That car is wild. How many ponies are under the hood because the actual cab part is over the rear wheels.

@MCLegoboy said:
"That car is wild. How many ponies are under the hood because the actual cab part is over the rear wheels."

Must be a Duesenberg.

At first glance this set looked way bigger than 177, but on closer inspection that's just the camera angles talking

Either way, pretty house :)

I love the gates that go with the fence pieces that are still in use today. I wish they still made those gates.

A house, a car, a blood-red picket fence, it's the American dream!

Those trees are so uncanny...

Got this set for Christmas 1969. Absolutely loved it (still do), and rebuilt it countless times. One of two sets that started the mini-wheeled vehicles that felt so realistic compared to the grey tyred, larger wheeled vehicles that had come in the years before.
It was under £2 in '69... I rebought it for £50 a couple of years ago!

I had no idea baseplates came with some studs painted with white dots. I guess it is a reference pattern for building on top?

They had some creative set names back in the day

@mrzeon said:
"I had no idea baseplates came with some studs painted with white dots. I guess it is a reference pattern for building on top?"
Yes, before that the thin baseplates often only had studs where the bricks went and around the perimeter e.g. 341-1 ... Blobs of white paint were presumable cheaper!

@sjr60 said:
" @mrzeon said:
"I had no idea baseplates came with some studs painted with white dots. I guess it is a reference pattern for building on top?"
Yes, before that the thin baseplates often only had studs where the bricks went and around the perimeter e.g. 341-1 ... Blobs of white paint were presumable cheaper!"

Except now the ones with the blobs of white are more expensive because the blobs of white wore down! That warehouse also came with both versions of base (in Canada, Samsonite was a different breed). I recently acquired a copy, but haven't looked to see which one it is, yet. I am pretty sure this set of the week was also in that buy.

I’m sure this appeared in one of the “break everything” bonus worlds in the early TT games. I think it was in SWII, you had to hit single bricks on the ground that would sprout into portions of this. That you could then blow up!

@mrzeon said:
"I had no idea baseplates came with some studs painted with white dots. I guess it is a reference pattern for building on top?"
The baseplates with white dots to show you where to build remained until well into the ‘70s. I had 372-1 and its green baseplate had them. I don’t think the crater plates of Classic Space had them though. Not sure which was the last set to have them or why LEGO thought they were no longer needed/worthwhile.

@Zander said:
" @mrzeon said:
"I had no idea baseplates came with some studs painted with white dots. I guess it is a reference pattern for building on top?"
The baseplates with white dots to show you where to build remained until well into the ‘70s. I had 372-1 and its green baseplate had them. I don’t think the crater plates of Classic Space had them though. Not sure which was the last set to have them or why LEGO thought they were no longer needed/worthwhile.

"

I used to find the white dots annoying because if you built your own design of model on these plates you ended up with dots showing on parts you had not built over and they just looked wrong.

I love this era of toy house construction and its quiet/disquieting utopian ghost town plans. See book:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17573880-architecture-on-the-carpet

@mrzeon said:
"I had no idea baseplates came with some studs painted with white dots. I guess it is a reference pattern for building on top?"

They kept using it at least till 1989 since 6270 also suffers from it.

@Zander said:
" @mrzeon said:
"I had no idea baseplates came with some studs painted with white dots. I guess it is a reference pattern for building on top?"
The baseplates with white dots to show you where to build remained until well into the ‘70s. I had 372-1 and its green baseplate had them. I don’t think the crater plates of Classic Space had them though. Not sure which was the last set to have them or why LEGO thought they were no longer needed/worthwhile.

"

That’s a good topic for an article! I am pretty sure my copy of 149 has the white spots, as you would expect for a mid 1970s set but I think I also had one of the 12v train buildings with a spotted baseplate, might have been 7838.

@watcher21 said:
" @mrzeon said:
"I had no idea baseplates came with some studs painted with white dots. I guess it is a reference pattern for building on top?"

They kept using it at least till 1989 since 6270 also suffers from it."

I don't remember ever seeing the white dots. Of course, I was a poor kid. Our Legos were from a big secondhand cardboard box. I remember dreaming of getting the big space sets. My brothers and I got a couple new ones (the small to medium sets 452, 462, 483, and 493). But, not the Galaxy Explorer. Instead, I recieved the Kenner Millennium Falcon for Xmas. It was pre-built plastic from then on... to the Dark Ages. Until, Lego SW caught my son's attention- around 2012. He loved building things and then smashing them. Lego was finally making really cool-looking SW toys. I guess that's why I over-compensate now. ;)

I got it for my 5 year birthday. I still have it in the original box. The box is special, because the bricks are in a smaller box attached to a larger box containing the base plate. I always liked it, because it perfectly demonstrates how the roof tile system is supposed to be used

I still have my original one! Sadly, not the original box and I don't have all the trees anymore, despite being metal they did break. I posted a picture in the forum of me in 1975 building it with my brother...
https://us.v-cdn.net/5015319/uploads/editor/zl/c8z6eeqh9xeh.jpg
Perhaps I should recreate the picture!

Those trees remind me of the trees built with glued granulate pellets, but it seems that those are from far earlier.

It's interesting to see those white dots. I know from the 90s that the instructions included a top-down image of the plate with cornerstone bricks placed at the first step. Sometimes they would color some studs red to indicate how far something is to the edge. I think that's a better alternative to having paint on your plate, as plates would be less re-usable at te time.

A plate of note is this one: https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=4186p01&name=Baseplate%2048%20x%2048%20with%20Playing%20Field%20Pattern&category=%5BBaseplate%5DT=S&C=6&O={%22color%22:6,%22rpp%22:%22200%22,%22iconly%22:0}

It's half a soccer field from 1998. As you can see, it's full of painted studs!

Ah, the old tv antenna... one of the most fragile parts ever. (Right up there with OG Classic Space helmets and their chinstraps.)

@Binnekamp said:
"Those trees remind me of the trees built with glued granulate pellets, but it seems that those are from far earlier."
They co-existed for a while... the fire station I got in 1970 had the granular tree 347-1, but some versions of the set came with the molded tree.

P.S. @Huw I know there was a lot of weird stuff being smoked at the time, but "Hospital - Lucy Lamb And Charlie Cat Visit Doctor Dog" listed as an 'also known as' for 347-1 Fire Station??

@Murdoch17 said:
"Ah, the old tv antenna... one of the most fragile parts ever. (Right up there with OG Classic Space helmets and their chinstraps.)"

I've never encountered one with all spokes. There's always one off to the side that has broken off.

@sir_vasco:
Ever see a crumble tree? Another early attempt at a LEGO tree, they molded the trunk in brown, and then dipped it in a solvent, then coated in unmolded green plastic pellets. Not only are no two trees alike, but they tend to shed a few pellets over time, since the solvent bond was very weak, because they probably didn’t do anything to press the pellets into the trunk.