CATZILLA Memories

Sophie has a long history or causing destruction and mayhem in the town.  If we're truthful about it, she generally likes to just be close to us and watch what we're working on.  She will carefully and gingerly step around the crowded streets and not cause any REAL damage....  But what fun is THAT?!?

So naturally we created the CATZILLA character for her to play.. and since the internet didn't already have enough cat pictures on it, here is a MEGA collection of Sophie's greatest destructive moments!

What Have We Been Up To??

You're probably wondering where we've been and what we've been up to.
Well, let me tell you.  We have found ourselves overwhelmed with final preparations for a new arrival to our home.  It's very exciting for us-- and I hope you'll read on for more details, but here's a hint:

Trailer Queen

Felt guilty not posting more videos this month-- so here's a quick one I whipped together this morning.  It features a car trailer that's been roaming around town for a long time now (surely you've seen it!).  Pretty simple design, looks good, functions well and easy to make.

Check it out!  Follow us and Subscribe!

Failure to Yield

As you may have read earlier, we had some car crash drama in our household recently.  Someone rear-ended one of our cars at a stop sign.  No one was hurt and our car has since been repaired, but it seemed like as good a time as any to show you some pictures of a recent chain reaction crash.   Tyler took all these pictures-- they were a complete surprise to me when I emptied the camera card!  He tells a great little story though...  as I think you'll agree:

Uh-oh...  something has happened here for sure!

Racer Adaptations

We've acquired a lot of the Racer sets over the last few years.  While only slightly more expensive than Matchbox/Hot Wheels cars they're better because you can change the cars' designs around and, of course, when they crash you can "damage" them.

The only downside is that you can't put a minifig in them...  and their wheels are set too wide to match the rest of the Bricksburgh traffic.   So, we had to adapt them.

Grand Prix of Bricksburgh

Growing up I used to watch Formula 1 races every chance I got.  Senna, Prost, Mansell...  those were the big names of the day.  I also had a rudimentary simulator on the computer that featured all of the race tracks on the F1 schedule.  My favorite-- by far--  was Monaco.  Something about the tightness of the circuit combined with the dense scenery to heighten the virtual sensation of speed.  Naturally, I would act out those races in my Legotown too (this was about 1986).  I'd transform all the sedans in town into "stock cars" and use the police car as a pace car.  A couple times I even stripped them down to chassis pieces with roof slope noses to look like F1 race cars!  Eventually Lego filled that void and began making ACTUAL race track/related sets.  Of all those, one is CLEARLY the best.... and we have two of them.

What to do....? what to do...?    Let me tell you.

Crash Test

Tyler is off this week, but we'll be posting a complete video tour and accompanying blog post that we prepared before he left.  It'll be ready in a couple days.  In the meantime, here's a crash test animation that Tyler made at the Victory Raceway Complex shortly before we shot the video tour.

He did this test animation of a crash on the front straight.   As this was only a test, we haven't added any sound or done anything in the way of backdrop or lighting...  Still, it gives you an idea of some of the possibilities.   I was going to just keep it to ourselves but since uploads to YouTube are free (yay!) I figured there was no harm in sharing it.

Built 4-Wide Tough

Growing up I spent a lot of time in Europe and each time we returned to the US is was always striking to me how many pickup trucks were around.  Pickup trucks are a very American vehicle and you don't realize how common they are until you go somewhere where they aren't.

 Lego is not an American company, obviously, so it took them a long time to come up with an actual pickup truck in a set.  We have trucks in several different sizes in our town, but the most useful is the one we're going to look at today.  Click on through and we'll show you how easy it is to build your own.

More Car Variations - As Requested

A while back we posted a YouTube video on how to make a Porsche but lots of folks were more interested in this:

That's right-- a family-mobile in the background attracted more attention than a sports car!  

Race Track In a Box

If you saw our Race Track Preview video earlier in the summer, you know that we're getting ready to expand the town and have some racing events.  What you might not have seen (unless you looked closely in the 2011 Legotown Tour Update) is that we also added THE BEST TRUCK SET Lego ever made:  Indy Transport 6335.

Read on for a closer look and see the modifications we've made to it.

Pod-racing Indy Style!

Alright, this one is a little weird.   What do you get when Storm Troopers steal your race cars?  A chase!

Something Fast, This Way Comes

Short post today.   In case you missed it, here's the latest video on our YouTube channel.  The house hunting has really taken a lot of our free time and the town has "degraded" a bit along the way.  We love our loyal YouTube subscribers and I felt I owed them a quick explanation and preview of "coming attractions".

CLICK TO PLAY

Check out the videos on our YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@NZCUTR. 

 You can also follow up us on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/brixburgh/.

Death From Above

Growing up overseas and spending lots of time on ski slopes in the Alps was very inspiring.  We rode cable cars all over the mountains to get around the ski areas and like most Lego kids, I was determined to replicate real life in my Legotown.  I don't have any surviving pictures of the BEST cable car system I made....  all I have is this, a crude "cargo" version:

I know it doesn't look like much, but bear with me... it'll make more sense in a minute.

I am the Stig

We're HUGE fans of the BBC television show Top Gear.  It is the best car-related show... in the world.  If you're in England we're jealous of you tonight.  Here's a picture Tyler took of our own Legotown Stig.  I believe he is holding a paper so it looks like a police mugshot.   He was "caught" zooming around our airport runways.  That's also our Porsche model in the background (you can see video on how to build it HERE).

If you look closely, you'll see the Stig in many of the other Lego videos on our YouTube channel... but I'm not telling where!

Check out the videos on our YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@NZCUTR. 

 You can also follow up us on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/brixburgh/.

I Can Still Hear You!

With the prospects of a quick move to a new house with an EMPTY garage gone, it is beginning to look like our Subaru will keep its loud broken exhaust until the weather gets warmer.  I'm just not a fan of crawling around on a cold driveway and scraping my dry wintered hands on rusty undercarriage bits.  So I will continue the thread I started a week or so ago and live vicariously through our trusty Lego repair shop...  where the weather is always warm enough to work outside (if you're made of plastic) and the parts just snap on and off.

What's That Sound?!

It is pretty hard for us to sneak up on anyone lately.  Our Subaru has a hole in the exhaust and rumbles and roars like a Top Fuel Dragster (no flames though, which is good).   With the weather being so wet and snowy I have not been able to attempt any repair, so we're just thumping around town scaring all the little kids until I can.   So... in that theme, I thought I'd share some older pictures of our Lego mechanics hard at work... mainly because I wish I could send a small army of minifigs out to fix our real car.  Wouldn't that be great?!

The One That Got Away

Over the course of about a week last Fall, Tyler and I played two sides of a jail escape in town.  I was the prisoner who broke out of jail and he was all the police trying to catch me.  We'd make measured moves each day (sort of like a chess game) and left video messages to each explaining what had happened.  It was kind of fun and quite unpredictable but the combined video messages aren't really good enough to share.  HOWEVER, the pictures tell the story pretty well and I thought you'd like seeing them.  So here's the story of how I ran from the police:

Take the Money and Run

One of the joys of having a large town and two kids who are camera savvy is that I find surprises quite often.  Depending on what's going on, I generally "empty" the various cards from our camera arsenal about twice a month.  Almost always I find interesting pictures on them that only the kids could have taken.   Today's sequence of pictures are from an ATM theft and police chase that Tyler set up and photographed.   I never saw this set up -- I only found the pictures over a week later, but the story speaks for itself:

Looks like today, crime DOES pay.  These guys are making a withdrawal.

CATZILLA ATTACKS!

Sophie is our cat.  She's so intent on being near us that whenever anyone enters the room where the Lego table is she promptly jumps up and finds someplace to watch us.   Most of the time this involves sitting on someone or something on the table (she prefers the smooth streets but those are typically crowded).  Naturally, this weird behavior has brought us a lot of fun.