The dark side of the brick

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 fill...

Today's build was the 2011 Darth Maul's Sith Infiltrator ( 7961 ).  Weighing in a 479 pieces, this should have been a relatively quick build but I kept finding I'd missed pieces so had to keep going back to the Lego Cave to get the right bricks (I'm halfway through a post on my issues with dark red vs. reddish brown and defective colour vision).  I reckon this added several hundred steps to my daily count but also probably half an hour to the build. I've still got the 2015 version (75096) to build up and I'll do a proper comparison between the various sets at that point but on a standalone basis, I really like this version.   A bit of scouting finds an image from the Star Wars Vehicle Guide: This shows that the Lego version captures the lines pretty well - my only complaint would be the join between the front and back halves of the build which leads to a gap where the original had a smooth ridge.  I love the cockpit area, though, with its great rounded design an...