LEGO conventions are some of the most fun you will ever have as a LEGO fan—you’ll meet new AFOLs, hang out with old friends, and interact with the thousands of public visitors. From my short time attending conventions, though, there is a less fun part about them… traveling to them and having to rebuild all your MOCs when you arrive. A few weeks ago I went through this exact experience because I ventured across the United States from Florida to Portland, Oregon for Bricks Cascade. The trip there ended up being around seven hours of flying between two flights which was the perfect excuse to experiment with different ways of flying with MOCs. Baggage Handling Baggage Handling system in Seattle. Besides LEGO, I love learning about and working in the airline industry, so before I get to what I discovered on my trip, I want to share a little bit about...

How should you store all of your loose LEGO parts? This is my personal and highly opinionated guide as an AFOL and MOC builder. This article could alternatively be titled “How To Spend Less Money On Storage and More Time Building!” but that seemed a bit clickbaity. What not to do with your LEGO colelction for easy access. The purpose of this guide is to share my methods of LEGO sorting and storage. I hope that you will find this helpful, whether you are new to the prospect of having a growing LEGO collection that needs organization or a longtime fan looking to upgrade their LEGO room and cut down on the time spent sorting. (I want to give credit to Matt Chiles for his guide on LEGO storage. While I don’t share his methods of LEGO storage, his website is what inspired this guide.) A Guide To This Guide This...

“Bio-Cup 2023 preliminary round starts when?” you ask? Why, it has already started! The preliminary round of the Bio-Cup 2023 building contest is now underway, and the theme of this qualifying round is Villain. What type of villain you create is entirely up to you. Contestants have until June 6th (23:59 PDT) to submit their entries, with the highest-scoring entrants moving on to the subsequent “head-to-head” elimination rounds (detailed rules can be found here). If for some reason you have no idea what the Bio-Cup is, even after all all of our prior contest coverage, below is a refresher of our past contest kick-off article by Grayson Moses. It provides such a great summary of what the contest is all about, that we shamelessly dust it off and put it back to use again each year - it’s tradition for us at this stage. Here’s hoping that participating in the Bio-Cup...

To mark the announcement of LEGO’s new Technic 42158 NASA Mars Rover Perseverance, we thought we would republish an exceptionally nerdy article about an actual MOC on Mars. Today we showcase the first LEGO Ingenuity helicopter (complete with instructions) built by engineer Stephen Pakbaz who worked on the actual Perseverance chassis which is now roaming our neighboring Red Planet. This article was originally published on June 13, 2021. You are probably more familiar with builder Stephen Pakbaz than you realize. In fact, Stephen designed the fifth LEGO Ideas set, the iconic 21104 Curiosity Rover. Every year, Stephen brings out-of-this-world (sorry, I had to) motorized content to the space theme at Bricks LA. It feels like next year might give us those thrills again. Stephen has given us a preview of the good things we’ll have on the other side of lockdown, this time by building a stunning 1:1 scale LEGO model...

Today’s guest article comes from BrickNerd patron Wayne Tyler. We’ve featured Wayne’s work numerous times and always marvel at his realistic renders. Today he shares some of the secrets behind getting the perfect lighting. So you’ve finished building a digital model or scene in BrickLink Studio and now you want to render an image to send to friends or post on social media. You click on the render icon to bring up the render dialog, then click on the render button and then wait until sometime later when your computer is heating up enough to fry an egg when you finally get an image. But what if you wanted to make that image look better, have more impact, and appear more lifelike? What should you do? The quickest and easiest adjustments to get an improved render are made with lighting. Using What You’ve Got: How BrickLink Lights a Model You can imagine the lighting...