This document is part of a World Wide Web resource located at
http://www.porchwithhouse.com/lego/.
There is also a
version of this document
with in-line thumbnail images.
In the fall of 1994 I built a car, a truck, and a motorcycle with a sidecar (106K GIF image) that could be used as part of the same series. In February, 1995 I built a large sedan, supposedly in the style of a car from about 1930. (see below).
The dump truck is something I worked on sporadically over the summer of 1994. It is 8 knobs wide, excluding the side ladders. The red parts underneath the ladders are fuel tanks. The rear part is hinged so that it really dumps. The interior has side-by-side seats and a steering wheel. The front grill design is by Jane Amanda Karr, age 5, who also specified the requirement for side ladders.
The car was an experiment in October 1994, mainly to see if a 6-knob width could yield a practical design with side-by-side seats. I wanted to get everything into 6 knobs, including doors and the arms of the occupants.
The main difficulty appears to be the placement of the seats, which have to be offset half a knob from the grid of the chassis. This causes them to interfere with pieces that I would have placed around the doors, though not with the doors themselves. Because of the pieces I used to get the offset, the seats are a little less well anchored than in other cars. Once the seats were in place, however, fitting the seated minifigures into the 3-knob-wide spaces was easier than I expected.
Just for fun, in November, 1994, I modified the car to give it a hood and trunk lid that open. It's the only use I've found so far for these 4x4 roof pieces with the hinge at one edge. (I got them in a set that included a 4-knob-wide trailer to whose interior they were supposed to give access.) My daughters, appropriately, immediately tried to stuff an entire 2-by-2-plate wheel set into the trunk as a ``spare.'' I prefer to stick the spare tire on the trunk lid.
I created the motorcycle-with-sidecar in October 1994 just to see if I could do anything interesting with the special motorcycle piece that I'd acquired. Aside from minifigures and the one-piece motorcycle itself, I tried to use mostly ``general-purpose'' pieces in this model.
The motorcycle has a sport fairing with twin headlights and a top case (behind the rider) in addition to the fully-faired sidecar. Both bike and sidecar have rear lights.
I don't know why I set this bike up British style (sidecar on the left) instead of US style (sidecar on the right). But I think it came out nicer that way in these pictures alongside the car:
I built a large, old-fashioned sedan in February, 1995. The car is supposed to look like something from about the year 1930, with running boards, spare tires on the outside, and so forth. My main motivation for building this was to see how different it would be to build such a thing with a current-day selection of pieces, as opposed to the parts available to me in the early 70s when I last attempted such a project. Unfortunately the car is not quite finished; it ended up a little bigger than I'd hoped, it needs certain finishing parts such as lights, I'm still looking for a real hinge for the hood, and the seating is a little awkward, especially in the rear.
I have a view of the car from the left front with the hood open (19K JPEG image), and from the left rear with the trunk open (26K JPEG image).
