It's even better finished.

 

I'm not even into Legos but this has me all a-tingly.

 

The rotating car platforms and batsuit wardrobe my fucking god

 

Finished building the Saturn V today. Super easy build, and a lot quicker than I was expecting. Took like 5-6 hours in total, which seems crazy quick to me for a 2k piece set. Like, the Destiny's Bounty took me something like 10 hours for not that many more pieces, and the super star destroy was a full 2 days, something like 16 hours. This is a pretty cool display piece though, as it's like 3 feet tall.

 

Finished the first conversion of the Forward Unto Dawn from Megabloks to Lego. Few things I want to tweak. The antennas in the front are backwards, though I do like the look. The wings are bulky as fuck, and while the bottom is hinged to be an angle, I don't like how it's set up at the moment. I'll probably come up with a way using clicky hinges to do it instead. I also need to redo the bridge a bid, as the original can't really be converted to Lego. Also, the engines need to be redone, as the wheels I chose to act as thruster housing are like $10 each and are a bit too large

 

I guess we can see why he worked on the Lego Batman movie...

He's also the one who submitted the design which eventually became the expensive-ass Ecto-1 that I can't afford.

I love Lego, but a while back it became one of those things for me where I kind of decided I didn't want to buy any more if I couldn't have them all.

 

I ended up bricklinking all the pieces for the Forward Unto Dawn... word of recommendation... triple check your auto-generated lists. Usually it calculates and creates packages for the cheapest parts with the fewest amount of orders, but it's not perfect. I needed 2 large wheels, and the order generator picked one out for $2 from one vendor, and $11 for another vendor. Similarly, in another order, these 2 tiny technic pins ended up costing me $10 each for some reason rather than the couple of cents they are. And here I was, thinking the price that the whole thing came too was very reasonable, yet still if I had read through the order more than one extra time, I should have still been able to save another $50 or so. Kind of frustrating, and I doubt my messages to the sellers will matter at all since the money has already been paid.

 

Surprisingly, all the pieces came in pretty quickly. Even the main bulk of the pieces, about ~2500 of them, came from Thailand and arrived in 5 days (!). Took me about 3 hours to sort through all the pieces and make sure all the orders were correct. Which they were, with the exception of one black technic round pin being a hybrid round/cross pin instead, but no big deal since it's a 1 cent piece and I've got tons of extras (and I also ordered extra pieces of a lot of them, to account for human error. Lego might not make mistakes with their sets, but people do).

Anyways, I started the build. I underestimated how hard it was going to be to build, since while I used the Megalocks instructions as a basis, I modified them a bit to fit the needs of a Lego build, so as I was going along, I had to dig through the actual 3d model of it to see how I put it together. It's not a huge issue, and the only other issue is that normal Lego builds have everything nicely broken up into sections and bagged up, so you would have numbered bags like 1 through 15 to go along with the instructions. I don't have that. I have about a mess of 500 baggies sorted by color and part. Not impossible to work with, just much harder than I'm used to. But, it could be worse. It could just be one massive pile of pieces.

Anyways, here's the start of it. Not much to look at yet, but it's about 50 studs long, and this is just half of it, and that's not including the rear engines or front antenna. Estimates show that it should be about 3 feet long when done, and I estimate that it'll take me 3-4 days of casual building to finish it. It took me like 16 hours to build the Super Star Destroyer, which is about 500 less pieces, and came in the aforementioned nicely numbered bags with easy to follow instructions.

 

Holy shit, this is awesome. Waiting with bated breath for final result.

 

Worked on it for about 5 hours today, maybe a bit more. Fingers are actually hurting a bit. I've got the main section of the back half done, as well as the supports. I need to finish the side stabilizers, add the hinge roof and bridge, the engines, and all the side detailing. So I don't even think I'm 25% of the way done yet, though the model is extremely solid right now.

 

Built for another 3 hours today. Finished the side stabilizers, which were a lot more pieces than I was actually expecting, so those alone took an hour. They came out better than I was expecting though. The bottom are just simple hinges and I wasn't sure if they would be enough, but 8 in conjunction is actually quite stiff so they will hold the angle quite well. Also attached the engines, which was pretty simplistic. just some giant black wheels with some transparent rings. The last thing was attaching all the side details, which is super tedious. Everything is made on sub-assemblies which are then attached to horizontal bricks, but there's a ton of different pieces meaning I had to track them all down 1 at a time, which took forever. I still have to do the second side, which should go faster now that I have all the brick bags I need already out. Then, it's just the roof and bridge to finish the back half of the ship. It's really starting to come together.


--- Post automerged ---
Back half of the ship is completely done now. The roof wasn't actually as bad as I was expecting.


--- Post automerged ---
Nearly finished. Maybe about 500 pieces left. Kinda wish the phone on my camera didn't suck so much, since it's hard to see all of the detail. But here's the front, without the antenna and roof.


--- Post automerged ---
Here's the completed build -

 

I just got this in my email:



what the actual fuck. where did this come from?

-edit- apparently there's been rumors of a UCS Hogwarts for awhile and I just completely blanked on that. Also, it's micro-figure scale, which isn't that surprising, but I'm not a fan of them. Still, we get the 4 founders minifigs.

 

I knew it was coming from r/lego. It looks pretty great, especially the interior. But I'm so torn between this and the non-UCS sets, especially as the non-UCS sets come with full size mini-figs. Eventually, the non-UCS sets will form a modular Hogwarts which might rival this one, but we can't know in advance.

 

I love the way it looks, but it's a ton of money. Sure, it's 6000 pieces, but half of those are probably 1x1 plates. I'm quite torn on it as well. I want it a lot, but, it's pretty hard to display if you don't already have a large flat surface for it. It's not like the falcon that you can put inside a coffee table. The only spot I have like that is on top of my dresser, but that's where all my pirate ships are. Like, I'm half tempted to take that $400 and design some custom modular diagon alley shops in the same vein as the stuff they've already done.

 

So I've bought the Great Hall and Whomping Willow set - Great Hall arrived in the post today, Whomping Willow arrives tomorrow. They'll stay in their boxes for now though, because I've got nowhere to put them in my room. I'll take them out and build them when I move house (probably in around 18 months or so).

Will probably also treat myself to the Hogwarts Express in a few months when my bank account has recovered haha.

In the meantime, because I wanted something to actually open now, I also got myself 10 bags of the HP minifigures series. I got Voldemort, Trelawney, Dobby, Dumbledore (x2), Flitwick (x2), Mad-Eye Moody (x3).

So 4 duplicates out of the 10, which isn't so great. On the plus side, the Moody figure has a two sided face and two different hair pieces (to represent Moody and Barty Crouch Jr) so I will display one as each character. Meaning really it's 3 duplicates. I need to find someone to trade those with XD

Otherwise I'm fairly happy. I really wanted the Voldemort figure, Dobby and Dumbledore are cool, and Flitwick means I now have a good number of the staff (everyone important except McGonagall I think). A bit disappointed that I didn't get any of the "teen" students though (with the new mid-sized bendy legs) as all the students in the sets I've got have the fixed short legs. Out of the ones I'm missing, I'd really like teen Harry, Hermione, and Ron, plus Luna, Neville, and Draco. Not too fussed about Cho, Dean, Cedric or PS Harry (or the FB figures, though Graves/Grindelwald would be good).

I considered just buying a complete set of them on Ebay, but it's actually a lot of fun to open them without knowing who you've got. Like gambling haha.

Anyway, here they are:

 

Had a small adventure actually trying to find these today. First walmart didn't have them yet, second walmart didn't even know they existed, and third walmart had some, and were very disorganized. They had a million sets, but weren't sorted at all. The main hall was right on display, but the whomping willows were all laying down on the very top shelf for some reason. Those were the two I bought, and I was pleasently surprised that the whomping willow was only $60 since it's a 750 piece set. Great hall was $100 for only 100 more pieces, so that's quite a big discrepency. They only had the aragog set and the super!trunk set which don't interest me that much at the moment (though the super!trunk does have some cool animals in it). I'll probably pick them up some time later. Also picked up 10 figures. So somehow, I ended up buying the same exact things as Taure. I do want to get the Hogwarts express at some point as well, though I have a feeling that will probably be an internet purchase. I'm also very interested in the Brickheadz, because they're fun to display at work. I'm surprised the walmart didn't have those, but there's no rush to get them.

Somehow I guess I got lucky and didn't get any duplicates out of the 10 figures I bought. Harry /w cloak, normal Harry, Trelawney, Moody, Voldemort, Neville, Draco, Dobby, and 2 FBAWTFT guys that I don't know who they are.

Lastly, I'm serious contemplating building a Hogsmead MOC.

-edit- finished building the whomping willow set. It's about a 2 hours build. It's a pretty cool set. The build itself is a bit repetitive for the castle bits, but I like how all the individual rooms were decorated. The car is pretty cool too, though a bit fragile. The whomping willow is pretty fragile as well too, and is probably the weakest part of the set.

 

Because I have a gambling problem I bought 4 more of the minifig packs. Got very lucky: Luna, Invisibility Cloak!Harry, Newt, and Dobby. Of those, only Dobby was a duplicate.

Meanwhile, I gave away my duplicate Dumbledore, Flitwick and Mad-Eye. They make pretty good little gifts to people.

Collection as it stands:



In order to "complete" the collection, I have ordered from ebay: teen Harry, teen Hermione, teen Ron, Draco Malfoy, and Neville. I think I'll leave things there.... it would be nice to get Grindelwald/Graves, but he's too expensive to buy from ebay and I'd have to get absurdly lucky to get him in a random pack.

 

I hunted for some more Lego today. I checked websites for local stock, and was mostly disappointed. Nothing but aragog, Harry brickheads, and grindelwald's carraige. None-the-less, I did want the Harry brickhead so I went over to the first walmart to get one, and for the life of me, I could not find it on the shelf, and the grindelwald's were sold out, and I had no interest in the million Aragongs they had. So, I went to the next shop blind, the nearby Target. Everything there was full price, and all they had were grindelwalds, as the hogwarts, womping willows and super!trunks were all sold out. And I really didn't want to buy the grindelwalds for $20. That's a bit too high for a 130 piece set, even though the Thestral is cool. The one thing I took note of was how many actual sets there were out of all themes. What caught my eye was the first order star destroyer which was retail $160, and I remembered last week when I went to my local walmart that they were discounted down to $80, so I went over there with the intention of buying one.

They did not have any. In fact, when I got there, I noticed the entire Lego section was remodelled, which rarely happens, so my hopes immediately skyrocketed. Whereas last week the stock manager didn't even know about these things, this week, the shelves were full. They even had the Hogwarts Express, which astounded me, since that seems to be the rarest of them. So, I bought that and the super!trunk, and the Harry Brickhead. The Hogwarts Express was of a low enough price that there is a decent arbitrage opportunity reselling on ebay if I wanted to take it, probably make $15 per sale after shipping and fees. So as of right now, the only sets I haven't encountered in the wild are the Hermione, Ron and Dumbledore brickheads, and the Harry polybag (#30407) which I don't even know where it's from. The Aragog and Grindelwald will probably be the last ones I get. Walmart has the grindelwald for $17, but still too much, as the Aragog has more pieces and is cheaper, and that one is still too expensive. If they ever get discounted to around $10 I'll get them, or maybe just as spur of the moment ones. I also can't wait until the Dieselnaught hits clearance, because that thing is sick.

 

So leaks are beginning to come regarding the 2019 wave of Harry Potter. The following is the rumoured list of sets:

Expecto Patronum (Harry, Sirius, stag Patronus, Dementor)

Triwizard Challenge (Harry, Cedric, Fleur, Krum)

Hogwarts clock tower (Dumbeldore, Madame Maxime, Harry, Ron, Fleur, Hermione, Krum)

Hagrid's Hut (Hagrid, Macnair, Cornelius Fudge, Harry, Ron, Hermione)

Knight Bus (Stan Shunpike, Ernie Prang)

These are at this stage not confirmed but there are some pretty specific rumours. I think the minifigs listed above are a bit on the generous side so probably there's some misinformation in there, with the exception of the Knight Bus set, which seems overly stingy (not a single main character).

The one that is definitely confirmed is the Clock tower set, which connects to the previous Great Hall and Whomping Willow sets and is Yule Ball themed. And best of all: confirmed Fleur Delacour minifig. Here's her torso for the Yule Ball:



My hope is that this set will connect to the Whomping Willow set to provide a kind of interior courtyard to Hogwarts castle where Yule Ball characters are meeting their dates, with a tower connected to said courtyard. Harry in Yule Ball robes is also confirmed for this set.

In vaguely related news, my Lego HP collection is now:

Hogwarts Castle
Great Hall
Whomping Willow
Hogwarts Express
Grindelwald Escape
All Collectable Minifigures except Graves and Credence

I think I've pretty much got everything out of this wave that I want now, so bring on the 2019 stuff.