My daughter's Lego 7739 Coast Guard Patrol Kit

My 9 year old daughter is into Lego (I think she's an engineer at heart) and has a Lego 7739 Coast Guard Patrol Kit.

Here are some photos of the Coast Guard Patrol Boat fully assembled by Hannah. She also took the photos with her digital camera - well done Hannah!

Lego Cruise Liner

A spare evening's work allowed me to produce this little cruise liner. It's got three main decks, plus a final 4th deck on top by the yellow lifeboats. Needless to say, quite a lot of bricks to make this model.

 

 

 

LEGO Mindstorms Sudoku Solver

While looking around for some Lego Mindstorms gizmos this evening I found Lego Mindstorms Sudoku Solver by tiltertwister.




You can find more details about this amazing machine at tiltedtwister.com.

Red Lego Sports Car

When I was a kid I had a lot of blocky red bricks and used to try and make fast looking sports cars out of the range of bricks that I had. I've tried to re-create these cars using an equivalent set of bricks with some better sized wheels; here is my first attempt:

 

Nowadays Lego has so many specialised parts and kids can make realistic cars out of kits such as the Lego kit 8156:

My six year old son was able to make the following car up from a kit 8159:

..this makes my car look very blocky and pixelated. Never mind, as a child my flexible imagination was able to round off all the hard edges and it appeared to be a sleek and speedy looking car. And that's how it remains in my memory :-)

White truck

The larger Lego wheels allow me to escape from the smaller Lego city scales and build more realistic looking vehicles.  Here's a truck I built today in an idle moment:

It's a pity the front grey wheels don't match the rear white ones. I picked the real wheels up in the Lego Shop in Brighton last year as my son wanted "lots of wheels".

Lego crane

Wet weather over the weekend usually means the kids are trapped indoors and need some form of entertaining. I use this as an excuse to get the box of Lego out and show my 6 year old son David how much fun engineering and construction can be.

Here is a photo of a crane we built using a load of 2x8 and 2x6 beams and 2x2 and 1x1 stud bricks for a tower and a massive block of yellow bricks to balance out the jib. While my son did enjoy helping to get something built that was taller than him, the real fun for him was knocking it over and watching hundreds of bricks fly everywhere! Ho hum.

The Lego City kits look really exciting and promise a lot of building and playing fun, but I still think the kids get more fun when I buy them big buckets of hundreds of bricks and order loads of beams and plates, wheels and window bricks from the Lego website. David can spend hours just building loads of weird and wonderful cars and lorries from his imagination rather than following instructions from a booklet; it's far more creative.

Anyhow, rainy weekends let me get the Lego out and regress back to being a kid again - and also help teach my son the tried and tested techniques of building fun towers and buildings in the process.

Gonna build a house...

This week my order for the Lego 6119 roof tiles supplement box arrived from the Lego shop (as well as some other bricks for my Son's birthday) and I thought I should show the kids how to use these bricks.

Since this Lego set contains all sorts of interesting corner bricks as well as the standard 4x2 roof brick I worked on a house that looks like a modern English house found in many housing estates around the country.

The result was quite satisfying, however the house is a little too small for my linking, so perhaps I need to order another roof tile set as well as another 6117 doors and windows box set too.

Anyhow, the kids liked the house and hopefully I've inspired them how these bricks can be used to make realistic looking buildings!