The dark side of the brick

So, after a couple of years of steady blogging, the last 8 months have been a bit of a drought... Three things have conspired to take my attention away from Lego Star Wars: firstly, my uncle died in July last year - you can pretty much see exactly when.  Sorting out his estate has taken me quite a bit of time, not least because I inherited 2,000+ CDs, 378 LPs, c. 1,000 DVDs, boxes of cassettes and hundreds of books.  It's actually turned out to be pretty valuable in parts and I've been selling individual items on ebay for upwards of £100, though a large part of the DVDs went to resellers for pennies. But listing and posting 1000+ items takes time. Secondly, my new role at work last year has meant significantly more travel - I'm now on a plane to Asia once a month and - like the last few weeks - twice in quick succession.  This takes out a lot of nights at home.  Finally, I also spent quite a bit of time playing back through Skyrim on my xbox... and am likely to lose ...

Yesterday evening was spent in the car so I didn't have a chance to post on the quick lunchtime build... the First Order Stormtroooper brick sketch ( 40391 ).  This is the second brick sketch and I bought both almost straight away; I built the BB8 very quickly but this one ended up at the back of the shelf and only came out when I was looking for something I could build in my lunch hour.   I know this took less than 12 mins because that's how long my pasty was in the oven for and I finished this by the time the timer went off so it wasn't a long build.  Firstly, I was surprised by the number of hidden tiles in there.  Secondly, I liked the layers.  In summary, it was a satisfying little build and quite different to the average Star Wars build. Today's build was in a very similar vein - the Scout Trooper ( 75305 ) from the helmet collection.  I was now looking for something that wasn't going to fall apart when it gets transported back in the car on Sund...