Yesterday, June 9th, we had a meeting of BayLUG at the Museum of American Heritage in Palo Alto. Click any of the photos below to see the larger version from Flickr, or click this one to see the whole album on Flickr:



The building contest theme was “Xmas in July” and I had the (unoriginal, it turned out) idea of having Santa Claus at the beach. I built a little island using two of the tan island pieces from set 6241 “Loot Island” (Pirates, 2009). (Note: I’m kind of amazed to see how much you’d have to pay to get that set today — someone is offering it on Amazon for $150, but you could probably buy the parts on Bricklink, including this island baseplate that only ever came in that one set, for far less than that.) Anyway, here is what I built:



However, my little model paled in comparison to some of the others, including the winner which was Kara’s beach scene with all the elves playing in the surf and sand. Here’s a photo of some of the contest entries:



I also brought my Micropolis city to display. I’ve been working on some new modules for it to add a river/canal to the city, based on the designs by Christian Benito over at Little Brick Root. I also built some edging pieces for the Micropolis, and modified my existing modules to support the routing of wires for electrified modules (club member Zonker Harris has been promoting that modification to the Micropolis standard). I’ll post more about those soon.



At the table next to mine, one of the younger members (Shane, age 14) had some amazing puzzle box models, and a working combination lock safe! He demonstrated how to open the safe, and how the puzzle boxes worked. They were quite clever.



This microscale house by Shane is a puzzle box! You turn the tree, slide part of the house, and then you can move the pool out of the way to expose treasure!



Lots of other members brought models to show off as well, mostly train stuff. The club is slowly beginning to adopt the MILS (Modular integrated Landscaping System) standard, and have been building modules for that. Hopefully at one of our upcoming train shows or convention displays, we will have an all-MILS layout!



The above photos and many more from the meeting can be seen at my Flickr album for the event.