The dark side of the brick

Having saved up several of the Star Wars helmets to build until last week, this week brought two new helmet releases.  These duly arrived from Lego this morning (after the probe droid came yesterday) and I decided that, since they were out on the desk, I'd build one of them this evening.  Top of the pile was Darth Vader ( 75304 ) so...   Out of the box, you get a fairly standard instruction book and 5 bags: This also started off as a pretty standard helmet build, though it was a bit unusual to start with the base (normally this is step 2 or 3).  Step 1 finished with the chin in place: Bags 2 and 3 then did the face and the central structure which was much more solid than is usual - all the other helmets have had a bit empty void in the middle whereas this one was much more solid.  I guess this accounts for the higher brick count. Step 4 gave the front, top and back, with fairly standard helmet techniques: Bag 5 then gave me a surprise... a brand new part!  A 6x2 pair of wedge plate

I didn't manage to finish work until 9.45pm this evening (last minute request for an important paper) so plans to build the brand new probe droid that arrived this morning were shelved.  Instead, I built up a small set - the Mandalorian Battle Pack ( 75267 ).   This follows the standard pattern for battle packs - four good minifigs and one or two small vehicles or bits of scenery for them to interact with.  The focus has therefore always been on the figs and these are, in my view, a really good set.  Three of the four are unique (the last has also appeared in a magazine gift) and all look really good. The rest of the set is fine but nothing outstanding.  Nevertheless, I may invest in a couple of spare sets of this as I think it will be gaining value pretty quickly.

I ended up working most of my Sunday and did another 13 hours at my desk today but have squeezed some time for what turned out to be a not-so-quick build.  Ok so it's over 1,300 parts but I was surprised at how long it took me to build up the 2015 edition of the Millennium Falcon ( 75105 ). While I have a BNISB copy of this in my stockpile, this particular version was a rebuild from parts and on building it up I found I was still missing a few pieces (the eagle-eyed reader will spot one replacement and I'm missing a printed tile and a silver blaster).  As usual when getting parts from the boxes, I made a number of picking errors and had to go back a number of times - I blame that for being a bit slow on this build.   As noted in the title, this is now the last of the Falcons to build up... at least the minifig scale ones (I've got a microfighter from this year to go). The rest are all on the shelves in varying degrees of inaccessibility so I've taken some really bad pho

Continuing my Sith theme, last night's build was the UCS Darth Maul bust ( 10018 ).  This was a second hand purchase from Ebay but after looking for a while, I found someone who was selling what was clearly a rebuild but with all of the correct parts, including the very rare black quarter cylinders.   In the end, what arrived came in a bin bag (!!! - though the most expensive parts had been separated into plastic bags) and was missing all of the 4x10 bricks.  The quality of the bricks was wildly varying - clearly this had been put together from mostly second-hand bricklink orders.  I ended up replacing some of the worst of the bricks from my spares and a couple of bricklink orders (I needed to buy the missing 4x10 bricks).  I may well start replacing some of the worst of the remaining ones over time but that will be a long-term project... along with replacing some of the yellowed parts on my second hand R2-D2. So, after cleaning and sorting, the bricks filled three of my containers

For the last of my holiday builds, I've graduated from mosaics of sith M&Ms to mosaics of sith lords.  Specifically, I picked Darth Vader as my choice of the three options from the offical Sith Lords Lego Art ( 32100 ).  Unusually, I'll lead with a photo of the finished thing: This set is all about aesthetics - box, build, experience and obiously the finished display piece, so let's go through these in turn. The box is a pretty unique shape but hints at what you're going to build - it's square and just larger on all dimensions that the finished mosaic.  It's clearly aimed at adults, minimalist in its design and all black (again, hinting towards the finished set).  The helmet sets are similar but somehow this box feels even more clean - almost clinical.  To be clear, this isn't a problem - indeed I find it refreshingly different. On opening, you get several interior compartments.  Unhelpfully, I've unboxed it here but the bottom contains 9x 16x16 tec

Excitingly, I've finally managed to escape London and get away for a few days. So, this morning, we packed the car with clothes, food, the wife's sewing machine, some books... and three lego sets that I deemed would survive transportation.  I've got to pace myself because these have to last me a week!   First out of the pile was the Boba Fett helmet ( 75277 ).  Weighing in at 625 parts, this is actually the simplest of the 2020 helmets.  However, it was a very satisfying build with plenty of interesting features.  Took me about an hour all told.     However, I'd like to raise two colour-related gripes: I really struggle to tell sand green apart from LBG in the instruction manuals, given my colour-defective vision Dark red is still coming in a really wide variety of colours and it's really obvious, even to me!

Some time ago, I started collecting the parts for Kylo Ren's Command Shuttle ( 75104 ) with the intention of doing a rebuild.  Because I wasn't totally convinced I had all the parts, this was one of the last sets out of the storage boxes.  As it turned out, I was only missing about 4 bricks which duly arrived from Bricklink during the week with my Friday night then obvious. I built up the more recent 2019 version ( 75256 ) sometime last year and at the time realised that these share a distinct heritage.  The obvious difference is that the original 2015 version is in dark bluish grey whereas the more recent one is slightly more striking in black.  The more recent version also has some more detailing in it but still comes out at the same number of bricks (1005)! However, they do both share a very similar mechanism for the arms... and I very nearly did what I did last time and end up building the wings backwards.   Overall, this set looks nice but has relatively limited playabilit

I'm working my way back through some of my new sets to build at the moment.  Today's first build was the Easter Bunny Carrot House ( 40449 ) which arrived free with some sets I bought the other week.  I really quite liked this set - it's cute but is very nicely proportioned and has some interesting pieces (this is the first time I've found a 2x6 tile in a set!).  I have sent some photos to my 7yr old niece who will be jealous until I deliver her copy to her later in the month when we're allowed to visit. Next up this evening in the quick build, it was back to topic with the Resistance Y-wing microfighter ( 75263 ).  I don't normally love the microfighters but this one is better than most.  I had a copy of this set for ages but gave it away to a friend in need of distraction (along with some gin) and it took me a while to find another copy.  Finally, yesterday's build was the AT-ST Raider ( 75254) from back in 2019.  Again, this has been on the shelf for age

First, a digression... Last night, I made the decision to stop trying to buy a complete set of the UCS republic dropship with AT-OT (10195).  I've been trying to buy the set for months but all versions rock in at £600+.  Given I'm not averse to a rebuild, I've decided to go for it and buy the parts.  I already had around a third of the necessary parts in my collection, including a couple of the rarer ones.  24 hours and 4 bricklink orders in, I'm down to the last 200 or so pieces, though that does include a few of the rarer bits.  I reckon I'm going to manage the whole thing for around £250, though it does depend on the cost of the printed dishes (I've got 4 of the 10 I need so far).   So, that's taken up a fair bit of time today... but I've squeezed in a bit of time for a quick build after a much-needed haircut.  Today I pulled the 2019 droid gunship ( 75233 ) off the shelf.  I reckon this is one of the sets I've had unbuilt for the longest - at lea

Yesterday was a cleaning evening - another second hand ebay set arrived which needed to be cleaned and inventoried.  As usual, it was missing some pieces - in this case 7 black 4x10 bricks (can you guess what the set is?) and as it was clearly a rebuild, some of the pieces were in pretty poor condition.  It was actually interesting to see no less than 3 moulds for the standard 2x4 brick, some of which must have been 40 years old as they're certainly not recent ones.   Today was mostly therefore a bricklink day, buying the missing pieces.  However, I've found some time to build up a new set that has been on the shelf for some time - the 2017 Phantom ( 75170 ).  I have to say that I was confused by this set as it looks nothing like the 2014 Phantom ( 75048 ) that I built up a couple of weeks back.  And a google search suggests that the 2014 version is much more accurate to the source material!  It's unusual for Lego to release an updated set which is less realistic. Here

I'm not talking about golfing, nor about my first computer (the Commodore Plus Four, with a whole 8k of RAM... showing my age!).  I'm actually on the sets designed for young children, specifically today the Resistance X-wing released this year ( 75297 ). It's a given that I'm not the target demographic for this set so I found the build ridiculously easy - I didn't even bother opening the instructions and just built it from the picture on the box.  However, I have built enough sets with my nephews and niece (some of whom are still under 10) that I know how they used to tackle sets.  I think even my niece would have enjoyed this one at the age of 4. Weighing in at just 60 pieces, it's a good job that some of them are rare to justify the very steep price tag - I would have priced this at no more than £10 at absolute tops and I think £18 is pushing it.  The microfighters are generally much better value in terms of bricks.   That gripe over, it's an ok set, thoug

Back in 2016, I was buying some of the Lego Star Wars sets but hadn't yet conceived of the ludicrous plan to own them all.  Captain Rex's AT-TE ( 75157 ) one was one of the sets I looked at and liked but couldn't quite bring myself to buy.  What attracted me was that it was clearly Star Wars but it was colourful and quite different from the usual sets.   A while back, I finally managed to get my hands on a brand new version, which was priced cheap because someone had made the mistake of opening it (why do people do this if you have no intention to build it?  It immediately takes 20% off the resale price).  Given it's Easter weekend, I've been taking on slightly bigger sets so this one came off the pile. I have to say that I really enjoyed the build - there were lots of interesting elements and, apart from the side panels, remarkably little repetitive work.   You get a number of unique minifigs too: Imperial Inquisitor Fifth is the most unusual, but three old dudes w

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

Being Good Friday, we had the day off work.  Most of the day was spent walking 15 miles across central London, eating hot cross buns and having fish for dinner.  All very traditional... this evening, however, was back to Star Wars Lego.   I first unpacked a second hand set of Mace Windu's starfighter and worked out which bricks were missing (I knew there were a few but this was also in pretty poor condition and I ended up replacing 20-30 parts from spares too).   That done, I moved on to a new set - an Ebay purchase of the 2016 Clone Turbo Tank ( 75151 ).  I was surprised by how long it took to build this - the best part of 2 hours. The Turbo Tanks aren't, all told, my favourite of the Star Wars sets, though I do think that there are some clever elements to them: in particular, I do like the way that they steer with the 4 outer axles moving freely and the middle one on springs to rebalance it.   This one comes with a mini walker, which can be stowed away inside (thought it'

A few weeks back I posted about the Poe X-wing from 2016, noting at the time that I had originally bought the 2015 black edition version ( 75102 ) and therefore didn't buy the recoloured re-release.  I've now finally gotten around to building the black version: The build was pretty much identical to the 2016 X-wing so I'm not going to talk about it again.  In fact, once I finished, I put them side by side and struggled find more than a few part differences - really the only difference is colours. They do look quite good together though. Here's a fuller set of X-wings on the shelf...