Clone bricks hunting season

It's on!
 

Counting templates

Our LUG had to count some 300.000 bricks into individual orders. To help ease the process I made a bunch of counting templates. First I split a few floor boards into wide and thin strips.

I glued a thin strip along the edge on the wide strips and let it set for a while.

I then cut the strips down but had to reclamp the lot since the glue had not set yet.

After the glue had set I put in another thin strip in the end so that 50 1 x n-bricks would fit in the template.

At the sorting event people could concentrate on how many rows they stacked not having to keep count on the actual bricks.

Once the template was full (or the order amount reached) it was easy to pour the bricks into bags.

This way we could all keep talking to each other only rarely having to do a recount (on occasion the bricks fell outside the bag). It was a lotek solution to the problem. :)

Even faster would be to use very accurate scales but they are expensive. This way I only used material that I had laying around and built 20 of them in an hour or so.

Train photos

Some photos from the trainmeeting we had on Saturday.

Setup.

From the movie Inception?

Tinkering.

I brought my "new" 6991 Monorail Transport Base, good fun!

False fronts, quite clever!

Two classic Swedish engines went head-to-head. Ooops.

This guys windmill has been squeaking for a couple of exhibitions, so I gave him some "flavoured lube". Apparently it did not taste very good. :)

On that note, here's some train porn:

Lot's to see and document, counting all wagons and engines we had 105 rolling units, not bad for a first!

The red train seemed more accident prone than the rest.

Almost the full layout.

In another room one of our club members was busy using all of his track for the first time.

Putting stuff on the Maersk train might have gotten slightly out of hand...

"Oooops", what an "accident". ;)

In case you've missed it, the previous post contains a video from the event.

Trains!

Ah, don't worry. I'm not going there just yet, but Sweden saw it's first train meetup this past weekend and I was there and had a lot of fun! Here's a little edit of the videofootage I got with my helmet cam:




Update: Here are some photos from the same event.

MOD: Car key improvement

My car key had been an sad sight for a long time. The rubber had deteriorated and I had not been able to keep the key on a ring for months. I got tired of quick fixes with super glue and decided to build something out of Lego.

The first step was easy, get rid of that rotten rubber.

I was now left with the bare key and the little computer chip that talks to the car, making sure it's the right thing that turns the ignition. After this I tried a few solutions but nothing really worked. I realized that the big black part could fit inside a 1 x 4 brick if it's hollowed out. So I drew the key contours on paper and built a little stack of bricks that covered it.

I then rebuilt the stack with generous amounts of super glue between the bricks.

I marked out where the key was to protrude from the bricks and took out the drill.

Easy material to work with!

I begun hollow it out with knifes, but it was slow progress and hard work. So I took out the Dremel with an rotating aggressive file. That was noisy but fast!

Did not take me that long until the key fit snugly inside. I had to narrow down the walls of the bricks some, since the key was a bit thick..

Here you see the opening with the key inside. The little black square to the right is the chip.

The next step was to put a little something on the end to hang the key. Drilled two holes and bent a thick piece of metal wire to fit.

I hammered the ends down, amazing what abuse the plate could take! I was sure to ruin this one but it stood up fine.

Liberal amounts of epoxy resin was smeared all around inside, the key put back in and then topped it up with more resin. Attached the plate and let it set over night.

The next day I cleaned up some squeeze outs and was pleased with the outcome.

Oh, right! Warning: This blog post might be offensive to those who feel even the destruction of bricks worth $0.192 is bad. ;) MOD in this case stands for "My Own Destruction".