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!

An Octopus will surface near you soon-ish – finally!

I know I have been promising this for way too long to have much credibility left, but trust me, it’s really going to happen. Yes, at long last the finish line on my free instructions for my Octopus MOC is in sight. After my last update in July I had hoped to finish it sooner (and I mean a lot sooner), but after it got off to a rocky start and what was supposed to be a quick two-month project already had turned into something else, there were some further setbacks, in light of which I then decided to take my time and figure things out and be as thorough as I can. Feel free to skip this boring part, but here are some reasons:

• As I already wrote back then, I’m not a healthy man, so this summer’s extreme heat coupled with some temporarily escalating generic health issues turned me into a lazy slob. Yes, a pitiful excuse, but that’s just how things are.
• My own drive for perfection got in the way. Being a graphics designer has the unwanted side-effect that one tends to think in very specific terms, meaning that page layouts have to be almost pixel-perfect and just look nice. That meant that I spent way too much time doodling around and trying to figure out how I could get LPub to do something at which it is notoriously bad. Speaking of which…
• The aforementioned program is pretty obnoxious and just bug-ridden. I also filed a bunch of bug reports and improvement suggestions, but suffice it to say that the developers behind it appear not particularly focused on making it actually user-friendly or at least best in its class in the sense that as a minor it could possibly be the best of many pretty terrible options. Trust me, doing instructions can indeed be a long exercise in frustration in pretty much any of the programs available currently. Let’s leave it at that.
• To somewhat mitigate those shortcomings, I had to spend lots of time developing workarounds. This means that my published file will be based on having multiple models in different states in the LPub file and on top of it it will be chopped together from multiple sources. I even spent good amounts of time copy & pasting things together in external text editors. At least that’s one of the few benefits of the text-based file format.
• As if I wasn’t in enough trouble already, I also decided to design a set of custom icons to use in the instructions because – let’s face it – the default icons e.g. for model rotation look less than exciting. You will see and hopefully like my interpretations and additions.
• Finally, amidst all of this I participated in a bunch of building contests in the hopes of winning some cool stuff. This naturally also consumed some time on my end because I literally spent entire evenings brooding over some minutia and conceptualizing the models in my head before actually assembling them. I might do a round-up post once the dust has settled on all that and I know in which places I qualified (or not).

On the bright side, all of this trouble has made me much more resilient and I learned a good share of new tricks along the way that may make things easier in the future. I also can say with confidence that now that I know what to do and which pitfalls to avoid there is a definitive ETA on the instructions so you can at least make the model and stocking parts for it part of your Christmas shopping list. Just give me another two weeks and I’m hopefully able to pull this together at last. Funny enough I just had another little setback with one of my hard drives crashing, but thankfully the files were not affected and thank the good lord I also do regular backups, so I can at least present a preview of the cover with my skin intact:

I need to fix the broken drive, naturally, but should be able to resume work quickly after that. Stay tuned for the pertinent announcement…

Update x2

The heatwave in the last few weeks and a few other things haven’t made it easy to actually get any work done, but now I’m actually a bit closer to getting the instructions for my Octopus MOC done.

It seems a funny coincidence that as I was dabbling around in the likes of LPub3D, putting up with its quirks and trying to figure out a few specifics for structuring the instructions, a new parts update was released. The octopus doesn’t use any of them, but I’m more than happy to finally have the new bracket types available. As you well know, I’m obsessing about this stuff all the time. Just to prove it and in case you have no idea what I’m talking about here’s a little Stud.io render for you:

While it may take me still a while to get the instructions actually finished, which mostly is to blame on my desire to make them look nice and professional and thus requiring lots of manual intervention in the formatting, here’s a preliminary listing of the parts used in the build (a.k.a. BOM – Bill of Materials) to get you started on stocking up and giving you a chance to order additional parts on Bricklink if needed.

Remember that this project originated based on four sets of the Deep Sea Creatures (31088). It will not be necessary to buy four sets as well, but it sure helps if you get at least one to obtain some of the parts, in particular some of the Dark Blue pieces. Also keep in mind that you can do color swaps and e.g. the Red parts will be invisible. So feel free to use whatever you have at hand.

This BOM represents the maximum variant as shown in my photos, but the final instructions will also contain some alternate building using a few different parts. Of course you can also save greatly by using shorter tentacles and thus reducing the number of slopes and ball joints. More on that as things progress on my end…