Dust

I hate dust. It's evil. Dust is one of the the enemies of LEGO. It dulls the sheen of my nice shiny LEGO pieces, and settles in crevices, nooks and crannies where I can't reach it without dismantling my models.

I was therefore delighted to find a possible solution, at least with regard to displaying my ever-growing army of minifigures. Bricklink store SimplyBricks run by Emma and Mike has started selling minifigure display cases (below) which looked just perfect for the job.

These cases were positively reviewed by Huw on Brickset, and I decided to order a load of them. I took delivery last weekend. Each trans clear case usually comes supplied with a dark blue grey 4 x 4 base upon which it fits snugly, although not with as much grip as regular LEGO bricks. The upper surface of the cases has moulded studs, and these do grip firmly. More firmly than regular LEGO bricks, in fact, if my unscientific tests are representative.

Below you can see the first residents of my new minifig cases (click to enlarge).

As you can see, I've swapped out the dark blue grey bases for black. I've also added a black roof. Finally, to ensure that my figures stand in the middle of their perspex prisons I've stood each of them on top of two black 1x2 jumper plates.

I have to say that these cases are perfect for long-term, dust-free minifig display, and the ability to stack them adds to their usefulness and versatility. On the down side,  I also tried the cases with some series 4 Collectible Minifigs, and some of them would only fit inside the cases if I confiscated their accessories. As you can imagine, the Gnome looks profoundly bereft without his fishing rod, and the Viking won't fit inside unless he's shorn of the horns on his helmet and also his shield. Then there's the fact that buying enough cases to accomodate all my minifigs would require a sizeable bank loan, although to be fair this is more down to my excessive minifig accumulation than it is to the price of the cases.....

I only wish that Emma could now source some larger cases to fit my other models.... my UCS Millenium Falcon seems to need dusting every 5 minutes to keep it clean, and I suspect Tower Bridge will be much the same. I've found standard dusters too destructive for keeping intricate models with lots of greebles dust-free, and was therefore delighted to discover a cheap and cheerful product called Supreme Duster. This basically consists of a plastic handle, out of which sprouts an explosion of yellow filaments. These apparently "attract and hold dust electrostatically" and are "non-feather and non-allergenic". I don't know about any of that, but when I waft it over my models it certainly does seem to do the trick, and at less than £5 including shipping you can't really go far wrong. Admittedly I need to take a slightly more robust approach when trying to clean more heavily dust-coated models - it's less a case of wafting and more a case of brandishing it as if I was slapping my models with a wet fish - but at least I usually get a reasonable result.

Talking of dusting large models, the mind boggles as to how long it'd take to dust the beast below.....

UCS Super Star Destroyer - coming to a universe near you ?

The picture above was discovered just a couple of days ago in the image cache on LEGO's own website. It's a huge LEGO Super Star Destroyer, and the clever money is on it being the next Star Wars UCS set, although LEGO themselves have yet to comment. It goes without saying that I want it !