Explorer-ing… Endangered Animals – LEGO Explorer Magazine, September 2021

Like most people, of course I have some favorite animals and while octopusses, sharks and whales are hard to top in my opinion, some land-based animals are certainly among those faves as well. That’s why I was really looking forward to this particular issue of the LEGO Explorer magazine.

The September 2021 edition deals with animals on the verge of extinction, being extinct or at least extremely under threat of dying out such as rhinos, certain sub-species of elephants, tigers and so on. These examples are illustrated with a few photos covering different groups across several pages. As usual these are merely stock images from different sources, so the visual style is rather inconsistent. Noising things up with minifigures and LEGO builds doesn’t help, either. It’s okay for children, but I still wish they would occasionally hire a photographer or at least license a complete series of photos in a similar style.

The poster once again is kind of weird as the designers couldn’t help themselves and had to stuff in some LEGO set. Aside from it unnecessarily covering the whole top half of the two page spread it is based on the old jungle them from five years ago, which makes this a “Huh?” moment. Imagine the aggravation when your little one falls in love with one of the elements and you have to explain that you can’t just go out and buy it. Really not that smart…

The main interest is of course the buildable extra, this time a male Urang Utan. The obvious flaw of course is that it’s Dark Red, not Dark Orange, but of course there’s a simple explanation for this. LEGO never produce extra parts for these sets and the elements are all siphoned from current production runs. Therefore the “bear paw” plate does not even exist in this color and even the wedge plates on the sides might be a problem ever since MOC builders have cleaned out the market to build the The Empire over Jedha custom model.

The large primate of course loses some appeal because of the “incorrect” color, but is otherwise okay. There can of course be no denying that this could have been even better had they e.g. added proper elbow and knee joints to the limbs or hinted at the soles of the feet with a differently colored plate or 1 x 1 slope. As it is, you can pretty much only pose this in a defensive/ aggressive pose instead of having the guy really sit or do something else.

Despite some of these shortcomings this issue is alright. Not great, but alright. The Dark Red parts of the model are useful, after all and for kids the editorial parts are informative enough…

Egged all over…

This year I’m surprisingly busy with building stuff for contests pretty early in the year. That’s most definitely a sideeffect of the ongoing crisis and everyone trying to keep people distracted and engaged.

As you may have guessed already, this particular competition was themed around the Easter holidays and this is my contribution to it. I grandiosely call it “Verstecker- & Entdecker-Ei”, which roughly translates to a simple “Hide & (Re-) Discover Egg”

 

 

 

 

 

In initially I had planned something slightly different, but ultimately it became a matter of managing resources. I had way underestimated the number of pieces I might need and both my own stock and the extra parts from Bricklink I had ordered eventually ran out. Likewise, figuring out how to build the model and get a good approximation of the curvature took me longer than anticipated, especially given my own drive for savvy engineering and making things perfect.

I wanted it to have a large hollow space inside right from the outset and I wanted it also to close seamlessly, so the upside-down modular building were on the table right from the start. this is also extremely useful for transporting the model and stowing it away as separate parts and had the model ended up being even larger this would have been even more of a requirement.

The slightly irregular, asymmetrical shape is a concession to the curved building. The problem with these types of things is that you can ever only get it reasonably perfect in one direction and have to decide what’s more important to you. I in particular wanted to avoid those ugly large gaps on the corners where the two directions of the “flow” converge simply because there are no suitable bricks to fill those areas. At least for now the new 1 x 2 brick with the curved top isn’t available in Lavender like I would have needed it to fill some of those gaps.

I didn’t win anything for this as with people stuck at home there were a lot of participants, diminishing the chances of winning as a mere function of statistics, but if some user comments are to be believed, I may have been in the top ten or top twenty still, as many users liked the clean design and solid building techniques. Who knows? At least it’s a good basis and may be worth revisiting and improving some time in the future…

Azure vs. Black – Round Two

Note: Instruction downloads at the end of the article. / Hinweis: Download der Anleitung am Ende des Artikels.

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I must admit that I had ulterior motives when I sneaked in my recent review of the Speed Champions set 76898 with the Jaguar i-Pace and the Formula E car, because at the time I had almost already finished an alternative build for this set. Some people like to call these the C and D models, but since the Speed Champions sets typically don’t even have a B model that seems a bit of a stretch to me.

I don’t usually do this sort of thing, but of course there has to be a reason and what else can it be than possibly winning more LEGO in a building competition? Yupp, this is part of the official #buildtogether / #baumituns challenge whereby official LEGO user groups and associated media outlets run these contests to provide people sitting at home during the ongoing pandemic with more fodder for their addiction. Each can have their own rules and for the particular one I opted to participate in those stipulated that you use an existing set and turn it into something else. An additional provision was that ideally the sets in question should be in an affordable range and not contain excessive large numbers of parts, so as many people as possible could re-create the models.

Having assembled that other set not too long ago and thus being aware of its content things then somehow gelled just like that. Unusually and against my habits I hadn’t disassembled the models yet and sorted the pieces into my collection, so everything was at hand and in a clean state without mixing the parts up with other sets. All it took then was finding a good idea and after a few nights of sleeplessly staring at the ceiling I came up with my “Classic Car”.

The car itself is modeled after classic Rolls Royce or Duesenberg cars from the 1920s and 1930s, but ultimately turned out to be a wild cross breed of a Hot Rod, a Batmobile and said cars due to how i had to find compromises and make do with the parts I had.

One of the biggest challenges therefore also was getting some “volume”, as the original set for instance does not even contain a single regular 2 x 1 brick and only a few other bricks, most of which weren’t even that useful for the project. As a result a lot of elements had to be stacked together from plates or created as hollow walls. That means that due to layers and layers of plates on top of each other the model is extremely stable for the most part, but of course there also are a few regions where the shortage of pieces resulted in a bit flimsy construction that could be improved.

Because of this the model pretty much uses every plate in the set with only a handful left after completion. The same applies to the slopes and tiles. When I was done, I only had the surplus wheels, mudgards, some surplus small tiles and a few other pieces left in my box. I’d say about two thirds of the original pieces are used here.

Naturally, the same limitations as mentioned in my review of the source set still apply. This is a very dark model due to the many black pieces despite my best efforts to produce a nice, consistent color scheme. That being the case there are also no “real” lights  and a few other things which you may want to rectify or add based on your own parts collection. Still, I guess it’s okay, after all.

Because I knew that the dark model in combination with my limited photographic equipment would make it difficult to recognize details and I didn’t feel like shooting hundreds of photos for people to follow along in the build, I decided early on to create a proper digital instruction. This was another bit of hard work, but ultimately I couldn’t really avoid it.

 

 

You can find the instructions below in a few different flavors. Since I’m still one of the last few holdouts still using LPub I started there, but unfortunately it doesn’t render some pieces correctly and it’s generally not easy to get things working in a manner that is foolproof, so despite my reservations towards Stud.io I whipped up a second version that may work better for a lot of people. Simply choose your favorite version.

Classic Car MOC, Instructions English, LPub

Classic Car MOC, Instructions English, Stud.io

Classic Car MOC, Anleitung Deutsch, LPub

Classic Car MOC, Anleitung Deutsch, Stud.io

You can also find the model on Rebrickable:

Classic Car

Leave your thoughts and questions in the comments, in particular if you detect flaws in the instructions or bump into unclear steps during the build. Enjoy!

Getting Hexi

While I’m admittedly a slow builder who likes to take his time and doesn’t too often jump in with immediate solutions to specific problems when people ask on forums, occasionally it still happens when something is pretty obvious and I can exploit my limited experience in these matters.

Such was the case a while ago when someone had bought commercial MOC instructions that just didn’t live up to the expected standard. I believe it was some sort of Star Wars TIE Fighter and as some those vehicles so often do, it used a triangular/ hexagonal arrangement of the wings/ cooling panels. This was done very flimsily (which to me proves that the original creator never actually had built a physical copy and only relied on digital creation or else he’d have noticed this easily) and needed some serious changes. The person asking had come up with an own solution that didn’t work that well either, so I spent an evening figuring things out using a mix of Technic pieces and conventional stud-based construction.

I’m not claiming it’s perfect and by all means it’s more an exploration of specific construction techniques, but it should meet the following criteria:

• It’s perhaps as narrow in diameter as it can get under these circumstances.
• It’s relatively stable compared to stud-only methods.
• It’s expandable by inserting more elements and swapping out the axles, so you can in theory create some pretty long segments just by repeating bits.

There are some downsides, too, of course, with the biggest likely being the extensive use of the half-width Technic liftarms. They tend to be more expensive on Bricklink as they are simply not found in as large numbers in commercial sets. I was just lucky to have them in my repository. Anyway, check out the small instruction booklet and make up your own mind. This will also be linked via my Rebrickable page, so you should be able to conveniently access the inventory. The crazy colors are just for distinction. Use whatever fits your type of model or whatever you have at hand on your own projects.

Hexa Core MOC, Instructions

Revisionist Krakken

As happens so often when working on a project for too long you can’t see the forest for the trees, as they say, so a few minor issues crept into my octopus MOC instructions. Nothing major and by no means a deal breaker, just small oversights. I’m pretty sure I had all the best intentions of fixing them way back when, but then somehow forgot about them. Therefore I’ve now sat down again and got to it. I’ve edited the original post and updated all the links. The specific changes are as follows:

• Fixed a bunch of spelling errors/ typos in the German version.
• Changed the color of the 3L bar in the eyes to Black to correctly reflect availability (it doesn’t exist in Trans Neon Green and the one included in set 31088 is actually a 4L one)
• Split up the 4 x 1 brick with sideways studs used at the top of the mantle into two 1 x 2 bricks because again it only exists in this form in Dark Blue. If you use other colors this will be irrelevant.
• Fixed a DPI mismatch on the BOM pages that would make them appear larger than the other pages in non-DPI-aware PDF applications, e.g. in browsers.

For your convenience I’ve also created a MOC page on Rebrickable. This should make it simpler to sift through the parts inventory, compare it to parts you may already have (if you maintain your list on there) and provides a convenient way to order the missing pieces easily if necessary by pre-selecting them in Bricklink shops.

The Krakken has risen!

Important Note: Download at the end of the article! / Wichtiger Hinweis: Download am Ende des Artikels!

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At long last I managed to finish my free instructions for my octopus MOC. Yay! I’ve been a bit under the weather last week so it still took me one week longer than promised, but I hope now that it’s here everything is fine.

I’ve written about some of the challenges in my last article on the matter already and despite all the bugs, quirks and flaws of the programs I used I hope I managed to cobble together something decent and tasteful. The preview of some random pages should give you an idea what to expect inside the PDFs without actually having to download the whole 16.4 megabytes. That should make it easier to make up your mind before burning valuable bandwidth and download quotas on mobile devices. On that note I also kept things as barebones as I possibly could within the limitations to keep file size down, so you may have to wait a bit e.g. for page thumbnails to be generated.

 

 

 

As I have hinted at multiple times, this set of instructions contains some alternate build variants. This is meant to help you save a bit of money if you are not able or willing to procure a shed load of extra parts e.g. from Bricklink. Still, with the mantle and upper “cloak” section of the tentacles being integral to the whole construction and always using the same pieces, at the end of the day you may not be seeing that much of a difference. Of course you can do your own re-engineering to optimize this further and perhaps if you come up with more efficient alternate designs might be willing to share it. I’d sure be interested to learn how other people might approach this. For your convenience I have also created a Rebrickable page to check the parts for the main most complex build and order missing parts from there if you feel like it.

 

 

 

The instructions are 100 percent free, but if you like them and think I should get something in return I’d sure appreciate being able to tick off some items from my wishlist. Just get in touch! 🙂 Feel free to post links to this article on forums, blogs and wherever you may be roaming the Internet to drum up interest, but please keep the copyright intact and don’t mess with the PDF files themselves by doing things like repackaging the pages with your own branding and redistributing them under your own name.

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To download the instructions click on the image or the link below it. On mobile devices it may be necessary to keep your finger pressed down a bit longer in order for a menu to appear that may offer options on where to store or open the files. On desktop computers you typically should also be able to use a right mouse click and selecting “Save link/ target as…” to pick a specific folder for saving. If necessary check your browser configuration’s default download options to avoid confusion and having to download over and over again.

Octopus MOC, Instructions, English

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Zum Download der deutschen Version auf das Bild unten oder den Link darunter klicken. Auf Mobilgeräten kann es notwendig sein, den Finger länger gedrückt zu halten und entsprechende Option zum Speichern oder die Übergabe an eine bestimmte App auszuwählen. Auf Desktopcomputern kann die Datei in der Regel auch mit Rechtsklick auf den Link und „Link/ Ziel speichern unter…“ direkt in einen bestimmten Ordner runtergeladen werden. um Verwirrung zu vermeiden und die Datei nicht immer wieder neu herunterzuladen, überprüft die Browsereinstellungen für Downloads wenn nötig.

Oktopus MOC, Anleitung, Deutsch