Switch My Lantern Up: The entries (Vol. 2)

Today we continue revealing the entries to our LEGO® building contest, where you had to find a new use for the Super Heroes lantern (part 65581). Let's see what the next 30 entries were!

Peacock by Krakenbrix

In this build, I used the seed part as feathers for a peacock. The feathers are attached to a wedge belt tire (part 2815 and 4185) to obtain the radial design.

Switch My Lantern Up: The entries (Vol. 1)

Our LEGO® building contest, where you had to find a new use for the Super Heroes lantern (part 65581) has now closed, so while our judges are getting all judgey and deciding which five win the LEGO Fiats, let's look at all the entries we received!

There were a whopping 89 fabulous creations submitted by you lot, and we will reveal them over the course of three days, in the order we received them. Thank you all, for sharing these wonderful ideas.

Iron Builder: Bryce Dempsey's stud shooter techniques

The Iron Forge contestant from the Iron Builder challenge revealing their LEGO® techniques for you today is Bryce Dempsey (on Flickr, YouTube and Instagram), from California. Appropriately enough for a builder who creates replica guns from LEGO pieces, last week in Round 3 the seed part was part 15391, the Minifigure, Weapon Gun, Mini Blaster / Shooter. 

My favorite of my own builds for Round 3 using stud shooters as the seed part was the soda machine. The build featured 11 stud shooters in total, with many unique uses.

Iron Builder: Stud Shooter LEGO® building techniques

We've been asking the Forge competitors from Iron Builder to highlight the techniques they've used each week with the seed parts. In Round 3 last week the element they all had to use was Design ID 15391, known as the "Minifigure, Weapon Gun, Mini Blaster / Shooter" on BrickLink, "Mini Shooter With Ø3.2 Shaft" on Brickset and "Weapon Gun / Blaster / Shooter Mini" on Rebrickable. Since being introduced in 2014 it has appeared in six colours. Given many would consider this a "specialised element that can only be used for one thing", it was a great choice of seed part by the Iron Builder admin!

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Miro78: I found an interesting 'non-connection' with the stud shooters during my Round 3 builds, in the build Zorro where I included some furniture. 

Iron Builder: Thomas Jenkins' stud shooter techniques

We have another Iron Forge contestant from the Iron Builder challenge revealing their LEGO® techniques for you today: Thomas Jenkins (on Flickr and Instagram), a Welshman living in Japan who has been building with LEGO for over 20 years. Last week in Round 3 the seed part was part 15391, the Minifigure, Weapon Gun, Mini Blaster / Shooter. 

On my first assessment of the Stud Shooter piece, there were two ways to use it in a model: take advantage of the bar that sticks out at an angle from the barrel of the shooter, or utilize the gaps and recesses that are usually used to house the accompanying trigger element.

Techniques using the angled bar of LEGO Mini Shooter With Ø3.2 Shaft, Design ID 15391

The angle of the bar meant that when used in conjunction with more shooters, it was quite easy to reproduce something akin to a spider’s leg. 

The shooters are connected quite simply with a 1x1 round plate with hole. The spanner seed part from the previous round also found its way into this model!

Iron Builder: Cab's White Diamond techniques

We have another Iron Forge contestant from the Iron Builder challenge revealing LEGO® techniques for you today. Cab (on Flickr) hails from Germany but lives in California, and turned eighteen recently... "so I don't even know whether to call myself a TFOL or an AFOL". We don't think it matters really, so long as your techniques are awesome!

Hello everyone, Cab here! I was lucky enough to be among the final 20 contestants in this year’s instalment of The Forge. Now, while the final four compete for the prized Iron Builder slot, I thought I would share some techniques and tricks from my main entry in Round 2, a bust of the character White Diamond from the show Steven Universe. 

Adept builders will probably be familiar with many or all of these techniques, but I hope I can contribute to a few builders’ technical arsenals. 

Iron Builder: Jaap Bijl's hummingbird techniques

One of the contestants in Iron Builders preliminary rounds, The Iron Forge, is Jaap Bijl (jaapxaap, found on Flickr and Instagram) from the Netherlands and he is a member of Lowlug and Innovalug. He took part in our 2019 Parts Festival and has now progressed from the Top 20 to the Top 8 in the Forge. We asked him to explain a couple of the techniques involved in one of his Forge builds from last week.

Hey everyone, it’s Jaap here! I’ve been participating into the Iron Forge contest, and made it to the final 20. In that round we had to build using the hammer and/or the wrench minifig accessory pieces. At some point when I was playing around with the wrench piece I found a wrench combination that looked a lot like a bird’s beak to me. So there I started building this hummingbird.

(Yes, for those New Elementary readers who remember it, I also used those big yellow stars from the 2019 parts festival in the flowers!)

Iron Builder: Round 1 results

The world heavyweight of LEGO® building contests, Iron Builder is underway and the results of the first round in the Iron Forge are in! There were 120 entries from over 60 builders and only the top 20 progress to Round 2, which whittles the 20 down to eight.

The seed part was minifigure legs. Here are the 20 winners in no particular order, other than that we have arranged them into the groups they will be completing within in the next round. Bring on the NPU!

Top 20 builders, Iron Forge Round 1

Ted A.

Some builders are bred for greatness, and others are just bread to be toasted. It's a Wonder some have even made it this far... "Boom! Toasted!"

Iron Builder: the LEGO® building contest is back

Iron Builder returns! And you can participate. This is great news for anyone who is still looking for advanced LEGO® building challenges (if Ryan Howerter’s REC puzzles and New Elementary’s “Switch Up My Lantern” contest aren't enough for you, that is!).

We love Iron Builder for its mind-blowing NPU and cheeky sense of humour and we intend to share a lot of news about it here on New Elementary. To kick things off, we figured it has been gone for a while and many of you may have no idea what we are talking about. So we collared two of the Iron Builder admin team, Simon Liu and Markus Rollbühler, to give us the lowdown on IB 2020 and how – for the first time ever – anyone can get involved.

LEGO® Reverse-Engineering Challenge: Days 6-17

We are a little behind with sharing Ryan Howerter's REC puzzles with you (been too busy organising our own building contest!) so here is a bumper crop to give you a challenging LEGO® challenge to fill your days. Want more? They appear on Ryan's Instagram at 11am Mountain Time every day (and we also try to publish them on New Elementary's Twitter at the same time).

Welcome back to the Reverse-Engineering Challenge, or REC for short. Simply look at these small LEGO builds, and try to figure out how they are built. Always assume the hidden side is identical. The colours are irrelevant. No rubber bands and no flex tubing allowed! It's not a contest, there are no prizes – think of it more like a daily crossword puzzle. Solve as many as you like, at your own pace. Solutions are posted every Sunday at https://linktr.ee/rhowerter.

REC17 Halhi141 

Bottom looks like the top.

Contest: Switch My Lantern Up

This contest is now closed. See the amazing entries here!

Time to see what you readers can build; yes it's a new LEGO® building competition!

We're asking you to make an amazing creation using a new piece; we want you to "switch up" the lantern element from the DC Comics CMFs by building something completely different with it. Don't use the lantern as a lantern – instead, impress us with your imagination and ingenuity!

LEGO® Reverse-Engineering Challenge: Days 2-5

On the weekend we mentioned Ryan Howerter is running an advanced daily building challenge and showed you the first one. They appear on their Instagram at 11am Mountain Time every day but we know not everyone uses Instagram, so we've started publishing them on New Elementary's Twitter and now here are a bunch of them for those of you who are yet to catch up! We will try to keep this up but if not, there's always Ryan's Instagram!

Welcome back to the Reverse-Engineering Challenge, or REC for short. Simply look at these small LEGO builds, and try to figure out how they are built. Always assume the hidden side is identical. The colours are irrelevant. No rubber bands and no flex tubing allowed! It's not a contest, there are no prizes – think of it more like a daily crossword puzzle. Solve as many as you like, at your own pace. Solutions are posted every Sunday at https://linktr.ee/rhowerter.

REC5 by Ryan Howerter

LEGO® Reverse-Engineering Challenge: Day 1

If you’re looking for some fun and good LEGO® building challenges and ideas, we can help! Today there’s a piece of great news for advanced LEGO builders: our friend and contributor Ryan Howerter is launching a daily building challenge on their Instagram. It will give your LEGO brain a good workout and definitely teach you new techniques.

It’s called the Reverse-Engineering Challenge, or REC for short, and you may be familiar with the concept already as four of these have been run on Flickr in the past. Here’s how it works.

Ryan posts a small LEGO build, and you try to figure out how it is built.

21322 Pirates of Barracuda Bay: Designer interview with Milan Madge & Austin William Carlson

The next LEGO® Ideas set, 21322 Pirates of Barracuda Bay, seems to be dividing opinion in the community. Regardless, you will be interested to hear what its designers, Milan Madge (set) and Austin William Carlson (graphics and minifigures) have to say about their adaptation of Pablo Jiménez's original design. And for this exclusive interview they've also shared the seven prototypes showing the model's development!

The first thing many people will say is that the final product diverges significantly from the original fan model. How did you come to the decision to make these changes, and was there much input from the fan designer?

Milan: The first step was building the fan designer Pablo’s model, but it became obvious early on that I was missing a lot of elements. Many of the pieces have been out of production for some time, so we had to get creative. The biggest hurdle was the raised baseplate, which meant a total redesign of the structure of the model, but even tiny changes such as the new boat hulls being wider than the ones in Pablo’s submission meant that all the proportions needed altering – a real headache!

LEGO® DOTS: Inside The House of Dots

We have an event report today from a new contributor, Michael Studman (yes, his real name), who is active in the London AFOLs LUG. We asked him to report on the launch of LEGO® DOTS, especially to check out the new parts in the sets and the never-before-seen opalescent colours. 

It’s not uncommon for a LEGO-lover like me to have an emotional connection with established LEGO themes, from childhood, or later in life as an AFOL. What is more unusual is to have an emotional connection to a new LEGO range even before it has been revealed to the public, and to have had a small but exciting part to play in its launch.

This thought occurred to me as I excitedly waited with fellow fans, reporters, and influencers last Tuesday 28 January in Kings Cross, London for the public unveiling of LEGO DOTS, their newest theme.

Recycle my Bicycle: The winners!

Time to reveal the judge's five favourite entries to our recent building competition, where we invited you to use the new LEGO® bicycle frame (Design ID 50015) in a clever way.

We had 33 lovely entries. (Didn't see them? Check them out here!) We thank you all for building and hope you all had fun. Jaime Sanchez, the LEGO Element Designer who created the new bike frame (as well as the mountain bike frame from 2018), messaged us to let us know he's been following the results, "and the results have been excellent. Great contest and I look forward to seeing the winners."

Recycle my Bicycle: The entries, part 2

Here is the second half of entries we received to our recent building competition where we invited you to use the new LEGO® bicycle frame (Design ID 50015) as something different. The five winners will be announced tomorrow, but who is your favourite? If you missed the first half, check them out here.

Double Headed Dragon

Ben Tritschler (modestolus)

Once I went to the flea market and found something for my living room. It was a small model of a "Double Headed Dragon" which now is hanging on the wall in the living room - as you can see on the first picture.

Recycle my Bicycle: The entries, part 1

Our recent building competition invited you to use the new LEGO® bicycle frame (Design ID 50015) as something different. It closed last week, and before we announce the five winners we're going to show you all 33 entries; half today and half tomorrow.

2019 Skærbæk Workshop: Batman bits

In September 2019 we ran a workshop at the Skaerbaek Fan Weekend in Denmark. 60 AFOLs were given two hours to make interesting stuff using some of the newest LEGO® parts, and a supply of mostly random brick stock. Of the hundreds of models and tablescraps created, we are presenting some of the most interesting to inspire your own creations. My thanks to the SFW organisers, the New Elementary team on the day and our cheery photographer, Andrew Tipping.

To finish our selection of workshop builds we look at Mini Accessory, No. 10 (40598 | 6266155) and Mini Accessory, No. 11 both in Silver Metallic/ Flat Silver (50018 | 6266977); two accessory packs from Batman sets that contain amazing pieces and proved so popular, you get an extra-long post!

Edward Eggens “Light tank”

Torbjörn Kristiansson “Dark Pearl Palace”

2019 Skærbæk Workshop: lots of bits!

In September 2019 we ran a workshop at the Skaerbaek Fan Weekend in Denmark. 60 AFOLs were given two hours to make interesting stuff using some of the newest LEGO® parts, and a supply of mostly random brick stock. Of the hundreds of models and tablescraps created, we are presenting some of the most interesting to inspire your own creations. My thanks to the SFW organisers, the New Elementary team on the day and our cheery photographer, Andrew Tipping.

Rather than highlighting particular elements, today's creations use various seed parts from the array in ingenious ways.

Erik Smit “Deer”