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[Jeremy McCreary]

Cause for celebration: My LEGO club's first public exhibition since 2019 is at the Castle Rock Car Show on June 19! I love cars, and we always look forward to this fun outdoor event. Not everyday you get to sit in a (barely) street-legal Ford GT40 that ran at Le Mans in 1973.

Table space is limited this year for post-COVID reasons, and it is a car show, so I'll be filling my half-table with RC vehicles and other car- and truck-related builds. But I had to make at least one top for the occasion.

The black and hot pink single-seater at the end honors Helio Castroneves for his 2021 Indy win. Only 3 other drivers have chalked up 4 Indy wins, and no one's won 5.

[Jeremy McCreary]

The top above is an example of what I call a "vignette top". These tops paint a scene, tell a story, or set up a sight gag -- preferably one that ties into the top's motion somehow.

I've been exploring this genre for a while now in 3D, but it's nothing new. Painted vignette tops have been around for millenia. LEGO just happens to be a convenient medium.

What kind of vignettes can a top portray? Here are 2 smaller examples. OK, OK, pretty corny, but visitors at LEGO shows seem to like them.

Mail carriers chasing dogs for sport when no one's looking...



Mommy sharks tend to have mixed feelings about baby sharks, that annoying song notwithstanding...



Subtract the race cars in the 1st post, and you have a well-balanced, high-AMI spinning platform with a reasonable scrape angle and spin time. Even by hand, this platform can acquire enough angular momentum to carry much heavier vignettes than any of the ones shown so far.

In the pipeline...
1. A couple doing the tango, best viewed with a strobe to see the steps
2. An airplane race with clouds
3. A city top with some hopefully recognizable iconic buildings from around the world

[ta0]

In the pipeline...
1. A couple doing the tango, best viewed with a strobe to see the steps

As an amateur Argentine (Uruguayan) Tango dancer, this piqued my interested.

Have you calculated how many G's of acceleration your figurines have to withstand? I suspect they would all pass out or worse! 

[Jeremy McCreary]

In the pipeline...
1. A couple doing the tango, best viewed with a strobe to see the steps

As an amateur Argentine (Uruguayan) Tango dancer, this piqued my interested.

Have you calculated how many G's of acceleration your figurines have to withstand? I suspect they would all pass out or worse! 

Being of tough ABS, minifigs are a hearty bunch. Their G tolerance is limited only by the strength of their attachments -- assuming that you don't want them to fly off. All of the attachments above are strong enough to handle any speed I can dish out by hand. That translates into reasonable spin times -- at least for a novelty top.

I love modern tango music, but all I know about tango the dance comes from Dancing with the Stars. The tango top will require  some creative minifig attachments. There will be 4 or 8 stations around the periphery of the platform. One or both dancers will have only one foot on the platform in at least some of these.

Can I call on you as my tango consultant?