The dark side of the brick

Way before the buildable figures, which I have very mixed feelings about, came the technic Star Wars figures.  These were released between 2000 and 2002 and I count 9 of them.  The buildable figures sometimes have some arm articulation (turn a cog on the back and the arm moves) but that is strictly it in terms of cleverness.  In contrast, the technic figures almost all do a range of really clever things via internal mechanisms. They also have a range of rare and unique part/colour combinations which is useful to have in the back pocket. I've purchased them all over the years and as part of the Grand Deconstruct, am now taking them apart.  I did the C-3PO, R2-D2 and Jango Fett straight off and forgot to take photos.  However, a few thoughts are: The 3PO model ( 8007 ) looks really good with all the metallic gold parts and stickers.  To date, I believe that this remains the only non-minifig version of C-3PO ever released.  The "clever thing" that this mo...

I managed to find time for a second build this evening which was fewer bricks than I expected... the mindstorms "droid developer" ( 9748 ) from way back in 1999.  This must have been one of the very first Star Wars tie-ins for Lego.   I have to say that this was a complete surprise to me when I found it while browsing Rebrickable and I had missed this and its bad twin from my list of Lego Star Wars.  So I got hunting on Ebay and picked up this very much second hand set.  There are a number of quite rare parts in here, including the technic R2 head pieces.  However, at the heart of it, is a mindstorms control block, which unfortunately is a bit temperamental so I've not been able to get it to do much more than beep a bit.   I've only built the R2 model but the book has two more builds in it - remembering back to my 1990s Lego technic, this was pretty common with multiple builds documented with the one set of bricks.  Here's a photo: I've got l...

It's raining hard here so what better way to spend my Saturday than building the new R2-D2 ( 75308 ).  My opening thought is that it's odd that this isn't an official UCS set, as the almost identically sized 2012 version ( 10225 ) was a UCS set so why not this edition?  My only guesses are a) that after the classification of the Assault on Hoth as a UCS set Lego are now super cautious or b) they have bigger and better sets that they want to reserve the UCS classification for later in the year.  It's quite possible that both of these are true. Initial impressions on taking this to my breakfast table are a) that they're consolidating on the uncluttered black styling and b) this thing is surprisingly heavy.  The box is also much bigger than I was expecting - though that's probably my expectations. On opening, you have 17 bags numbered 1 to 13 and 2 big technic beam frames (new to my collection), plus the instructions.  There's also an inner box.   Getting...