The dark side of the brick

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 ...

Today's build was a nice quick one - the Phantom ( 75048 ) from 2014.  This was one of the early sets I bought from Ebay, as I started coming fully out of the dark ages, though I made the mistake of buying it without minifigs and had to collect these separately.  I'm still missing the unique helmet for Ezra. It's a nice little set with some unusual bright-light orange detailing.  I initially thought I'd picked the wrong colours out of the store!  As usual for the Rebels sets, I don't know much about it - I really need to explore this side of the Star Wars non-canon.   Of course, the main thing about this set is that it pairs with the Ghost ( 75053 )... which I wrote about a few months back.  Of course, I had to join the two together and I think they look really good as a pair. The Ghost looked a bit incomplete but I really like the joint set. One of the next builds now has to be the more recent version of the Phantom for a proper comparison. While I'm ...