May 4th build

May the fourth be with you!  

I did a bit of googling at lunchtime and found out about the new LSW set release rumours but others have covered that much better than I can so no more here.  On to today's build then... I thought I'd get one of the new sets out and went for the near-UCS Imperial Probe Droid (75306).  This is something of an overlooked icon from the original series - there have been a number of small versions but it's taken 20+ years to get to a full-scale edition.  I guess it's only with some of the latest bricks that this can be done so well - and to be fair it is very movie-accurate.

First impressions are the box which is fast becoming a standard size and withe the minimalist "adult-oriented" all-black styling.  Opened up, you get the instructions, stickers, 6 normal bags and two small bags of various pearl dark grey crank shafts and the like.  It feels quite light - bags 4 and 5 in particular feel very insubstantial!  

Bag one builds the base:

Nothing outlandish here.  On to bag 2 which does the main body:

In this was the first of the pieces that were new to me - the 3x3 rounded corner plate with cutout.  It turned out that there were no less than 10 new parts for me in the set, which is always very exciting!  10 parts are also currently considered rare, which - if persistent - should keep up the value of this set over time.

Bag 3 gave me more detail on the body and the support:


Bags 4 and 5 then did all the various arms - it's definitely these which give the probe droid its menace in the films.  As a 6 year old when I finally got to see the films, this was pretty scary stuff!

At this stage, I was about 40 mins in and thinking I was doing well!  However, when I tipped out bag 6, it felt like half the set was in there!  For just the head, there is a surprising amount of detail and this took me about 20 minutes more, bringing the full build to about an hour.

I classify anything that comes with a big sticker that has technical detail on it as a near-UCS set.  This would include the recent Yoda and BB8 sets for instance.  This set stands up really well against any of them, including the actual UCS sets.  As such, it's going to get 10 from me!






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