For the past week or so I’ve been working on adding a mailroom to the Daily Planet model. In real newspapers the mailroom is either adjacent or part of the room the papers are printed in. In the mailroom, mailers run machinery to insert ads and different sections into the folded papers and then they are put on pallets and sent out to the delivery trucks, etc. at various times, my father, grandfather, uncles and even my mom worked in mailrooms, and I even worked as a sub in a few for a while.

I decided to add a print room/mailroom to the Planet model for fun and you can see my rendition of a press to print the papers on, though the mailroom has been obviously simplified. I even created a minifigure of dad working there, along with some signage to go along with it (apparently the Planet is a dangerous place to work), and a pallet of papers ready to go and I chose the “Luthor Wins!” newspaper tile as the edition being printed. I’m thinking about adding more custom details and maybe even a locker, and a few more employees. You can see more photos below.

I’ve spent the last few sessions in Stud.io revising the instructions to build the dome, because I wasn’t completely happy with how easy they were to follow and there is a weirdness in the instruction generator around creating submodels for symmetrical objects like the dome sides. Truth be told I struggled with it for hours and wasn’t making much progress and then one Sunday morning a few weeks ago, my wife (a former software engineer as well) spent about 2 hours with me doing experiments creating submodels and then seeing exactly how the instructions are generated. The problem I was having was in creating the submodels in a separate file, then copying them into the dome file and having each side blow out into a completely different set of instructions.

In about an hour after spotting the common thread she suggested an approach that did exactly what I wanted and worked just like instructions for official LEGO sets. I plan to create a simple demo example along with the steps to create correct instructions and put them up here because I can’t imagine I’m the first person to struggle with it.

Besides that, I wanted to actually create a plan to allow the Planet globe to turn using a Powered Up! motor housed in the clocktower of the model and I hadn’t allowed for that in the previous build. This new set of instructions and the model in the photos here are the final approach and you can see a few aesthetic differences from the original build of the dome I did originally. Here’s a few more photos of the results:

I’ve also been working on the room where the papers were printed (interestingly called the mailroom) along with a model of the printing press to fit in the floor above the bullpen. My father had long worked in real newspaper mailrooms running the machinery used to add inserts for things like ads into the papers before they were sent out for delivery. I’ll be adding a LEGO minifigure of my dad to the model and something tells me he’d love it if he were able to see it.