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  Course: Functions & Features
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Designing with Doors Open the door to new design possibilities! When is a door not actually a door? Learn about some of the interesting and creative ways to use LEGO doors, and soon you'll be able to add doors to your own LEGO designs.  
What's behind a door?
Chances are, you already know what a door is. You interact with many doors on a daily basis. By definition, a door is a movable panel that is used to close off access to a room, a vehicle or a piece of furniture. It typically swings on hinges but can also slide or rotate. Doors can be used to conceal something, prevent entrance to a certain place, or divide one area into two separate spaces. There are doors on your house to keep heat inside and strangers outside. A stereo cabinet can have doors to hide the stereo from sight. There is a door on your computer's CD-ROM drive to prevent dust from entering the delicate electronic parts of the drive. Doors play important functional roles in household appliances: refrigerators have doors to keep cold air inside, oven doors keep heat inside, and dishwashers have doors to keep water from spilling out. More than doors. Cabinets, refrigerators, and secret trap doors can all be made easily and quickly with LEGO elements. Doors to enter small LEGO houses appear in almost any LEGO System set that includes a building and a Minifigure. Most of these doors have a friction fit, similar to the interference fit that keeps LEGO bricks stuck together: when you close a door, it will stay closed until you open it again, and vice versa. You can also build doors that flop back and forth with almost no resistance by using regular LEGO hinges. There are many uses for doors in a model. Just like doors in real-life, you can use doors in your LEGO creations to hide things or provide access for your LEGO Minifigures. You can use doors to hide landing gear in a plane or spaceship. You can make a closed cubby to store different brushes for a street sweeping machine, or an escape hatch for a Minifigure to eject from a prototype car. You might want to create a pet door for your house, or a hidden trap door for your top-secret LEGO science lab. You can use LEGO door elements for many other purposes, such as a sailing ship rudder, wings for a small plane, or the mouth of a monster. If you have a whole bunch of LEGO doors, you can use them as feathers on a bird. Use your imagination and you may discover an ingenious new use for LEGO door elements! Designing with doors. When building doors into your LEGO model, you will need to keep a few things in mind: 1) Be sure you leave enough room around the door for it to open freely. 2) Before you enclose it completely in a model, make sure the door is large enough to accommodate whatever is supposed to pass through it. (It is not fun to rip the model back down to fix the door spacing.) 3) If your doorway is much wider or longer than any of the LEGO doors that are available, remember that you can make a split door with two door elements.
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