9th January 2016
MASTER BUILDER TIPS AND TRICKS
As part of the new year our master builder and Brick Party host Mark will be sharing some basic tips and tricks for building your own Lego® models throughout 2016! Here’s his first post:
S.N.O.T. Building
S.N.O.T. stands for Studs Not On Top and is one of the easiest of the more advanced building techniques. Essentially it involves using either hinges or Lego parts that have studs going in more than one direction and lets you build more curved or angled shapes by attaching pieces sideways, upside down or on angles, like I did with the numbers in this Happy New Years picture:
There are S.N.O.T bricks, S.N.O.T plates and ‘brackets’, all of which can be used to put pieces together in new and interesting ways, but best of all, they’re all used in most official Lego® sets, so almost any child will have at least of few of them in their parts collections! You can also buy these parts directly from Lego.com.au’s pick-a-brick service under the ‘brick, special” and ‘plate, special’ categories, or by searching the Bricklink site’s numerous stores.
Basic S.N.O.T means using a brick or plate that has studs on it’s side so you can then add more bricks sideways to either create a curve with sloped bricks or add control panel tiles for a spaceship. It also means you can stack a S.N.O.T brick onto ANOTHER S.N.O.T brick to get studs facing the bottom and build upside down! Now that’s super S.N.O.T-y!
More advanced uses of S.N.O.T take advantage of some simple brick maths – the fact that it takes 3 plates stacked to equal one brick high or that 2 studs are the same width as 5 plates laid sideways- you can see some that at work in the bottom of the “0” in 2016.
Hinges or plates with clips and bars ( used to create the diagonal angle of the ‘2’ below) allow you to put studs and parts at more angles than the S.N.O.T parts, but will normally require a bit of support from other parts so they keep their angle and don’t flop around, especially if you put a lot of parts, and therefore weight, on the angled end of the hinge connection.
So next time you’re building at home, why not try out some S.N.O.T to make your next creation stand out?
That’s about it for my first Master Builder tips and tricks post- I hope it helps you or your child get more out of your Lego® collection and create more amazing things!