Entering the helmet collection

I'm still working through 10179 and felt like a Sunday break.  It's not as if there's a lot to do - normally, we'd be in the Midlands this weekend for my mother's birthday but lockdown life is pretty limited.  So, I thought I'd build my latest delivery - after being out of stock almost everywhere for weeks, I found the Tie Fighter Pilot Helmet (75274) available from Argos for delivery.  18 hours later (Argos is doing a good job of competing with Uncle Jeff!), it's on my doorstep and another 24 hours later than that, I've now constructed it.

 

This is my first foray into the Helmet collection which Lego started up last year.  It's clear that this is aimed at adult collectors (the box labels it 18+) and it is somewhat fiddly in places (the breathing tubes).  I can't imagine my 8yr old nephew building this one yet!  It also certainly looks pretty good once finished - there is plenty of detail and dimension to it.  It also contained a part which was new to me (always exciting): the small train wheel.  Also a couple of parts in colours I didn't previously have.

However, I was left oddly dissatisfied at the end of the build.  Firstly, this felt a bit like a giant Brickheadz model - certainly the inner structure of a square box comprising bricks with studs on their sides felt very familiar.  It also had shades of the Yoda model from 2019 that was really tedious to build thanks to all the shaping done with small plates.  I'd have preferred a SNOT design to this, if I'm honest - I think that would have looked way cooler.  

A couple of other thoughts: as I opened the box, out dropped a tiny sticker sheet - for a premium set like this, they should have invested in fully printed parts.  Absolutely no need for stickers, especially just for a couple of small tiles.  Also, while the instruction book was nice and heavy, this meant that it reduced to around 3 pieces per step, which was really simple for an 18+ set.  I was also surprised to note that they used highlighting throughout to indicate the new bricks in each step!  

A couple more photos:


Just as a comparison, I recently built most of the Boushh helmet MOC from AlboLego.  I miscalculated the number of 3x2 RB slopes I had and am still waiting for a couple of spares from Bricklink, along with a couple of other bricks that I am missing.  However, you get the idea... I have to say that I think this set is better designed than the Tie Fighter Helmet! 

I'll post a couple more photos once I've finished it. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Star Wars M&M Mosaic

Image
A few weeks back, I was trawling through Rebrickable, checking which Star Wars sets I hadn't build up and I came across two promo sets that I'd not found before.  The first was the "Han Solo on his Tauntaun" that I built up a week or so back and documented here .  The other was the altogether more crazy Star Wars M&M promo mosaic ( SWMP ) which rocks in 5462 pieces, according to Rebrickable.   It's debatable whether this really a released set, as only 400 were made that they were never available to the general public.  Apparently, it was a Walmart promotion event, held in different locations across the US and you could build these over 48 hours.   The set is massive - it covers 6 48x48 base plates so is around 76x115cm (2.5x3.75ft for those who work in imperial).  However, the whole thing distils to just 4 plate sizes (1x1, 1x2, 1x4 and 2x4), plus 169 2x2 black tiles.  And there are only 9 colours too.  Before you can start building, though, you've got to
Read more

Lego Colours

Image
Thanks to my mother and grandfather, I am colourblind. After discovering (c. 2001) that I knew all of the PhD students and postdocs in the colour vision team at Cambridge, I allowed them to experiment on me and was duly diagnosed as extreme deuteranomalous vision defective.  Putting aside the science, this means I have very limited ability to distinguish blue from purple, as well as struggling with red/brown and green/brown (oddly, I'm almost always fine with red/green).   Why am I writing about this in a Lego blog?  The answer should be obvious in that there are times when I really struggle to identify what colour my bricks are.  Particular challenges are: Dark red vs. reddish brown (this is my all-time worst and I struggle with them every time) Dark green vs. dark brown (especially cheese slopes) Transparent yellow vs transparent bright green (this is another random weakness which totally foxed Petroc when he tested me 20 years ago) Dark green vs. black (yes, really - I regularly
Read more

Han Solo on his Tauntaun

Image
I've not done very much building in recent days - I've instead been focussed on a couple of super-rare promo sets.  The first is the Star Wars / M&M Mosaic which I now have all the parts for but realised that there are no building instructions out there.  So I'm painstakingly creating my own in LeoCad - will post a link once I've finished them so others may follow in the footsteps of the Sith M&M.   However, I did mostly build one of them today - the super-rare Han Solo on his Tauntaun ( LLCA53 ) which I've rebuilt from spares and Bricklink.  I struggled to find any build instructions until I came across this post, which gives chapter and verse on the set... so I'm just going to post a photo.   I'm missing a piece (on order from Bricklink) and I replaced two of the reddish brown plates with clips with dark red equivalents.  The jumpers are also modern equivalents and I switched the turntables that top the legs with black rather than LBG bases which a
Read more