Upscaled LEGO Classic Space Helmet - DIY

Some people have asked how I made my upscaled LEGO Classic Space helmet. For those interested in making your own, here you go...

In the past I have worked with printing out ready made files that allow you to build a 3D image, but I wasn't happy with the file I found online. I needed to come up with something better. I found a digital 3D file of the classic helmet in the LEGO building software L-Draw support files. I was able to open the DAT file in Google's Sketchup application. Within Sketchup I was able to modify the 3D object to clean up unneeded parts. Mainly removed the interior of the helmet that made it fit a LEGO minifigure head. I then exported the 3D object to a DAE file. I imported the DAE file into an application called Pepakura Designer. Pepakura Designer allowed me to unfold the 3D image into 2D parts. The initial unfolding is not in the most ideal layout and requires some editing to get the file ready to print out onto cardstock. (I am going to save you some time and provide you with the Pepakura file that I created. Link)

After cutting out all the pieces I then glued them together to create the 3D helmet.

(Note: Most of the pics will be from when I made my first helmet.)

I Coated the outside of the helmet with fiberglass resin. 

Next I added a layer of resin to the inside of the helmet, add a layer of fiberglass matting and another layer of resin. Trimmed the excess fiberglass/resin from the opening of the helmet. (A dremel tool is excellent for this.) Add another layer of resin to the inside of the helmet to smooth out the rough fiberglass. 

Now I added a layer of General Purpose Bondo putty to to the outside of the helmet. I did this in small patches so the putty I was working with didn't harden before I was able to apply it.

Once I had a layer of Bondo covering the helmet it's was time to start sanding. I started with 60 grit sandpaper. The first round of sanding was to start getting the helmet to look round. The Bondo layer helps to even out the areas between the sharp angles. I didn't worry about getting the helmet completely smooth, because I knew I was going to need to add another layer of Bondo. 

The second layer was to fill in holes and build up areas that needed to be rounded out more. Then more sanding. Then more Bondo and the more sanding. I eventually move to a 120 grit sandpaper once the helmet had the look I want.

At this point I add another layer of resin to the outside of the helmet. The resin filled in most of the small holes or scratches that I had missed while sanding. 

Once the resin dried I sanded the resin to smooth out any problem spots or used some more Bondo, if needed, and sand again. Took a damp cloth to clean up the dust and let dry. 

(New helmet)

Add a layer of primer paint. Once the primer layer was dry, I went over the helmet with 300 grit sandpaper to smooth it. 

Now I add a 2 coats of helmet color. (I took a minifigure with me to the hardware store to match the color as close as a I could.) 

Once the helmet was dry, with a hot glue gun, I added a string of yellow battery operated LED lights around the inside of the helmets face opening. To finish up I added a layer of foam around the inside of the helmet. I adjusted the foam so that the helmet fit on my head at the correct height and to keep it from jostling around when I move.

This may not be the most ideal example of a "how to", but it should get you moving along the right path to making your own helmet... air tanks... blaster....

  

DIY LEGO Collectable Minifigure Display with IKEA Ribba Frame

In the premier issue of Blocks magazine, in late 2014, they had an article "How To Make a Minifigure Display Frame".  Great article with pictures and instructions for making a large frame to hold 48 minifigures. I knew instantly I'd want to make one someday. However, 48 minifigures?!? I just couldn't wrap my brain around displaying 48 figures in one frame. I could pick 48 Star Wars characters to display or a mix of different themes, but these options just didn't appeal to me at that number. Not to mention that the IKEA RIBBA frame is 19 3/4 x 19 3/4" (50 x 50cm) and takes up a lot of wall space. Luckily IKEA makes a smaller RIBBA frame that is 9 x 9" (23 x 23 cm). 

In my first design layout I wanted to fit as many minifigures in the frame, without it looking too cluttered, and have the figures evenly displayed. This resulted in 3 rows of 5 figures. I popped in some of my Space minifigures and I felt like it turned out pretty good. 

At some point after any AFOL emerges from the Dark Ages*, they discover the LEGO Collectable Minifigure series of figures. (I'll save the obsession of the CMF for another post.) Each series contains a dazzling array of 16 collectable minifigures that you just want to display. Wait, what?!? 16 minifigures? But my display layout is for 15. :(

Needless to say my second design layout was for 16 minifigures. I stayed with the 3 row layout, but spaced the middle row to hold 6 figures instead of 5. Fitting 6 figures in the middle row brought the figures a little closer together. I used the same spacing for the top and bottom rows so that the minifigures are evenly spaced across each row with the extra space at the beginning and the end of each row. More pleasing to the eye, I think.

But what about the Disney Collectable Minifigure series? It has 18 minifigures! That was an easy fix. My third design layout has 3 rows of 6. It may seem a little tight, but the display still looks great. I had to use a longer support block for Ariel and Ursula though, due to the size of the figures.

Enough of me rambling, let's get down to the business of making a minifigure display frame. 

What you need:

• IKEA RIBBA 9x9" frame - You have two options black or white
• Mounting Board - I use white matte board that you can  find at any art supply store
• 16 Support Blocks - I use the Inverted Slope 45 2x2 - Part #3660
• Super Glue - I suggest the Gel Control kind
• Craft Knife/ Exacto Blade 
• Cutting Board - I use another thick piece of scrap matte board or thick single layer cardboard 
• Ruler - Preferably 12" or longer
• 45/90 Cutting Edge Triangle (Optional) - Very helpful when drawing guide lines
• Sharp Pencil
• Tacky Putty - Found at any art supply store. You could use tape, but you run the risk of tearing the matte board
• 60 or 80 Grit Sandpaper
• Damp cloth

You can get creative with your matte board and support block colors, but I use white so that the minifigures stand out. I did try black support blocks and they look great too.

Making the Display:

1. Carefully open up your RIBBA frame. Take the glass and use it as a template to draw your cut lines on your matte board. Cut out your mounting board. Set the mounting board and frame to the side.

2. Take the paper insert from the frame and place it face down on your work area. This is going to be used as the template for laying out the support blocks.

3. Using a sharp pencil make marks along the edges of the paper where your guidelines will be placed. (This is where the Blocks magazine article fell a little short, because they didn't give you any measurments to go by. I'm giving you measurements for a 16 minifigures frame.)

Start with the horizontal guides. This will set the row placements. Starting from the bottom left corner make the following marks up the left edge. Each number of millimeters (Metric system?**) starts from the previous mark.

Horizontal guides - 20mm, 12mm, 54mm, 12mm, 54mm, 12mm

4. Now draw your horizontal lines cross the paper using these marks. (This is where the 45/90 Cutting Edge Triangle comes in handy.)

5. For the vertical guidelines, we are going to do them in two parts. The top & bottom rows and then the middle row. For the top & bottom rows we are going to again start from the bottom left corner and make marks along the bottom edge. Each number of millimeters starts from the previous mark.

Vertical Guides - Top & Bottom row - 22m, 16mm, 18mm, 16mm, 18mm, 16mm, 18mm, 16mm, 18mm, 16mm, 18mm, 16mm

6. Now draw your top & bottom row vertical lines. I only draw the lines long enough to make the boxes for the top & bottom rows. This causes less confusion when dealing with the middle row. Once the guidelines are drawn, draw an X in the first box and then another X in every other box along the rows. This indicates which boxes to cut out.

7. For the middle row guidelines we need to rotate the template paper 180 degrees. With the template now upside down, again start from the bottom left corner and make marks along the bottom edge. Each number of millimeters starts from the previous mark.

Vertical Guides - Middle row - 39mm, 16mm, 18mm,16mm, 18mm, 16mm, 18mm, 16mm, 18mm, 16mm

8. Now draw your middle row vertical lines. I only draw the lines long enough to make the boxes for the middle row. This causes less confusion when dealing with the top & bottom row. Once the guidelines are drawn, draw an X in the first box and then another X in every other box along the row. This indicates which boxes to cut out.

9. Using your craft knife, cut out the boxes you have marked with an X. Using a ruler as a straight edge to cut along will give you nice clean cuts. 

10. Flip the template over and place a small amount of Tacky Putty at each corner of the template.

11. Afix the template to your mounting board and set it aside.

12. Take your sandpaper and rough up the flat vertical side of the support blocks. Sand enough so that the side of the brick doesn't have its shine anymore. By roughing up the side, we are giving the glue something to hold on to. After sanding the side of the brick your use a wet cloth to wipe away any dust. Do this for all 16 support blocks.

13. Take your mount board, with template attached, and place it in front of you. The row of boxes closest to the edge is the bottom. This is important to remember, so you don't glue your support boxes the wrong way.

14. Read the steps 15 and 16 carefully before doing them.

15. Take a support block and apply a small amount of super glue. You don't need a lot because the glue will spread along the face as you press it to the mount board.

16. Place the support block on the mount board, aligning the bottom of the block with the bottom of the cut out box, with the studs of the block pointing in the direction of the top of the template. 

17. Repeat steps 15 and 16 for the remaining support blocks.

18. Carefully loosen the tacky putty and lift up the edges of the template from the mount board. You should now be able to remove the template from the mount board. Sometimes if you add too much glue to the support blocks, it will run and you will need to separate the template from the glue around the support blocks. The template may tear some, so be careful so that you can reuse the template. 

19. Now place your minifigures on the support blocks and place the mount board in the frame and attach the frame back. You may need to adjust accessory placement so that they don't bump against the glass. I tend to remove some of the accessories, such as 2x2 tiles or tails to make things look nice, but that is up to you. We are talking LEGO here. ;)

20. Reassemble the RIBBA frame with the wooden spacer  against a the glass. Carefully lay your mount board inside the frame. At this point I usually hold the mont board in place and lift up the frame to see if everything looks right. If everything looks good, add the backing board and finish assembling the frame.

Tada! You now have a frame to proudly displaying a series of the Collectable Minifigures.  

Now it's time to get cracking on a few more so that you can display them together. (Didn't' I say something about the bigger frames taking up too much wall space? Oh well. :P )

*Dark Ages : That time in the life of an AFOL when they lose interest in LEGO and take up other interests, hopefully to regain their passion for LEGO at a later date.


** Metric System - I live in the USA and the metric system is usually referred to as a foreign language. However the metric system uses a much smaller measuring increment, the millimeter, which is the perfect scale to measure out the placement of the support pieces. Isn't 12mm x 16 mm a lot easier to deal with then 1/4" x 5/12"? 

Sorted by part, or sorted by color?

Sorted by part, or by color? I think this question is often hard to answer and has to do with the many factors that are involved: quantity, part, space and cost. 

The first logical answer anybody gives is to sort by part. If you have 20 pieces of a particular part, it's easy to find the specific color piece with the other same parts. If you only have 2,000 pieces, that breaks down to 100 different parts, it's easy to get a couple drawer bins and sort them out. Doesn't take up much space and the cost of the bins isn't too much.  Jump those numbers up to 50,000 pieces and 1,000 different parts, it takse a lot more space to have them sorted by part; and that's not taking into account the cost of the storage containers to store them. We have all seen the LEGO room pictures with walls covered floor to ceiling with storage drawer bins. The cost of the bins starts to rival the cost of the pieces contained within. Along with just having the extra room to have them in ,unless your significant other doesn't mind the bedroom decorated in storage bins. Don't' get me wrong, I think everyone ultimately wants to have that room filled with bins, but the reality is that it's not going to work for the average LEGO collector.

Let's look at the other side of the brick and sort by color. No matter how many pieces you have the number of colors is far fewer than different parts. On average you end up with about 15 primary colors that will cover 98% of your parts. The cost and space to store some tubs isn't so bad. But let's look at trying to find parts you're looking for, and take into account how many parts you have. If you only have 1,000 pieces, and your average piece by color is 70, then it's pretty easy to find the part in the tub. But the more likely scenario is that you have average color count by piece is  3,000 and finding that part is not so easy. Sorting by color doesn't sound like a good idea.

Looking for parts? Sound like we are building something. First let's go with building a set from instruction. With the sorted by part method, it's very easy to find the part you want by finding the right bin. Provided you have you bins arranged in a logical manner to find the right bin/draw with the part you are looking for. Labels make this much easier. With parts sorted by color this quickly becomes a nightmare, unless the set is monochrome and you have less than 100 pieces by color. 

Now let's look at building a MOC. Everyone's MOC building process is different. Some draw up a plan, or pre-build it with software. That sounds closer to having instructions to build from, so let's go with the free build method. You have an idea and a color scheme in mind. If your parts are sorted by part, you start pulling pieces that you think you'll want from the drawers and lay them out and start to create. If you think of another piece you want, you go back to the drawers. Again, this process depends on how many pieces you have and the space to store them, so you may end up just pulling out a bunch of drawers to work with. If you sort by color, it's very easy to grab a tub of colors you want to work with and spread out your parts to begin letting the creative juices flow. However, we have to look at the piece count again. Dumping 2,000 orange pieces onto the table to look through is a migraine just waiting to happen, and that's only the first of several colors you wanted to work with. Ugh! However, with a smaller piece count it's not so bad. Easier to find the part you want and cleanup is fast when you are done. Just drop the parts back into their color sorted tub.

Logically sorting by part is the way to go, even if it takes up more space and whatever cost is needed for the storage bins. However, whether sorting by part or color, it keeps coming back to the factor of quantity, with a little bit of space, as the key factor for either methods success. So, let's push the extreme of quantity to see how it affects our decision.

Think about a collection of 500,000 pieces. Sorted by part it's no longer simple to look for a specific colored piece mixed in with a couple hundred pieces. So naturally, you now sort the piece by color too. Wait a minute... sort by piece AND color? That is going to take up even more space to separate them out and even more cost for the storage containers. Now granted we are talking about 500,000 pieces, so space and cost really aren't a deterrent at this point, because you'd need both to get this far anyway. Sorting by color for 500,000 pieces is just madness. You could never find what you are looking for in a giant tub of 30,000 orange pieces. 

Sorting by piece and then by color? Sounds logical. But what about sorting by color and then by piece? At 500,000 pieces that's probably the logical way to get them in the bins in the first place. It's a lot faster to sort by color and then sort by part, to put them in the bins. But doesn't sounds a lot like how sorting by color starts out, in a smaller collection?

Let's go back back down to a 50,000 piece collection sorted by color... and then sort by part. Wait, what? But how can you sort a tub of one color by part? Time to think outside the box, or the tub actually. Sorting by part always seems to go down the path of the drawer pull bins, because we see all those cool pictures of the rooms lined floor to ceiling with bins. But remember it's not the average LEGO collector that has those rooms. I think we all seem to forget about our handy little friend the zip-lock bag. We all use them at some point to store pieces, whether it's a set we've taken apart or collecting pieces to build a set we are parting together. So why can you sort out the pieces by color and then sort by part... into zip-lock bags?  You don't even have to sort by every part. You could sort by part type: brick, plate, slope, etc. Or even by part size. The options can grow, or shrink, depending on the quantity of pieces. Now building a MOC with color sorted bins sounds like a great way to get all your pieces together.

I think the problem with the question of sorting by part or by color, is that the person answering the question doesn't return with the question of, "How many?"  As with anything LEGO, the possibilities are endless, so the answer will vary depending on the situation.

To sticker, or not to sticker? That is the question.

I see people complaining all the time about LEGO producing many new sets with a lot of stickers, instead of printed parts. I think at this point in time everybody knows why LEGO makes stickers instead of always printing on pieces. If you don't know, it's basically about cost. Pieces that are printed are typically pieces of the same shapes. If there is a new piece, that hasn't been printed on before, it requires a lot of up front cost to make the machinery to print on the new shaped part, which results in increased cost of a set. Thus printing stickers is much more cost effective and keeps the price of the set down. But the question at hand is... to sticker, or not to sticker your pieces? 

Let's break this question down into what I feel are the four major types of people who own LEGO bricks: Kids, Collectors, Brickers (or Parters, still working on this name) and MOC-ers.

Kids: As little and big kids all agree on, you open the box, dump out the parts, pull out the instructions and build. When a sticker needs to be applied, you either attempt it yourself or make someone else put the sticker on for you. Why? Because the instructions tell us to and the end result makes the set look so cool once it's built! Then you take it apart and build something else with the parts. If the stickers look strange on your new build, who cares? I just built a bad@ss spaceship from a country cottage. Verdict: Who cares, let's build something.

Collectors: Oh how this bunch loves to criticize what LEGO is doing right, or wrong. Stickers are the bane of every good set. Why? Because stickers can be a pain in the @ss to apply to a piece. It's already bad enough that the Collector has opened the box, (decreasing the sets resale value!), but now if the stickers aren't applied correctly (ex. placed crooked, fingerprints or air bubbles) , the set doesn't look right. If you don't apply the stickers, the set still doesn't look right. Oh the O.C.D. that this must cause. Collectors enjoy building and letting the work of art shine in all its glory up on a shelf, like any great piece of art should. Printed parts would simply make Collectors happy. Verdict: Sign petition to ban LEGO from making sets with stickers. 

(On a side note, Collectors piecing together retired sets often look at the a printed piece as the Holy Grail to finishing a set. Especially the sets from the early 80's. The printing on many of those pieces have not survived the test of time. Oddly, the stickers seem to be holding up pretty good on the sets from the last couple decades. As long as they aren't crooked, have fingerprints or air bubbles. :P )

Brickers: Buy a set, (or 10 or 50), dump out the parts, sort them and list them for sale. Printed parts get a different part number than non-printed parts. Parts that are printed have greater value as they are rarer than the non-printed parts. No need to sticker the new parts. The sticker sheet itself is just another part to be sold. Buy some bulk loads of gently used LEGO bricks? Parts with stickers just get sold with their non-printed brothers and sisters. Some Brickers will list the sticker parts seperate, but the value isn't worth the time and effort. Odds are the sticker is placed crooked, has fingerprints or air bubbles. Verdict: Who cares? The parts sell either way. 

MOC-ers: Of all the groups I feel MOC-ers want both printed parts and stickers. Lets face it, some of the printed pieces, or stickers pieces, are so cool! They often bring just the right touch to a MOC. Sometime, a MOC is built completely with the printed/sticker piece as the focal point. But on the other hand, when your MOC needs a quantity of 200 pieces of Plate W.Bow 2x2x2/3 in Bright Orange and all you can find are the ones with Arctic Explorer logo on them, wouldn't you really have prefered that they had been stickers instead of printed? Verdict: Depends on the day. 

So... to sticker or not to sticker? There really is no right or wrong answer. Each individual has the right to place the sticker were the instructions tell us to place it, leave it on the sticker sheet, or stick it on your forehead. It doesn't matter, as long as you enjoy your bricks.

Now stop reading and go build something with LEGO bricks!