Zonker's LEGO Page

First Thing: These pages are NOT sponsored or endorsed by the LEGO companies. They are the personal creation of an enthusiast of LEGO bricks. (The official LEGO home page is www.lego.com.)

Turn Table Round House Train Table Plans Engines Maintenance of Way LED Train Signals Wagons My Trains Page My Top Page

My favorite LEGO themes are Space, Trains, and Town (especially RSQ911!). I'm also starting to play with the Bricks! application by Gryphon Software on my macintosh, to create some basic instructions to document my ideas. (The screen images just cut-and-paste into Adobe PageMill, and CLARIS HomePage...my hats off to the Gryphon, Adobe and CLARIS coders!)

I currently have these pages describing some of my building projects. (Most of the pictures are already here as well, but some of the pages are not done yet.)

• Fire Station One - With three engine bays, two floors, a dispatch center, crew quarters, three-pad heliport, and three-story drill tower,was built over more than nine months.
• Emergency Vehicles - Coming soon, pictures of my own emergency vehicles
• My Trains Page - Showing my own engine and car designs, and an introduction to the new Big Project, a 5-bay working roundhouse!
  • The Roundhouse Page with pictures and notes of the project
  • The Turntable page with pictures and notes of the turntable
  • Coming soon, instructions for some of my special cars (Bricks! or LDRAW?)
• The Marble Maze - What started as an attempt at making a Kinetic Sculpture turned into an an experiment using kinetic energy. (It has instructions and Gryphon Bricks! illustrations to explain why it works, and will have an MPEG movie of the marble running through the maze soon.)
• The Zamboni - A fun project, but a Bad Luck Charm ;-)
• The Claw - A project with gears and Technic parts.
• My Models Page - This page details a variety of models I have built. Some were official LEGO designs, and others were smaller projects that didn't deserve their own page.
• My Space Bases - Coming soon; Various models of small, staffed outposts

I Know What I Like...

While I like building LEGO models, I also got wrapped up in collecting the special elements. As a result, during my early collecting days I rarely bought more than one of any given model, hoping to collect many of the different special elements, as opposed to collecting many of certain parts. So, as a result of that, I don't have enough LEGO people of any Space race to make a good space station...unless I want a "Babylon 5-type United Nations in Space". (This isn't such a bad thing, but I had been thinking about a big Blacktron base, or a large Space Police base.)

Earlier in my life, I was a 9-1-1 dispatcher, an ambulance driver, and a volunteer firefighter. I think that my background in Emergency Services is a large part of why I like the LEGO Town RSQ911 series so much. It was my work in Emergency Services that led to the Fire Station One project that I finished.

I've also been in love with space exploration since the first Gemini launch. I was young then, but I'm proud to say that I've only missed watching 2 shuttle launches and 3 shuttle landings on TV. I've never seen any of them 'in person', but I hope to do that someday. (I knew there was "a major malfunction" long before it was called on the radio channel...) My enchantment with the Space programs are what sparked my interest in the LEGO Space series.

Originally, I had HO and N gauge trains when I was a teen, and only got my first LEGOs about 10 years ago. Finally, the twain shall meet! In December of 1996, we had our first LEGO train running around under our Christmas tree! :-) In 1997, we'll have plenty of cars on our train.

I've also started keeping a LEGO journal. It's a blank college notebook-style, with quadrille (1/4" graph paper) pages. This allows me to keep LEGO ideas I have in one place, for the day when I have time to test the ideas. As embarrassing as it is to say, I've dreamed of building LEGO things, and if I wake up and remember the ideas from the dream, I sketch out the ideas on Post-It notes in the dark. This usually works OK, but there have been a few times that I have found gibberish on the notes the next morning. I put a lot of ideas for train stuff in the book during my summer trip to Europe. Until that trip, I only had a couple of the work trucks for the train series. But during the summer trip, I found a Freight Rail Runner in Poland, and had it shipped home to California. Later in that trip, I bought all the train-related LEGO Service packs (wheel sets, bogey plates, coupler sets, and flatbed bases) from one small store in Prague, in the Czech Republic. My latest project is a working roundhouse as my big project. This is still in the brainstorming phase, as ideas on paper meet LEGO bricks, and a variety of options will be tried and discarded, in search of the best solutions. Watch for the pictures.

I'm looking for a few good pieces! Since I got into the collecting late in life, there are a few early pieces that I'd like to buy or trade for;

• The old TV antenna, from the early town sets.
• There was a work crane, with a vertical/gear plate for the cab. This was also used in the old monorail set. I've got one rail, and I would be willing to trade that for the antennas, or I'll trade for the 2x4 gear/brick that mates with the rail.

I'm also interested in trading some of my duplicate Town and Castle and Space instructions for someone's extra Train instructions. If you might be interested in trading, please email me.

Top of Page

Fire Station

Trains

My models

Marble Maze

Zamboni

email

Copyright 1996-99, David K. Z. Harris, N6UOW
Questions? Comments? Additions? Email frenezulo@esperanto.org

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