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Some of you may have already seen the
headlight brick mosaic
patterns I’ve been coming up with using Ldraw:
While out running the other day, I had an inspiration: maybe I could take six of
these patterns and form a cube. It didn’t take all that long to figure out a
way of joining up the six sides, and I was happy to find that it can be done
using, guess what? More 1x1 headlight bricks!
For some reason I thought it might be easier to try building this cube in the
imaginary world of Ldraw rather than out of actual bricks. But I soon found
working in three dimensions in Ldraw to hurt my brain. So I changed strategies
and started building with real-world bricks. In a little under 24 hours, I had
a completed cube:
But holding it in my hand was no fun, so I decided to build a stand for it, too.
Rather than have it sit on one of its sides, thereby covering up one the
patterns, I wanted a stand that would let it balance on one corner, letting all
6 sides stay in view. This turned out to be a little tricky, but after 2 more
hours and two completely discarded attempts, I came up with a relatively simple
and elegant solution, and thus the project was complete:
Stats for anyone curious: Each side of the cube is a 16x16 square made up of 256
1x1 bricks with headlight.
The six sides add up to 1,536 headlight bricks. Each of the twelve edges is
comprised of 16 bricks, for a total of 192 edge bricks. This brings the total
number of headlight bricks in the cube to 1,728.
Here are a few shots of the stand by itself:
Even after figuring out the joining technique for the edges, the actual assembly
of the cube was somwhat difficult. Anyone who has built two halves of a LEGO
sphere and then pressed them into one whole sphere probably has some idea what
I’m talking about, except here there were studs that needed to be joined in six
directions at once. Anyhow, finally, here is a close-up of the edge, in case
anyone wants to figure out how to build their own headlight mosaic cube, and a
shot of the interior of one half of the cube:
For anyone who missed the original
discussion of these headlight patterns and is curious how to build their own
headlight brick mosaic patterns, I threw together this
brief tutorial.
Cheers,
-The Rev. Brendan Powell Smith
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Message has 7 Replies:
 | | Re: Headlight Brick Mosaic Patterns Cubed
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| (...) What were you outrunning? You weren't actually running just for exercise, were you? Not that it's one of my 3 rules that I try to live by on my Lugnet member page, but I never run unless I'm chasing somebody or I'm being chased... Anyway, (...) (21 years ago, 30-Jun-03, to lugnet.build.mosaic, FTX)
| | | Re: Headlight Brick Mosaic Patterns Cubed
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| (...) Simply amazing! And just to make it a little more insane: Have you thought at all about attaching the faces of the cube from the inside in order to preserve clean edges? Play well, Andreas Stabno (URL) (21 years ago, 1-Jul-03, to lugnet.build.mosaic, FTX)
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