My 300th post and other things at 12:42 PM

Hey everybody! Whattup?

It's been quite a while since I've posted and quite frankly, you can blame Facebook for that :)
I used to have a life, but Facebook ate it - Unknown

Anyway, just a couple of general updates, I've added another song to my Playlist (OK so I added a lot of songs, but just one in particular) called "Trigger Happy" by Weird Al Yankovic. I think it's hilarious, and chances are you will too!

Also, as you may have noticed, this is my 300th post! Yay, let's party, bring out the confetti... that was fun. I'll be done now.

Aaaand, something else I'm really jazzed about is this wicked new site called YearbookYourself.com. On this site you can upload a picture of yourself and then look through the years at how you would look from 1950-2000

Here's a Picassa album of my Yearbook pictures from Yearbook Yourself. Hope you like 'em!



-Graydon L

PS I hope y'all like my new Profile Pic!

Time to welcome someone new! at 8:43 PM

That's right, we have a new member of the blogosphere: Sophia H. She just started her blog a few days ago and has already made several posts (including detailed descriptions of Fort Nisqually activities, which are always a plus, and also some pictures). She asked me to plug it for her, so that's what I did! Check it, homies:

http://revolvingattwospeeds.blogspot.com/

-Graydon L

I definitely need to get another hobby at 8:15 PM

OK, so I created another one. Yes, it's yet another LEGO Transformer! As before I wanted to try new techniques and I did in the end. My goal was to refine the hood-of-the-car-becomes-chest-of-robot system and I did an average job. It kind of left a lot of stuff hanging off the back, but I made it look OK by changing it into a jetpack, which you'll see later.

Well enough talk, time for pictures and video!



As you can see, it would be cooler if it had tinted windows, but it's not exactly possible with LEGO so I had to do without :)




I just added the spoiler this morning. At first it was one piece, but that didn't work, so I split it into two pieces and attached them to the legs.


And now, the transformation video! I sped up the middle because it would've taken far, far to long to do and there was a lot of tedious, small-piece work to do which wasn't very interesting, not to mention impossible to see!




Here are the pics for after the transformation:



Here's the jet pack from above, It's basically just a jet engine with flappy thingies hanging over it.




A close-up of the head. He actually looked a lot better than I expected when I was trying out different designs. This design really makes him look evil!



On the left of this picture you can see the rocket/missile/thing (it's that big roundish black blob under his hand) attached to his lower arm. It actually fires, which was a plus for me!

Well that's all for now, I do have another idea for a different transformation style that is used many times in the movies, but I think I may try to make a jet first :)

-Graydon L

LEGO Transformer: Swerve at 6:22 PM

OK, so I'm sure you thought that the LEGO Transformers that I last posted about were pretty cool, but this one blows those two out of the water!

I built the first version yesterday and late last night, but he looked rather... fat... to say the least. So I made several modifications and basically slid the belly fat up and made it into a chest (I guess he started working out!), added some guns, moved the head lower down on the body, and jacked up the wheels to give it more clearance when driving in it's car mode.

Another one of my goals was to copy another robot from somewhere else to test my skills at building with LEGOs. I would've copied from the movies, but good detail videos were hard to find and there were plenty on Youtube of other ones, so that's what I went with.

Here's my favorite, and the one I did most of my 'research' from. It's one of a series of ads for a German made car called the Citroen C4.



Pretty funny, huh?

And now, some pictures of the Robot in it's car-mode.

I named it 'Swerve' because (according to the all-wise name generator on Facebook) that's my transformer name :)



A (blurry) close up of the seats and roll bars.



From the front, with a good view of the steering wheel!



It's riding so low because it's on carpet, on a hard surface it's got about a quarter inch of clearance.



$0 down! 0% financing! Pay $0 for 6 months! Or lease one now for only $599/month!


And now it transforms!




It stands up on it's own!



I like this one, it makes his head look cooler!



Have a piece of THIS!



Swerve wants YOU for the Autobot Army!


-Graydon L