The latest round of Technic sets has created a bit of a stir with all their epic space-y-ness! We’ve already taken a close look at 42181 VTOL Heavy Cargo Spaceship LT81 and 42180 Mars Crew Exploration Rover and now it’s time to turn our attention to the smallest of the space vehicles:  LEGO Technic 42178 Surface Space Loader LT78. Is it a mighty mouse? You’ll have to read on to see! Like its counterparts, this set will also be available March 1st. It has 435 pieces and will retail for US $34.99 | CAN $44.99 | UK £29.99. The LEGO Group sent The Brothers Brick an early copy of this set for review. Providing TBB with products for review guarantees neither coverage nor positive reviews Unboxing the parts, instructions, and sticker sheet Like the other sets from this wave, the front of the small box has the large SPACE banner and...

LEGO itself is a treasure for many of us! So ironically, the iconic 2x4 brown treasure chest is one of LEGO’s most symbolic pieces. It’s playable in many of our realms, from classic Pirates fighting over a booty of doubloons to Castle Forestmen stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. Today we’ll nerd out a little bit over some fun LEGO treasure chests, AND include instructions to build the two chests pictured below at the end of the article! 2x Custom instructions (medium 6X10 and Mini 4x7) LEGO Treasure Chests Let’s start our journey with a glimpse at some of the treasure chest pieces LEGO has made over time. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but it shows some variety from simply the classic 2x4, which itself comes in more than ten different colors! And if you look at the lid piece and base as separate parts,...

Welcome back to All Types, a look at the typography of LEGO. This time around, we’ll travel back through time from the beginning of the 90s all the way to the 60s. This round of typefaces seems to have some commonality—but stick around ‘til the end where I look at a very funky personal favourite! For readers who haven’t seen the previous entry in this mini-typographic deep dive, go and check it out! For those of you who have, this time around I’ve attempted to credit the designers responsible for the typefaces shown. They all have their own equally rich history that should be remembered. Futura - 1992 Basic Range Futura, my guilty love, showed itself in box art. It had been used previously in this same Basic range but I chose to focus on the first sets with the System graphic, an iconic feature of this age. Futura is the...

This week is Engineers’ Week, and as part of that celebration, today we are going to dive into planetary gear trains! Ring and Planets in a pencil sharpener These gear trains have some unique features that may make interesting additions to your builds. Planetary Gear Trains (from now on PGTs) are used in lots of things: cars, helicopters, airplanes, wind turbines, electric drills, and manual pencil sharpeners to make a shortlist. A big advantages is that they have coaxial input/output shafts, can often take up less space than other transmissions, have less torque loss, and better distributes the load among the gears. In our LEGO PGTs, we likely won’t see much space-saving, but we should get the rest of those advantages. So let’s get nerdy and explore planetary gear trains in LEGO! The Basics [If math scares you, skip to the next section where we start talking about LEGO!] PGTs have...

Introduction One of the best attributes of LEGO trains is the fact that they move! The laws of physics tell us that in order to move, we need energy; in particular, electrical energy. However, before we get into the obvious use of electrical energy to move our trains, it should be mentioned that many of us likely started our LEGO train journey with “push-along” energy from our arms. I remember receiving my first LEGO train set at age three. It was not battery-powered, but self-powered! For most children, this is how we start our play experiences. We are not burdened with having to know how electrical circuits work, how things like motors and switches, etc. need to be connected, or the basics of operation. We simply put our trains on the track and pushed them along (also making sound effects of course!) Eventually, we recognize that having our trains move themselves...