Happy Birthday to Me !

I'm generally a bit of a curmudgeon when it comes to birthdays. Finding myself one year nearer to death isn't really anything much to celebrate as far as I'm concerned. My wife thinks I've got it all wrong - she views it as a chance to celebrate having survived for another year. But maybe that's just because she's from up North where life expectancies are presumably lower.

All that having been said, I'm pleased to announce that this blog is two years old on Friday. Having previously given myself a big, self-indulgent pat on the back for having coaxed Gimme LEGO to the age of one, it would have been all too easy to let things slide having hit that milestone, but it's still going and people are still visiting. In fact, overall visitor numbers, and also the number of people following the blog, are gradually creeping up, suggesting that the time spent posting on here is worthwhile and that people are presumably getting something out of it.

Not everything in the garden is rosy, however. The Gimme LEGO Bargain Hunt ! page went great guns initially, but updates have been increasingly sporadic since I started to collaborate with Huw from Brickset on the Amazon Bargain Watch system which you may well have come across since its launch last year. For the uninitiated, Amazon Bargain Watch is a rather nifty LEGO discount tracker which has automated the process of finding the best deals on Amazon in Europe and the U.S., thus rendering my manual updates pretty much obsolete.

Anyway, one good thing about birthdays is that people generally cut you more slack than usual if you decide to get all nostalgic. On this basis, I thought it might be interesting to see which postings have attracted the most visitors during Gimme LEGO's 2-year existence, and you can see a list of the Top 10 postings below, ranked by the number of visitors.

  1. Review : Star Wars Set 10221 Super Star Destroyer

  2. LEGO Star Wars UCS Exhibition, National Space Centre, July 2011

  3. Great Western LEGO Show 2010

  4. Gimme LEGO Awards 2011

  5. Great Western LEGO Show 2011

  6. Review : Star Wars Set 10212 Imperial Shuttle

  7. Revealed : Kingdoms Set 10223 Joust

  8. Update : my MOC City Layout

  9. Preview : LEGO Star Wars UCS Exhibition, National Space Centre, June 2011

10. Review : Star Wars Set 10143 Death Star II

OK, so it isn't really very scientific - some postings have obviously been out there for longer than others so people have had more chance to stumble across them - but some clear trends nevertheless emerge from the data. My review of the Super Star Destroyer was some way ahead of the other posts in terms of hits, which isn't altogether surprising given that it was I think the first review anywhere on the net. There has in fact been a lot of love for LEGO Star Wars in general, with reviews of UCS sets occupying three of the top ten slots in terms of traffic. Reports from LEGO shows and exhibitions are also clearly popular, with four of the top ten slots occupied by show previews or reviews. I was also surprised how much traffic the updates on my MOC City Layout have been getting, although maybe I shouldn't have been given the number of e-mails I receive telling me to get a move on with it....

Set 10221 Super Star Destroyer - out in front

So what can you expect going forward ? Well, first of all, my enthusiasm for the blog remains largely intact, so Gimme LEGO will continue into its third year. I suspect that the current mix of excessively long reviews, opinion pieces, meandering event reports and general ramblings will continue pretty much as it is now. That having been said, I'm always happy to consider suggestions from readers, so if you feel inclined to get in touch with me and let me know what you'd like to see on here then please be my guest. Regarding the Bargain Hunt page, send me your tips and I'll endeavour to publish them on there. I'm also hoping that I'll be able to feature some custom Amazon Bargain Watch content on the Bargain Hunt page in due course, which should liven things up a bit on there. And yes, I really do need to press on with my MOC City Layout as there's more interest in it than I'd expected and I want to avoid another year's worth of "hurry up already" e-mails....

So thanks for reading the blog, and thanks for all your comments and e-mails. And thanks also to Huw for giving me access to Brickset's extensive library of photographs for my postings. I'd save you all some birthday cake but I'm just too greedy....

"That's no moon....."

".....It's a space station". OK, so Ben Kenobi was actually referring to the first Death Star at the time, but it's too good a quote to worry about minor details like that.....

I bought Set 10143 Death Star II from an eBay seller back in early 2009 for a little under £150 + shipping. Not MISB, unfortunately, but complete and boxed with instructions. That I didn't get round to building it until a few weeks ago when when it was needed for the Brickish Association exhibition at the UK National Space Centre speaks volumes about my lack of enthusiasm for the set. As a LEGO Star Wars collector I was always going to buy a copy, and I could certainly appreciate what looked like an impressive bit of design from a technical perspective. Truth be told, however, I had a strong suspicion that the build itself might turn out to be a seriously tedious exercise in stacking grey plates one on top of another for days on end. Building large Star Wars UCS sets can sometimes get a bit repetitive, and Death Star II is particularly grey, and carries the promise of considerable repetition. Still, duty called, so I gritted my teeth and got stuck in.....

It's a big set - 3441 pieces, which by my reckoning means it ranks fifth in the all-time list of biggest LEGO sets ever ranked by piece count. Released in 2005, it had a RRP of £249.99 in the UK, or $269.99 for our American cousins who really don't appreciate how lucky they are when it comes to the price of LEGO in their country....

The solitary instruction manual is spiral bound and thinner than I expected given the huge piece count. The instructions were clear and easy to follow.

As usual, I sorted the parts into 3 large crates - small pieces 2x2 or less, plates larger than 2x2, and everything else. Predictably, the vast majority of parts were plates - literally a dispiriting sea of bley swimming before my eyes....

After sorting was complete, the first building task was to construct the stand, around which Death Star II would gradually coalesce. Serial build pictures can be found below - click to enlarge.

Consistent with other Star Wars UCS sets, Death Star II comes with a plaque (below). This attaches to the base of the stand and gives us Star Wars obsessives a number of invaluable nuggets of information to bore everybody else to death with. Did you know, for instance, that Death Star II is 160 kilometers in diameter and has a quadanium steel hull ? No, me neither. I almost hesitate to mention that Wookiepedia gives the diameter of Death Star II as 900 kilometers, but we'll not get into that right now....

Once the stand is completed it's time to start building the actual Death Star itself. First of all the sections forming half of the Death Star's equator are constructed and put into position.

(Rotated 180 degrees)

Then it's time to start carefully attaching the panels which make up the outer surface. These panels are connected to each other via the use of Technic Connectors angled just right to approximate the curve of the Death Star's surface - clever and effective.

(Rotated 180 degrees)

The next stage of the build is the construction of the complex exposed sections (below) which give the Death Star II its iconic "work in progress" appearance in Return of the Jedi. These sections are built up layer by layer, and are predictably fiddly and repetitive to put together. As a result, the "x 2" which appears in the instruction manual when the first of these sections is completed must rank as one of the more depressing sights in my LEGO building career to date....

Tedious or not, the finished effect is pretty impressive. Manoeuvring the two completed sections into place (one of them upside down) was tricky and took a few attempts, but once installed I could breathe a big sigh of relief.

(Rotated 180 degrees)

The gap between the upper and lower exposed sections was then covered over, completing the 'equatorial trench' running around the entire circumference of the Death Star. Some external detailing (hanging down over the lower exposed section, visible in the picture below) was also added at this stage.

The next job was to complete the sphere by constructing the surface of the last remaining quadrant. Once again, the panels making up the outer skin were connected by way of angled Technic Connectors, with a large space left to accommodate the Death Star II's primary weapon.

Just prior to installation of the final panels came the long-anticipated task of constructing the Death Star's superlaser, replete with a riot of neon green laser fire.... Yep - "that thing's operational !"

Then the final panels were put into place, completing Death Star II. The icing on the cake was a mini Super Star Destroyer (SSD) which was placed into orbit around the main model.

You can see the finished model below, no doubt caught in the act of firing on a hapless MC80 Mon Calamari Star Cruiser, and complete with its orbiting SSD.

So the verdict ? Well, it's certainly bigger than I expected, and it weighs a ton. It's also less fragile than I thought it would be, having survived being hauled around my house to various display locations and also being transported to and from the recent Brickish Association display at the National Space Centre entirely intact. The build technique used to approximate the Death Star's surface curvature is clever and effective, as is the method used to mimic the 'unfinished' areas of the space station, and while close-up you can obviously see gaps between panels, the model looks pretty impressive from a bit further back. And as I think the pictures below demonstrate, while not exactly accurate, it's certainly an immediately recognisable representation of the source material.

(Picture from thefathead.com)

In terms of the overall building experience, yes - it was, as expected, pretty repetitive at times, although not as tedious as I thought it'd be. It's hard to estimate total construction time as I split the build over a number of evenings and was slowed down by the process of trying to capture a reasonable set of pictures as I went along. Plus I'm just a really slow builder anyway.

As stated earlier, the driver for building the set was a display of Star Wars UCS sets at the UK National Space Centre in July 2011. You can see a picture from the exhibition below, showing the finished model in the esteemed company of a number of other UCS sets.

So in summary, it's an impressive model which utilises some clever building techniques. Sure, it was a bit of a slog to build at times, but not half as bad as I expected. And it's a serious parts pack if you're into bley plates.....