Posts

Showing posts with the label Behind the Scenes

WE’RE NOW MAKING FREE CUSTOM BUILDS FOR STORIES-THE NEXT FREE CUSTOM SET COULD BE MADE FOR YOU.

Image
We made 15 sets. Not one was for sale. THE TEAM BEHIND THE REAL ELECTRIC RACING BOAT. WHY WE DO THIS Most of our day-to-day attention goes into making each build as well as we can and sharing it with people who enjoy building. But the longer we do this, the more we find ourselves asking what else we might be able to do with what we know. We know there is only so much we can do. But if what we make can help a person, a group of people, or a team hold on to an important experience, a memory, or the connection they share for a little longer, that already feels meaningful to us. We are still figuring this out. Over time, though, we have come to feel that alongside making our products well, we can also try to use what we know to help preserve something that genuinely matters to others. So we want to keep moving in this direction. This project is our first attempt. HOW THE PROJECT STARTED The project began with a message from Cambridge University Riviera Racing. That first contact led to thi...

Behind the Scene: The Lines Don't Try to Impress

Image
There's a sketch pinned somewhere in Leon's workspace — rough, barely more than a silhouette — that shows a vehicle with no interest in being beautiful. That was the starting point for M-ATV. Leon C has spent most of his design career working on performance vehicles. The kind where every curve earns its place, where a roofline shaved by two degrees can change the entire feeling of the thing. He's good at that. Comfortable with it, even. So when this project landed on his desk — a military all-terrain vehicle, angular and unapologetic — his first instinct wasn't excitement. It was curiosity. "The challenge wasn't complexity," he told us, weeks after the model had been finished and photographed and approved. "It was about getting the character right." That's a different kind of problem. Off-road vehicles follow their own logic. Where sports cars seduce with motion, these machines communicate through weight. Through stance. Through the kind of p...

TOURBILLON — The Watch That Refused to Be Ignored

Image
  TOURBILLON — The Watch That Refused to Be Ignored What if the most precise thing you could build wasn't moving toward  anything at all? Leon C has designed V8 engines, inline-sixes, turbofans — mechanical systems where motion has a direction and a purpose. Power in. Output out. The logic is easy to follow. Then he looked inside a mechanical watch, and everything he knew about motion stopped making sense in the best possible way. The tourbillon inside wasn't driving anything. It was turning, returning, turning again — a continuous loop with one quiet job: fight gravity, beat by beat, so the hands above never drift from the truth. Not moving toward a finish line. Moving as it should. That idea refused to leave him. This build is where it ended up. Seeing it in three dimensions. A tourbillon isn't hard to find. Plenty of watches have one, and plenty of videos show them running. What's harder is actually following the logic — understanding not just that it rotates, but wh...

Behind the Scene: The Seventh Shade of Green

Image
  We embarked on the design process with great enthusiasm, but  a  Problem No One Saw Coming . The most stubborn challenge in creating the Willis Off-Road wasn't the complex gearbox or the intricate chassis. It was finding the right green. Not just any green, but the green—the one that felt like a memory of mud, moss, and adventure. After six failed attempts, with paint samples ranging from sickly yellow to lifeless gray scattered across the studio, the team was ready to compromise. But the designer, Leon C, just stared at the nearly perfect model and shook his head. The soul was still missing. That relentless pursuit of “soul” over “spec” is what truly defines Leon’s approach. For him, every color, curve, and component must serve a deeper story—a story that began long before the first brick was snapped together. Why This Vehicle? It Was About a Promise. For Leon, the project never began with a spec sheet. It began with a feeling he described as "trust." While others saw ...

Behind the Scene: The Song You Can Touch——Z240

Image
  It wasn't the speed that caught Blue J's attention. It was the silence. Not the silence of the car itself, but the quiet it seemed to promise. When he first saw the lines of the Datsun 240Z, he didn't think of horsepower or racing stats. He thought of an empty two-lane highway just after dawn. He thought of the hum of tires on asphalt being the only thing you needed to hear. This was the feeling he wanted to trap in bricks. Not a trophy, but a mood. A Line That Remembered Blue spent more time looking than building in those first weeks. His screen was filled with photographs not from car shows, but from family albums found online — grainy shots of the Z against desert backdrops, parked at scenic overlooks, its paint faded by sun. "The curve," he ' d say to anyone who asked, tracing the air from the roof to the tail. "That ' s the whole story. It ' s not aggressive. It ' s … resolved." To him, this was the shape of a concluded thought. It...

Behind the Scene: The Garage Next Door——A determined Underdog

Image
Something More Than a Movie Moment In a year when the roar of F1 engines filled theaters worldwide, a quieter, more personal race was being run on a designer's desk. It wasn't about replicating the glamour seen on screen, but about capturing the gritty, problem-solving heartbeat of a race team itself. This is the story behind the V25 F1 Racing Car—a story not of victory laps, but of the relentless pursuit of "what if."   Why This Car? It Was About the Spirit, Not the Trophy. For designer Leon C, the choice of a car inspired by the Haas F1 Team was deliberate. In the glitzy paddock of Formula 1, Haas embodies a different, deeply American narrative: the determined underdog. It’s the story of a team that builds, tests, fails, and iterates with sheer tenacity. Leon wasn't drawn to creating a replica of the championship leader; he wanted to build a tribute to the effort. "It’s the grit that resonates," he noted. "The feeling that every single part is fou...