Well, Brickworld Chicago 2026 has come and is now gone. So behold, the secret all as to why all those beams were needed. May I introduce you all to my largest and most ambitious creation yet:
The World of Throwbots/Slizers
Designer’s Notes: What you just saw above was only a mere fraction of what I had planned.
In September of 2025, I received an email notification that for a secret super early bird special on full-badge attendees for Brickworld Chicago. Gave it a few days and decided that I would go again. Displaying was fun and I really enjoyed myself at BWC. And this go around, when it would open, I would volunteer to create and run an activity - a LEGO character lore quiz. Something to test the waters as being a showman for later endeavors and to make it a different experience from the year before. All that was left was to decide what I should display.
I didn’t want to bring back anything from the year prior, but that presented a problem. Last year’s line up was the best I had to offer. They were some of my favorite builds, most creative, artistic, and quite the spread of variety. And having hardly built anything new since, it would mean either making a ton of new stuff or rebuilding a bunch of old stuff.
Realistically, that left me with three options if I stuck to preexisting MOCs.
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Random - Another random grab bag of builds of both new and old who didn’t make the prior year’s cut - not a great option.
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Hero Factory - Buy enough parts and have all my HF MOCs exist at one time and in one place. Now, I love this idea. That is great and I will do that one day in the future. I just need to finish more of the character builds and I want to make a massive Assembly Tower. Not certain if it will be to set scale, perhaps Minifig scale, but a massive HF tower that opens to show various scenes throughout the show. Some monitors explaining HF lore and my finish HF story stuff. And so much more. That will have to wait.
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Throwbots. I know for a fact that all my Throwbot guys can exist at the same time, because they did back when I built them for the contest. That just leaves a small problem - how do I display them? They’re small, they’re simple, they succumb to the Garage Sale Problem far too easily if they’re out on a table in the void. Really, there is only one viable solution to this - put them in an environment. And while we’re at it, build it out of Technic.
Before I explain more of my reasoning, here were some of my other ideas to help set the stage. These are all the new build ideas rather than rehashes.
- Junkbot - Ages ago, I recreated all 123 Junkbot levels/screens and had it on Lego Ideas as a 1-in-123 model. Though not ready yet, I have since thought of a better way to build it. I need a singular frame that allows people to plug in and out level parts to easily swap and choose which of the 123 models they want to display. Rather than dismantle the entire thing and rebuild it again and again. There are some design challenges to get this to work, especially since I still want it level accurate. But…just having one wouldn’t be much of an attention grabber or display, now would it?
Picture it, a double-stacked row, a wall if you would, of all the Junkbot levels. Walk down an entire aisle and see the entire campaign of two games in a singular trip. Plus, an example of what the singular standalone version looks like with all the free elements to design a level. And a dude in the full body Junkbot cosplay by it.
Before the current cosplay that I’ve been working on this year, I was going to cosplay as Junkbot. But if I was going to cosplay Junkbot, why not go all out and make a relevant display? You can probably see why it didn’t happen this year.
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Technic Animals - Throughout 2026 and 2027, I plan on working on that Technic 3-in-1 animal set idea. The goal is that, by 2028, I should have not only worked out that set but a number of different Technic animal builds. And have the display be interactive so people can try them out. Have that as part of the Lego Ideas launch to get as many supporters as possible. Could all be in Technic-built environments or maybe a zoo.
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Onu-Metru Archive Exhibit - Because I want to continue pushing the bounds of Technic, what if I built out a section of the Archive almost purely out of Technic? With custom Rahi on display, Matoran walking around the exhibits, etc. I’m not sure how big it would be…because that entirely depends on the size of the Rahi. So probably big.
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Technic Bumper Cars - Building a bumper car out of a Technic would be fun. Functional bumper cars running around and crashing into each other in a building that’s also made of Technic? Much cooler, more impressive…and would take me too long to figure out the engineering for 2026 so it is shelved for now.
You might be starting to understand my level of madness. Between HF, Junkbot, the Technic animals, bumper cars, and Technic-built Onu-Metru Archive, all of these are large and ambitious projects. And I already have a ton of other stuff I’m doing this year, so I need something more manageable. Something that will push me but not be too ridiculous.
Throwbots. Now there’s an idea.
I’ve already built two environments largely out of pure Technic before. There’s the Abandoned Arctic Rescue Base (Biocup2023 R1) and Atobe Finishes the Job, which demonstrate my early experiments. The Atobe one is what really sold me on using the Throwbots as the subject matter. While the Community Build dude is massive for building an environment, the smaller Atobe is so much more manageable. And Throwbots really aren’t that much bigger, so how hard could it be?
Because I care about the canon of my dudes, I had considered duplicating some environments at first. Because Biplane and Scavenger can’t exist at the same time. They aren’t the same character, it’s just that the meteor destroyed Granite’s section of the planet. So having a Granite section for Biplane and then another version with the meteor coming down or already partially hitting the world as Scavenger escapes. Or just have the meteor coming down on all of them from above. Too complicated, it got cut. That and I really needed to figure out spacing.
I already wanted a single standard table (8’x2.5’) again and I wanted to bring a few of my new creations with me (Scarab, Drinking Bird, etc.) that didn’t exist last year. So that shrunk the Throwbot display down to six feet long and width could be adjusted as needed. After rebuilding all the guys, six feet was shockingly small for them to be spread out in ways that allow them to be easily photographed. Which quickly developed into a new problem.
By now, I had mostly decided on how I wanted this to look. I would have seven biomes - Fire, Water (under and surface), Ice, Rock/canyon, Amazon/jungle/woods, City, and Energy - one for each place my guys canonically lived in. And each would get two 15L Technic beam sections to live in…Water has too many guys. It needs at least three sections. Well I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with Energy anyways. Probably lots of purple and tubing, so we can ax part of Energy or Energy in its entirety. The Energy Dragonfly and Rabbit can exist in the City and Jungle sections, it will be fine. Heck, the dragonfly can be caught in a web between the giant trees of the forest. And now water needs to be four sections large. Fire needs three. City needs three. Ice and Rock/desert cannot be shrunk beyond two or it looks weird. Uh oh, the forest is getting small. We’ll need to redistribute them into City.
Problems were rapidly developing. I wanted a water surface that stretched out most of the way, if not the entire length, of the water section so it really looked like it was underwater. Transparent panels and/or beams to do the trick. Using the long canyon wall and trees in the Jungle sections to be disguised support arms. We have a boat guy, so we need a water surface. So however high up that goes determines the height of the skyline. There’s going to be a large backdrop in all sections that match up the skylines. Biplane will be flying fairly high up as a result. But now my forest is slashed, maybe the City can help support. And City was supposed to…Let me explain another design consideration before I get to that.
I like giving viewers a narrative to follow. It’s part of the stage play/set designer in me to arrange something that will help lead the audiences’ eyes. To accomplish this, the overall design was going to be a trapezoid shape. Not in the literal sense, it would have been rectangular, but you can sort of see this in the version at Brickworld. The idea was that, whether the person came from the left or right sides, the display would lead up their eyes up from one end before going level at the highest point with the Water section, and then ramp back down to offboard them to the next display. This is easiest to see if the volcano leading to the icy mountain, which slopes up to the canyon, which goes up to the water surface…before an immediate drop off.
Energy would have been the original other end point. But in either case, the plan for City was to have our big teal friend going up a literal ramp onto an elevated road that would then curve around several skyscrapers. And that was still the plan until I started building and realized how big my dude really is and that the ramp would not be feasible. Not with the space I had available. Which also meant I no longer hand room for curved roads either. Or parts.
For an exact timeline, the earliest I could start on this project was May 18th. In which I was able to rebuild the dudes, eventually construct a rough frame, and wait on parts to arrive. While waiting, I spent three weekends building just the volcano. Not the lava river and pool. Not the floor of the region. Just the volcano. And that thing was a pain to work with to eventually anchor it into the floor. At which point, to save on time, I started putting in random points to eventually add other landscaping details.
I should have started with water first, but I did want the correct color parts first so I would have to take it apart and try again later. Plus, the volcano was conceptually easier to start with. But since I also wanted each region to somewhat look like the Throwbot box art, Water was going to be extra challenging regardless. Water went next and as I started running out of time, added random placements on the floor for later details and moved onto the desert.
Did you know how rare tan is in Technic? Did you know that the Thornatus is some of the only sources of Technic in tan? I didn’t. I didn’t know I had some of the large stockpiles of tan by owning the set since childhood. I bought as much as I reasonable could and by the time water was mostly done, it all arrived… eight days before I needed to leave. Spent two-three days crunching on the canyon, about two on the Ice region, couldn’t spent hardly any time on the forest, and City got everything else I could spare…And worst of all, I ran out of pins.
Despite all those Technic beams I bought, I didn’t think to buy more Technic pins. I have so many. By rough estimates, what I had available to use, and including what was already in use prior to this project, was ~1,500 blue 3L friction pins and ~3,000-4,000 black 2L friction pins. And I ran out.
I ran out of pins. I had to resort to my collection of frictionless pins. That floor for City? That’s held together by 3L and 2L frictionless pins. If you poke at it, it moves like an accordion. And I ran out of those too. I started using those 3L (2L pin, 1L axel) hybrid pins like they were strange 2L friction pins to get it together. I couldn’t order any that would arrive in time and I was so short on time I couldn’t go to any of the 2-4 hours in total drive time for third-party stores to raid them for Technic pins.
So the big tree(s) in the forest? Gone. Now stumps. The sky, clouds, smoke, and any of the fancy background stuff? Gone. Don’t have time, can’t spare the pins. What about power lines and pole, guard rails, lights, any details for City? No time, no pins. Ugh. That slope in Ice is pretty bad, what about - NO PINS, NO TIME.
After 8 PM on the day before I had to leave for Brickworld, I called what you’ve seen above good enough, tore it down, packed it up, and left the following morning. Still hungry for pins.
But I would like to bring this to other conventions later this year. That will give me time to get more pins and make some improvements…After I finish the cosplay. That needs to be finished in the next couple weeks. Also, since BioniLUG is doing a Slizers collab, it would be really nice to see it displayed nearby their stuff. It was really funny seeing that announcement when I had already decided on the World of Throwbot stuff months prior.
Oh. And here were the other guys that came along.
The Others:
The most interesting thing were the comments from the public on these guys versus the display.
Turns out, most Bionicle fans don’t like or at least don’t care about Throwbots. Most System fans actively hate Technic. Without fail, almost every other full attendee would tell me how impressive and insane my build is because it’s completely made out of Technic and that they hate Technic. Especially building with Technic, because it hurts to build. But a lot of people loved my display and were so shocked to see Throwbots. Hit a forgotten nostalgic nerve for many.
…Except the World of Throwbots isn’t what got the most attention. Nor was it the Scarab, as I was expecting after Brickfair. Nope. It was the Drinking Bird and the Kinetic Orbital Sculpture.
I kept hitting them throughout the show to demonstrate their functions and people loved it. Also learned that drinking birds are no longer part of popular culture and 20-somethings and younger didn’t know what it was. That aged me so fast.
Tokens:
100% purist Lego. I’m using a taillight sticker from a Technic set. But these were the ten tokens I handed out.
…And I think that’s everything? Let me know what your thoughts are on the World of Throwbots and any suggestions for improvements.
