pipes or conduits running down the side.

I have pipes running down each cube on 3 sides.   I also aded signage for extra detail.  I've perched my cyberpunk tower on the roof of my existing nightclub building.  More details about my custom strip club modular building can be found here.

For an extra pop of colour, I added lighting to my Cyberpunk tower.  I used different no name branded light kits I found on Temu.

For the exterior of the tower, I installed a red LED strip light on three sides of the tower.  Since I have three cubes, that makes a a total of 9 red strip lights.

This is the led kit i used. It comes with 10 led light strips, two expansion boards, one connecting wire, and one usb plug.  With three cubes, I needed to add another expansion board from my light kit stash.  Here's the Temu link for this light kit.

Inside each of the cubes, I have the red led light wires connected to a six port expansion board.

Here's what the connection looks like inside each cube.  I have another wire that connects one cube's expansion board to another cube's board.  On the lowest cube expansion board, I've attached a USB plug that runs out the bottom.  Refer to the second pic from the top of this blog post to see how that looks.

For the interior, I used the same brand of LED lights I used to light up the upper part of my Lumibricks tower.  The light strips are sold in different colours, but I chose pink and ice blue as those colours seem to be most representative of cyberpunk colours.  I used one ice blue coloured light strip inside each cube and linked them together using connecting wires.

This LED kit is also found on Temu and it goes by the name MAXCXT.  The kit includes a few extra connecting wires than the other red light kit.   Here's the TEMU link for the MAXCXT light kit.

So let's review the basic parts you will need to make one cube:

2 piece16x16 stud baseplate (top and bottom of the cube)

4 pieces of girder part

8 pieces of corrugated wall panels

8 pieces of large windows

8 pieces of clips for the fence part

4 fence parts

4 2x2 jumper tiles

assorted smooth tile pieces that attach to the top of the wall and window panels.

Finally, if you plan on adding a lighting kit, instead of using one 16x16 baseplate, you might want to consider using a collection of sized smaller plates for the top and bottom of each cube.  Leave a hole so that the light connecting wires can pass through from one cube to the next.   

If you like the Cyberpunk style, you will love the Lumibricks Cyberpunk sets!

Anyways, hope this mini tutorial guides you in building your own Lego compatible Cyberpunk style tower.  Let me know if it helps!    Thanks for looking and Bye for now.

My Custom McDonalds Modular Building gets new lighting!

 

Hey brick fans,  welcome back!

Today, I wanted to show you the latest updates to my McDonalds MOC modular building.  In 2024, we added a second floor seating area to the fast food restaurant.  This year, we decided to kick it up a notch by adding lighting!

In case. you haven't seen my older blog posts about the McDonalds building, here's what it looks like.

The entire second floor is completely surrounded by windows and there's an outdoor terrace where diners can get some fresh air while they are enjoying their meal.

My favourite part of the McDonalds restaurant is the drive thru lane, which you don't see in other modular MOC buildings.

I admit that the backside of the building is really ugly.  I still need to get some new red bricks and panel walls, to replace those weird coloured bricks from Sluban.

I think  I might have changed the back door colour since the last update. It's now yellow, but I think I had a brown door before.  A new change that I made was adding a second door under the staircase so that from the back door you can go right into the kitchen.

I also added some red and yellow inverted sloped bricks to tie into the canopy design on the main floor.

The McDonalds crew hasn't changed.  The burger flipper, the french fries mascot, and Ronald McDonald minifigures are still holding up the fort.

You can't really notice the lighting when the room lights are on.  There's a strip light that is mounted to the underside of the roof to light up the second floor interior.  There's also another light outside to light up the terrace.  

Lighting is a combination of Lightailing/Briksmax lighting components and third party light strips I got from Temu.  They aren't compatible so I used the Lightailing wire converters to join the elements from the two systems together.  You can find them here: https://www.lightailing.com/collections/accessories/products/connector-converter-resolving-compatibility-issues-between-new-and-old-connectors?ref=Na3aPUQJDUmtv

Here's my blog post about the third party LED light strips I got from Temu: https://altbrickdeals.blogspot.com/2024/04/teedoo-lego-component-lighting-kit.html

On the main floor I added an overhead light that illuminates the drivethru lane.

And finally, I have a light strip that lights up the main floor interior.

Here's what the lighting looks like when I turn out my room lights.

Here's another view of the lighting for the drive thru.

After taking the pictures, I realize that I might now have to add even more lighting to light up the McDonalds sign.  Oh well, I'll save that for another day.   Feel free to let me know what you think of the latest enhancements to my McDonalds restaurant MOC!    Thanks for looking, Bye!

Transforming the FunWhole Graffiti Bus Stop F9066 into a custom Transit Hub

Hey brick fans!

I recently had the pleasure of building this new set called the Graffiti Bus Stop F9066. It's part of the FunWhole Street Fusion series and features three separate components that can be displayed in a number of variations.  My quickie review of the original set can be found here if you want to see what's included.

While it's a cool little set, I needed it to fit into the format of my not Lego city.  So, I set about integrating  it into my typical layout.

I've customised my set by placing it onto a 32x32 stud raised baseplate, some of you might know this better as a MILS plate.  The original set came as three separate components which you could link together, and move around, but in my setup I have created a transit hub.   The transit hub serves as a connection point between the bus terminal and train line.

The transit hub consists of the bus terminal shelter, the grafitti laden mezzanine and a train line in behind.  The small flea market is no more.   With the raised baseplate, I have included a studded sidewalk on which to attach my minifigures.  FunWhole typically only uses smooth tiles in the majority of their sets so I always end up replacing them with studded plates so that minifigures can be more easily affixed.

Here is the mezzanine which serves as the entrance to the local rapid transit train line. The recycling center and sign post from the original set was retained, but is now supplemented by a vending machine.  I've added a few extra minifigures and another bike.  I've also added a few of my own minifigures to give it a little more hustle and bustle to this upgraded transit hub.  

The silver bench from the OG bus stop has now been replaced by a turquoise bench that spans the length of the bus shelter.  I've hidden the wire connection hub for the lighting under the bench.   Lighting for the bus shelter has been retained.  The payphone stays pretty much in it's original location, but the extra trash can is a new addition.  I incorporated  the smaller grafitti wall from the flea market directly into the bus shelter.

The majority of glass panels from the bus shelter have been repurposed into the train platform which is located behind the bus shelter.

It's hard to see the train platform when viewing the transit hub from the front, so here's an overhead shot.  Stair access to the train platform is via the large mezzanine next to the bus shelter.  The accent light from the grafitti wall has been repurposed as lighting for the train platform.  

This is the view from the train tracks with a better view of the reused grafitti glass wall.

In this view, we can better see the new vending machine and the light green bike from the OG set.  In the FunWhole Newsstand set, there was a printed ad for fresh farm produce and I've placed the ad on the fence as an easter egg.

The mezzanine area is a bit underlit so a future project may be to include some extra lighting in that space.  

Thanks for looking at my modified Grafitti Transit Hub, see you next time, Bye!