July has come to an end, Summer is halfway over, but fret not, there’s plenty to enjoy! So wherever you are – be it on vacation on a beach or on your couch in the living room – we’ve got a sizzling platter for you, full of interesting articles, deep dives and insightful features from all across the LEGO community! We are lucky to have this many outlets and channels creating incredible content, and these are the best of the month. Here at BrickNerd, we followed the Summer Olympics and Bio-Cup and learned all about GBC mechanisms and about color in fantasy builds. We customized Speed Champions sets, made custom cloth flags, prepped for SHIPtember and abandoned instructions outright. We had Christmas in July, took a LEGO set into the pool and traveled to Scotland and around the world. And we celebrated a community champion, a LEGO train layout, and LEGO Club...

When most LEGO fans build sets, they follow the instructions to a T. But there are a few of us who enjoy making alternative creations from a set, just to see what we can build with the bricks provided. Today, just like before, we are going to do just that. Two BrickNerd contributors were given the opportunity to fiddle around with the newest additions to the LEGO Botanical Collection, 10368 Chrysanthemum and 10369 Plum Blossom. So what can they do with such small sets? It’s time for Will and Josh to start plotting with some plants! Let’s turn it over to them in their words… Crazy Chrysanthemums - Will Hafner A few weeks back, BrickNerd received an offer to monkey around with some new sets provided by LEGO, and I tossed my brick in the ring to be considered to rebuild one of the new Botanical sets. Lo and behold, I...

Today’s guest article comes from Caleb Wagoner, a car and sportscar racing enthusiast and AFOL from Virginia. You can find him online on Instagram. Today we’re going to be taking a look at two LEGO Speed Champion sets, 76935 NASCAR Next Gen Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 and 76934 Ferrari F40 Supercar. While the sets you can buy from the shelf starting August 1st are great, I thought it’d be fun to mod them to make each one a little more special. So drivers, start your engines, and let’s get racing! 76935 NASCAR Next Gen Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 In the last couple of years, NASCAR has changed their cars to be modern racecars, and this set reflects that. I don’t watch much NASCAR myself, but I do watch a lot of endurance racing. NASCAR fielded a modified Next Gen Camaro in 2023 for the Le Mans 24-hour race, so that seems like a...

I used to MOC a lot. In the olden days. I am, by trade, a professional parent, and while even under optimal conditions, that entails being on-call 24/7 with a Sisyphean list of tasks. I would usually carve out some LEGO time in the day when my people were all in school and the worst of the fires had been put out. I’d let my brain dive deep into the creative pool and build. At least, that's how it worked in the “before times.” Minifig me at my minifig house. We’re here all the time. In March 2020, we suddenly all had more time. But also all my people were now home all the time. All. The. Time. All. The. Time. So, yeah, “Lots of extra hours in the day!” But most of that time is “short attention span theater.” Ask me how many times I’ve been brought up to code...

“Woah! You do NOT look like what I expected!” This is the greeting that I received after finally meeting one of a handful of Bionicle/constraction builders displaying in-person at Brickworld Chicago 2022. At LEGO conventions, it’s fairly common for people to mistake any grey-haired person like myself for being the parent of one of the displaying builders—as opposed to actually being one of the displayers. In addition, some people still envision the stereotypical Bionicle/constraction builder as being a young male teenager, who spends as much time debating Bionicle canon in online forums as they do actually building with Bionicle. Receiving this reaction after meeting another male Bionicle builder means to me that there’s still work to be done in changing this paradigm—even within the Bionicle community. More and more builders from varied backgrounds have been trying their hand at building with Bionicle/constraction parts. It is evident that annual community-building contests like...