(MOC) LEGO Hockey Rink "MSG"

[TheScotty91]

Hey all, so I'm pretty new posting wise to these boards after just reading for a while and wanted to share a project I've started working on over the past year.  After seeing some of the hockey rink creations across the internet, especially one posted on here, I was inspired to start designing my own creation in LDD and later Stud.io.  I've been a hockey fan my whole life... originally a Hartford Whaler fan... now New York Rangers fans (if you can guess from my avatar) so this seemed to be the natural next step in my LEGO revival that started about 5 years ago.  My goal is to build a LEGO minifig scale (about 1:48) of Madison Square Garden.  Which for the ice surface equals 50" or 162 studs long by 21.25" or 68 studs wide.

Eventually I also want to have two full teams of 40 players (custom created with individual jerseys), Rangers vs. Bruins, plus coaches, referees, off ice officials, ice crew and of course Zambonis.  Later, when I have more space, I would love to start building out the stands.  But after a couple of digital designs, I haven't gotten a look I've really loved yet so that's on the back burner for the moment until I finish the actual rink and obtain more space for this monster, lol.

The first picture is what I'm hoping for the first phase of this to be.  As a small sample of how many pieces are in the ice surface alone... 884 2x4 white tiles.  My guess is over 2,300 in just tiles for the entire ice surface


And here is my current physical build.  I've completed center ice and am working on one of the end zones and starting to build out the benches and penalty boxes.  It's really crazy how big this is in real life, haha.
I have 46 16x16 dark bluish gray plates so far in this photo


Better sense of the scale with one of my first custom minifig attempts for the future players for this rink.


The only problem that I have run into so far that I didn't anticipate when building this digitally was getting the doors to the benches working correctly.  It fits good closed... but can't open it up, haha.  So posting this to see if anyone may have an idea on how to resolve this.  I really... really don't want to cut a corner of a brick... but not sure what else would work right now.


Thanks everyone for checking this out, and I'll throw up some more updates as I continue.  You can also see more pictures at My Flickr Albumn

[Vindicare]

Man, this is awesome, nice job so far. The logo looks great. I definitely look forward to updates. 

[ER0L]

Wow, that's an ambitious project!  However, since it's still at a rather early stage I guess I’d think over the scale - even if you have postponed the plan of building the whole thing. I don't know how large a MSG in 1:48 would be, but I’d guess much too large for Lego purposes. Bricks (and of course the necessary minifigs which would have to be thousands) will cost you a fortune, much thought will have to go into transportability (i. e. modularity) in case you want to show it somewhere else when finished. I guess a large structure like this should - and can - be built in a much smaller scale and still look good. You might want to take a look at the work of the pros of the Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg (probably the largest model railway in the world): Their soccer stadium is 1:150 - in a surrounding of 1:87.