Tim Schwalf brings us the Hurricane Battlecruiser, a 155 stud behemoth made of equal parts smooth paneling and fantastic greebling. The smaller fighters and overall presentation kick the whole thing up to 11.
And if you’re beginning to see a trend in our coverage this month, head on over to the SHIPtember group to see these leviathans being built.
We recently received a copy of LEGO’s exclusive addition to their Superhero line, The Tumbler. Official piece count is listed as 1869 elements. The actual model measures nearly 16 inches long, over 9 inches wide, over 5 inches high and weighs in at just over 4 and half pounds. The thing is huge! It currently retails at 199.99 USD.
Pros:
– It is very accurate to the original vehicle. The details, inside and out, are very good. The cockpit area is full of minute detail and the stickers really make the control panels come alive. The used of wedge plates, tiles, hinges, bar connections and ball joints work really well together to create the unique shape which is crucial to the Tumbler.
– There are lots of good parts and a fair number of fairly unique pieces. The huge rear wheels are cool and the two front wheels are currently only available in this set, I believe.
– The build is challenging and the there are some unusual techniques that were used to achieve the proper angles.
– It is a very good-looking model…quite an eye-catcher actually.
This set of mecha triplets by Izzo Yossi features a set of corresponding equipment including an aerial suit, a quadruped walker and a tank. They all look capable of dishing out a serious beating, but which one is your favorite?
A strange alien species deserves a suitably strange and alien-looking space craft. So this star fighter by Tyler Sky is the logical runabout for those mysterious and unfathomable creatures, the LEGO Friends. And it goes great with Tyler’s Friends roadster!
I’ll enjoy a good vignette any day, and this one by Jonas O. (-Wat-) is an example of one that captures ample detail without trying to be extravagant.
Andy Baumgart (D-Town Cracka) is a master of military models, and this realistic 9K22 Tunguska Tracked Self-Propelled Anti-Aircraft system is just proof of that. This new model is a redesign of an earlier version, and it’s interesting to note the differences between the two.
This heavily-armed mech by Ryuhei Kawai (kwi-chang) looks ready for combat. I like the subtle red accents and the hydraulics seen in the back view. You can see more photos in this Flickr album.
César Soares (Cesbrick) presents another vibrant depiction of medieval fantasy with this wizard’s cottage. I am delighted to find a new patch of color in each corner that blends purposely with the rest of the diorama. Be sure to visit the builder’s Flickr photostream to see more photos of this highly detailed work.
Lego was kind enough to send The Brothers Brick a copy of the upcoming Santa’s Workshop set for review. I was lucky enough to be the one to review the set, and my 3.5 year old son was lucky enough to help. There are plenty of official photos of the set floating around already, including those in our own coverage of the set reveal, so I’ve tried to concentrate my review on interesting things about the set, rather than take a bunch of new photos. This is partially due too the fact that it has been tough to pry the set away from little hands, as my son ran around the house with it screaming about Santa as soon as I opened the shipping box.
Parts
This set is a virtual smorgasbord of unusual parts, in fascinating colors. The set contains 883 pieces, which is pretty fantastic for a price point of $70. Although I primarily build space and mecha, I can imagine repurposing most parts in this set to my own use. The doors might find themselves languishing for awhile, but that’s balanced out by a huge helping of gold parts. There’s certainly enough gold piping here to outfit a steampunk lab (even the inside of the North Pole sign is a gold lightsaber blade). I was also surprised to see quite a few printed parts for the reindeer (both their faces and backs are printed. I was also rather pleasantly surprised by the number of extras included in the set. There was even a spare cookie! Finally, the set is PACKED with SNOT bricks, it’s almost worthwhile as a parts pack alone.
Minifigs
As with the parts, I was rather happy with the minifigs included in the set. You get Santa, Mrs. Klaus, four elves, and five reindeer. Oddly, Mrs. Klaus and an elf both come with two-sided faces (alternate unhappy faces shown in the photo). The Santa hat is really nice, though I presume it’s the same as the Collectible Minifig Santa, which I don’t have (at least not open). Mrs. Klaus looks like her dress is a new print, and it certainly fits the part. The elves span a variety of personalities, which helps give the set a bit of a Burle Ives Rudolph vibe, which I personally like. Our complement includes “Magic Wand Guy”, and “The Badest Elf There Ever Was.” The latter steals Santa’s cookies.
Speaking of Reinder, though, there are five in the set, four large, and one small. That said, the set doesn’t actually include Rudolph. According the Marcos Bessa, the designer, Rudolph is a character they would’ve had to license. Fortunately, it was easy enough to swap one of the spare Christmas lights onto the small Reindeer’s nose, and Christmas was saved. The Reindeer count has been raised as in issue in my house, so I may have to pick up more of the printed bits on Bricklink, to bring our complement up to the proper eight (plus Rudolph). The tubing used to connect the harness to the sleigh looks long enough to be able to attach at least one more pair of reindeer. “Rudolph” by the way, can apparently even balance on his tail.
The Build
This set was pretty interesting to build. There are some nice SNOT technique used for everything from the Reindeer heads to window construction. It was far beyond my son’s ability to build anything but the minifigs (and repair reindeer), but that’s to be expected. I’m betting that town builders won’t learn much new from building this set, but it’s still a fun build, with a lot of variety. The set is also broken into a series of smaller sections, as most are these days, which allow you to break up the building into discrete chunks, without opening all the bags. There’s also a great little micro-scale Classic-Space ship rolling out of the toy machine, which is marked improvement over the inclusion of another micro scale train for the minifig children to play with.
Overall
This set is a great buy, you get a lot of interesting parts, a lot of useful parts, and some unique animal bits. It was fun to build, and SCREAMS Christmas. If you’ve got kids in your house, it’d be fun to build a chunk at a time, as a build-up to Christmas. It’s surprisingly sturdy for a set in the Creator Expert line, but sleigh can even withstand swooshing by a three year old. It also looks like the two exclusive holiday sets for spending over $99 with LEGO direct this year are annexes to this workshop. I’ve only seen the one available October 1 in the store catalog, but it looks like a little elf workshop that’d match up with the back of this set nicely. The set is available September 17 to VIPs, and October 1 to everyone. I’d recommend waiting until October 1, so you can add something else to your cart, and get the free add-on.
We have featured a fair few trains built by Carl Greatrix (bricktrix) in the past. More recently he turned his attention to cars. Apparently there isn’t much that he cannot do, as he has now built an F-4B Phantom II jet fighter and it is gorgeous. I have been following his work-in-progress pictures for weeks, eagerly looking forward to the finished model.
In the sixties and early seventies, the Phantom was the premier fighter aircraft in the US armed forces, serving with the Navy, Marine Corps and the Air Force. Carl’s model wears flamboyant markings typical for US Navy Phantoms. The markings of VF-161 Chargers, which was home-based in Japan as part of the Air wing assigned to USS Midway, were some of the most attractive ever to grace a Phantom and I applaud Carl for choosing this squadron. The model isn’t just good-looking, but has a lot of functionality too. It has opening cockpits, for instance, as well as a retractable undercarriage and moveable control surfaces. Although I actually like studs on a model and prefer my own aircraft models to be somewhat less reliant on stickers, it’s interesting to see Carl apply his typical style to this subject. The result is phabulous.
Danish teen Lasse Vestergård has already proved himself adept at large architectural builds with historic themes, such as the Ancient Greece diorama we featured a while ago. His most recent work also has a historic angle, but is closer to home. His home town of Roskilde, to be precise:
Lasse chose 1:100 scale for this diorama, which not only allowed him to cover the entire city center, but also enabled him to capture the distinctive architectural style of its many historic buildings. In the full set of images, Lasse even explains the history behind each individual one.
I would imagine modeling an entire town this accurately required not only a lot of build time, but also a lot of on-the-ground research. So it comes as no surprise to learn that it took Lasse 16 months to complete! Rendered using a mountain of gorgeous dark red bricks, the centerpiece is obviously Roskilde Cathedral, which like many older cathedrals was extended over the centuries and thus features many differing architectural styles.
The build was recently displayed at the Klodsfest LEGO event in Roskilde itself. One of the features I personally enjoy about this diorama – because of the scale used – are all the 2-stud-wide vehicles dotted about the landscape.
