When I was in elementary school reading The Indian in the Cupboard, I was fascinated with the book’s cover art. I stared – probably when I should have been reading in class – for hours at the cupboard the figurines lived in and wondered which of my toys I’d put in there. (My Strawberry Shortcake figurine collection made the most sense.) I started thinking of the book’s cover art again a few weeks ago, when I realized our living room mantle was being overtaken by dozens of Lego minifigures. They needed their own cupboard, that’s for sure. I looked at display shelves sold at hobby stores, but they didn’t have the right amount of compartments I wanted for the minifigures, like the shelf on the book’s cover. I described the idea to my boyfriend, master craft-table builder, and we quickly found ourselves rounding up the minifigs and getting them ready for their new home. Here’s how you can make one, too.You can make yours any size, but our size holds 100 pieces. One row will be smaller than the others, to show off smaller minifigs, accessories, or favorite bricks.
2 strips of 1″x2″ pinewood Strip of 1″x1″ pinewood you may need to rip this yourself Table saw with dado blade and standard blade Chop saw or hand saw Step 1: With the circular saw, start out by cutting 2 pieces of luan to 15″x30″ and 16″x20″, respectively. Step 2: Set your table saw fence to 1 1/2″ from the blade. Cut nine 20″ luan strips and eight 30″ luan strips. You could do all of this with a circular saw – it would just take longer and be less precise. Step 3: Next, take your 1″x2″ pinewood strips and cut two 20″ pine pieces and two 30″ pine pieces using the chop saw (or hand saw). (You’ll have some scrap wood leftover, so save that for your next project.) Step 4: Cut one 30″ piece of 1″x1″ pinewood. Step 5: After that round of cutting, set your dado blade on the table saw to 11/16″x3/4″. Notch each end of the luan and pine strips. Make an additional notch in the center of all of the 20″ luan and pine strips.
You are now done using the dado blade. Change to a standard table saw blade. Step 6: It’s now time to make notches in all of the pieces so that they can be joined together to form the actual shelf. Clamp all of your 20″ luan and pine strips together. Set your table saw fence to 2″ from the blade. Run your wood along the fence to make the cut. Test your notch with a piece of scrap luan to make sure it slides in. If not, you might need to nibble the notches a bit wider with an additional pass on the table saw. Rotate the piece and repeat the same step on this end. Once this is complete, set your blade to 4″ and make a cut on each end. Repeat this again, moving to 6″ and then 8″. After 8″, the cutting is complete for these strips. Step 7: Clamp all of your 30″ luan and pine strips together. We’re repeating the same process as the step above, but this time in 3″ intervals. Step 8: When all of the wood has been cut, take your two 30″ pine pieces and set on a flat work surface with the cuts you made facing up.
These are the sides of the shelf. Add a small dot of wood glue in each joint on the pine notches, and insert one of the 20″ luan pieces facing down. Step 9: Move across the strips, repeating this process. Use a rubber mallet if you have a tight fit. Step 9: Once the first set of joints is done drying, flip the entire piece over. Take your two 20″ pine pieces and put wood glue on the end notches you made with the dado blade. Attach to the top and bottom of the grid. Step 10: With your 30″ luan pieces, repeat the same process of gluing the joints, as in step 9. Glue and insert the 30″ piece of 1″x1″ pinewood into the center notches of the 20″ luan strips. Step 11: Clamp the entire piece and let it dry based on the wood glue’s suggested drying time. Step 12: After the piece is done drying, you’re now ready to paint the shelf. Prime first and let it dry completely. Add 1-2 coats of spray paint and let it dry before hanging (or adding the minifigs!).
Step 13: You’re done! Hang the shelf just like you would any picture – add your own hooks, if you like. Lish Dorset loves to craft and inspire others around her craft (including her cat Ronnie), too. She’s a former staff writer for CRAFT and a lover of Maker Faire. A lifelong Michigan resident, Lish’s work can be found at Killing It As A Groun-Up. While she loves all crafting mediums, she spends most of her time sewing, quilting, and finding ways to involve a glass of wine in her projects.Lego is undoubtedly one of the most iconic and successful toys of all time, and it seems like an almost daily occurrence that one Lego builder or another makes your jaw literally hit the floor with their impressive creations—but sometimes, they come from the company itself. Petrolicious has featured some of these Lego artists before (in many respects, that’s what they are), artists who just happen to use Lego bricks as their medium to showcase that imagination and craftsmanship have virtually no limits.
We’re big fans of people like Malte Dowrowski who not only free-styled a bespoke Porsche 997 GT3 4.0, but also his own Martini and Rossi Porsche racing team as well. All out of Lego, of course. But not everybody can be a builder who can figure things out by themselves and build a bespoke model “freehand”. For the rest of us, there are the official Lego sets that come complete with instruction manuals, and the company has been on a tear in recent years, packaging up some amazing kits in their own right like the Lego Taj Mahal, the Lego Ghostbusters Firehouse, and let’s not forget about the Lego Death Star. Because, seriously, who doesn’t need their own small medicine ball-sized Death Star? That is what I was both a little apprehensive and excited to receive the just-released Lego Technic 42056 Porsche 911 GT3 RS kit that the company developed in conjunction with Porsche. Apprehensive because the kit contains 2,704 pieces, and that a mischievous toddler lives in my house.
Excited because it had been a long while since I built a Lego kit, and I was interested to see if building this Technic kit would teach me something—about Lego, cars, or engineering. The Lego Technic Porsche 911 GT3 RS kit comes in an impressive box, so you know you’re in for something special. When you open the lid, the first thing you see is the instruction manual with the Porsche crest on the cover. Then you take out the manual…and find it’s 578-pages long. OK, this is probably going to take some time, especially if you haven’t built a Technic model before. To help set the mood, and ease you into it—and to try and make you forget about the considerable heft of the instructions—the first section chronicles the history of Porsche, and parallels both the actual “991” GT3 RS development with the Lego version which happened at the same time. There are four smaller sub-boxes of parts in the kit, each pertaining to a different chapter in the manual, and roughly corresponding to how Porsche might build the actual car.
For example, start with the drivetrain, build the chassis, then marry the two together, just like the factory does it. Next comes the frame, and then body. There are a total of 856 steps in the instruction manual, and by my (very patient) wife’s account, I expended several hours of effort on just the first sub-box. I did say this was Lego’s “advanced” line, didn’t I? No bones about it, this kit was an immense challenge for me, not just by its size, but also because of its intricacy. But, as the hours…and days…wore on, and more and more of the pieces interlocked, a car began to take shape, albeit very slowly. If you’re new to Technic, there are some different pieces than regular Lego kits, but if you take your time, and work over a preferably clean neutral background, you’ll be fine. You’ll probably still be as exhausted as I was when I installed the last piece: Step 856: insert a snazzy piece of Lego luggage into the trunk of the Lego Porsche. Anyway, I finally built a car that was almost 24 inches long and detailed with opening doors, engine lid, “frunk,” plus working technical functions like suspension, steering, and a working flappy–paddle gearbox.
It’s all pretty impressive, actually. The car is one of the most complex devices a person can own, yet many of us just take for granted that our cars just “work” they way they do. When we turn the key, we tend to forget that an immense amount of thought, and mechanical know-how went into making them the way they are. Where an actual car’s systems might be somewhat unfathomable, its inner workings encased in metal, unknowable unless you take it apart, you can see all the goings-on in the Lego version. Turn a wheel and see all the gears turn. The same holds true with the steering: the action of turning the wheel turns a shaft attached to a gear that acts on a rack so that the wheels turn. The result is that while while Technic’s engineering is a more simple abstraction than of an actual automobile, through building this 2,704-piece behemoth I now have a better understanding for the engineering that goes into a car I can drive. That makes building a Technic kit worth considering for any automobile enthusiast.