We’ve recently had a few new people join the LUG.

• Nathan “Nate” Cunningham (not to be confused with the Nathan Cunningham who has been with the LUG for several months) is a LEGO Castle fan and lives in Ogden, Utah. He came to the September meeting at Spencer’s house.
• Ryan (goes by “thavok” on the web) has been building for about 20 years and recently has started to get into LEGO Trains. He says he’s “generally stayed in the Space themes but love[s] them all.”

Reed also met a couple people at a train display at Hill Air Force Base- Gray, who said he’d like to donate all the bricks his kids left behind when they moved out if we ever set up a permanent display somewhere; and also Chris, who has been involved in the Tuscan LUG in Arizona. He’s also co-written a book about Mindstorms NXT!  We hope to be hearing from them soon.

Welcome to all the newcomers, hope you enjoy being in the LUG!

This month’s meeting was held at Spencer’s home in Wendover, Nevada.

The agenda was as followed:

1. We toured Spencer’s new LEGO room. The room is located in his
   basement and is 15′ by 20′ with metal shelves to hold his collection.
2. Spencer is on the decline of sorting his e-bay purchase from
   March. However, during the meeting Spencer discovered that his sorting,
   at times, was insufficient to produce a known part at a given time.
3. The LUG choose to build a working drawbridge to use in our train layouts.

The LUG has been unable to build a circular layout due to access to the interior (no one enjoyed crawling under the tables).

The bridge turned out great and was a classic LUG collaboration with everyone pitching in the help. George and Nate worked on the bridge understructure and towers. Isaac, Luke and Bill worked on the bridge side trusses and the towers. Luke contributed two “U-LUG” mosaics to integrate into the sides of the towers. Bill, Brian and Spencer designed a motor and pulley system to lift the bridge. Our expectations of the weight of the bridge were too high and the gear-down too large
and slow. In fact the motor probably could have lifted a small car
without problem. The highlight of the day was when we put all the pieces
together and the bridge worked on the first try!

Please review the film here: (link coming soon-ish)

We would like to thank Spencer for the opportunity to meet at his house and the wonderful lunch Cindy (his wife) provided us.

Large portions of this post were written by Brian Pilati.

Our next monthly meeting will be on September 15, 2007 at Spencer’s house in Wendover. The meeting will start at 11 AM, so the carpool group(s) will be meeting at 9 AM-ish in Salt Lake. Spencer has said that his store will be open, so we can search through his unsorted LEGO bricks and buy what we want. Also, all Spencer’s bricks will be available for everyone to build something for the train shows. Most of us will probably be working on a UPS building. Lunch will be provided (hamburgers) and we might build some  MichLUG-style tables to use for shows. Driving directions are on the Google Group.