Lego Tardis

Posted on January 09, 2009 in Lego. - No comments

The BBC have just announced that the new face of Doctor Who will be Matt Smith, once David Tennant finishes his tenure at the end of the year. It was while watching the announcement that I thought about building a little Lego Tardis for my young son. He was spoilt over Christmas and got lots of Lego, and was very excited about Doctor Who.

It became quickly apparent that building a Tardis out of Lego, especially one that has more details than just a plain blue box with a light on the top, was going to be more complicated than I thought – and would require more bricks of different designs than we had.

Lego Digital Designer

However, all was not lost! For all of you that are either embarrassed about being 30+ and having Lego all over the lounge floor or can’t persuade the wife that it’s not a children’s toy there’s still hope!

Available on the website is the Lego Digital Designer. If you download and install this tool you can build Lego models on your own computer. LDD is surprisingly easy to use even with complicated hinges etc. the added benefit is that there’s no need to go scrabbling around a big box of Lego looking for the brick you require – they’re all available from the brick palette.

Once you’ve built your model in the tool you can upload it to the Lego website and (if you’ve limited yourself to a subset of the available bricks) you can purchase your model from the Lego Factory.

How to build a Tardis

Having downloaded the LDD I thought I’d have a go building a Tardis model. Of course no there were no problems getting hold of the bricks that I wanted!

The first thing I had to work out was the scale. I decided to make the digital model larger than I’d intended as I was no longer constrained by the bricks I had available and that I wanted to add more detail. Using a my son’s Tardis toy for reference I decided that the model would be 22 studs wide across the base and about 32 bricks high.

The most difficult bit about building the thing was figuring out how I was going to do the hinged doors. In the end, this wasn’t as difficult as I’d thought it was going to be.

You can download the Lego Digital Designer model of the Tardis .

I checked the cost of the model with the Lego site and was horrified at the cost! nearly £100! I guess I could probably optimise the model to use less bricks, but not by THAT many. I did think about doing a version with just two sides, but that seemed rather unsatisfactory to me.

It seems that for now it’ll have to stay a digital version only. At least this way I won’t get complaints about leaving Lego all over the place!

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