The dark side of the brick

No posts for a month and then 2 in a day.  I almost added the Falcon set to the last post but decided that they deserved their own special post. As I've been deconstructing, the Falcons have been taking up significant shelf space, even stood on their side, proped up against the wall.  So, they had to be an early target for deconstruction.  However, I did want to get the full set out and compare/contrast.   To date, Lego have released 6 Falcons at what I would call "minifig playset" size.  Generally these come in at around 1000-1300 pieces (the earliest is the counterexample due to the use of bespoke printed parts for the superstructure) and have been some of the pricier sets each year they came out.   The full list is: 7190 from way back in 2000 4504 from 2004, which was the archetype for all subsequent versions, though somewhat flimsy itself 7965 from 2011 which substantially improved on the sturdiness by introducing a technic substructure but ma...

In case it's not obvious from the near daily posts, I'm on a mission to finish building all my Lego sets, which happens to now include all but about 3 Star Wars themed releases (today, the original Death Star playset and the original UCS snowspeeder both turned up, leaving me just the UCS Tie Advanced, a couple of rare minifigs and the Imperial Inspection to go).  Being a spreadsheet geek (it goes with the job), I've now predicted a finish of 19 June.  There are definitely some risks to this, not least the fact that the wife demands (reasonably) that I spend some weekend time with her but I've already managed to reduce this from the original prediction of 26th by being a bit faster on the building than my predictions allowed for.  So, I'm hopeful of staying on target. Last night I did build one of the polybag magazine gifts ("gifts" is really a bit of a misnomer, as I only buy them for the sets!) but mainly I've been building up one of the bigger techn...

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 ...

So, it's done - 10179 is complete and installed in its home in the Lego cupboard.   Here it is in all its glory: Sadly, this isn't an original - rather it's my rebuild.  I've managed to get mostly the right parts (including recently getting the ladders for the rear) but there are a number of substitutions, most of which are either cosmetic (the 75535 pin connector replaced with 62462 and some of the 6.6l bars replaced with 6l ones) or colours (inside you'll find some of the hinge bricks are the wrong colour).  I also have a genuine 10x10 radar dish but it's a custom sticker rather than a print.   However, it still looks awesome.  The level of detail is quite distinct from the later version - this one has much more going on in the back quarter whereas the more recent 75192 has, in my view, a more consistent level throughout. When I got 75192, I loved it but was vaguely disappointed that most of the superstructure is near identical to the original 2007...