It's rare that I get four straight days off, and better still I'm not going away, I don't have too much that I need to do so that means only one thing - Time for a big(ish) Lego project.
And in what may end up being a very poor choice I've decided to 'Live' build it. That is I've committed to finishing it by the end of Easter Monday and I'll keep you peoples informed of how it is going each day.
Now of course there is more to building a Lego Project than just the build. You have to select what to build. Now if it's a bright new official set then maybe this is pretty darn easy (I have my eye on the newly released, but somehow already sold out Back to the Future Delorean) but I've added to the degree of difficulty by deciding to build a non official 'alternative design' of an existing set.
The set question is one of the bigger, more complex ones I own it's the Land Rover Defender 2573 parts of Technic wonder - when I originally built it a year and a half ago it was pretty much the most complicated Lego set I'd done at the time.
Here it is from when I took it for a little adventure.
Of course being me it doesn't actually look like that anymore - about 6 month ago I rebuilt it into a forklift, so you can consider this our starting point.
So step one, is taking all of this apart which in itself is a task, like about a 2 hour task, also this is tehnic it's not like system Lego that you drop and hey presto it's come apart, pretty much every piece has to be removed piece by piece.
I've also learnt from that Forklift build that when you are dealing with a few thousand pieces you want to categorise them so you can find them all again so this leads to tables that look a little like this - this would be maybe 20% of the pieces in this set.
This I'm not considering part of the build, so I did this last weekend. From there (because I can't leave this stuff on the kitchen table for a week) it's into bags to be packed away for a week
And of course there is the question of what we are building. I've thought long and hard about this, considered all of the options on rebrickable - considered Jeeps both wrangler and military, a retro tow truck, an even a helicopter, but I landed on a Le Mans racer by a guy (I assume) called Dyen's Creations.
This is what he has to say about it:
My alternate model from set 42110 which is this LMP Racer. Model has front and rear suspension, positive caster angle on front axle, brake callipers on rear hubs, HOG steering with working steering wheel, 4 speed gearbox, moving pistons in V8 engine and of course openable engine cover. I did few versions with opening wing doors but I wasn´t happy with any of them, so I let it just like this, only with opening window frames. Gearbox has the stop on the last gear, so you go from 1 to 4 and back from 4 to 1. Gear shifter mechanism was quite challenging to me, but I am happy with result - it works reliably. All functions are in video.
It's 2304 pieces, which means I uses over 90% of the original set's pieces which is very very impressive. The comments on the site tell me that the level of detail is impressive and no one is whinging about a 'poor build experience' so I think it's going to go really well.
I'm pretty excited to see this come to life over the next four days
and without wanting to spoil anything - here is what the finished product should look like, this is the designer's photo not mine:
