Van-tastic

I suspect that some if not all AFOLs who buy more sets than they have time to build have some sort of mental 'build queue' of sets. Set 10220 Volkswagen T1 Camper Van has seemingly been near the top of mine ever since I bought the set soon after its release last year, but it's never quite reached the front of the queue. I thought the model looked great in the pre-release publicity pictures, and it's looked great when I've seen it at various events and in LEGO brand stores. Problem is, something always seems to come up just as I'm contemplating diving in.

But not any longer. Sometimes all you need is a little nudge in the right direction, and for me that little nudge was the 2012 Great Western LEGO Show, also known as STEAM to the faithful. This annual event showcases LEGO models built by members of the UK LEGO user group the Brickish Association, and some of you may have read the reports that I wrote for the 2011 and 2010 shows on here. As part of this year's show, Brickish Association member Robert Clarkson is organising a collaborative celebration of the VW Camper Van complete with LEGO versions in a variety of colours, and he was looking for someone to build the official red LEGO version. This provided me with the perfect excuse to finally get cracking on the set, so I signed up and have spent the last few evenings making good on my promise.

The box (above - click to enlarge) is HEAVY. Having become accustomed to a diet of licensed sets whose boxes often seem to contain more air than LEGO, it's a shock to encounter a box which is literally jam-packed with pieces, so much so that it even seems to bulge a little at the sides. Also unusually for a UK set, the generous 1,332 piece count can be found on the front of the box, alongside a huge picture of the completed model superimposed upon a suitably rural backdrop. The length of the finished model - 30 cm / 11.8 inches - is also printed on the front of the box. The back of the box (below) shows the van parked up with doors and windows open, plus some close-ups of the van's interior.

Cutting the seals releases 15 bags of parts, some containing smaller bags of parts. Unusually, the bags aren't numbered, and the build is consequently not divided into sub-assemblies each with their own bags, which makes a change. The box also contains two instruction booklets and two small sticker sheets, all carefully packaged in a plastic bag with a stiff cardboard insert to keep them flat and delightfully pristine. The instruction booklets are A4-sized, and each runs to around 80 pages; their front covers feature the same image as the front of the box  In addition to the building instructions, one of the booklets contains an inventory of parts spread over 2 pages, and there are also a few adverts, predominantly for LEGO Exclusives such as Set 10219 Maersk Train and Set 10214 Tower Bridge.

A few of the more interesting parts can be seen in the picture above. Pride of place goes to the tall tan window frame and the trans yellow modified 1 x 1 plate with tooth, both of which are unique to this set, while a number of other parts, including the metallic silver dishes which form the hubcaps, the pearl gold faucet and the red arches and facet bricks, are only available in a few sets. Certainly a nice selection of parts overall, and if you're on the lookout for white curved bricks, both studded and studless, this is your set..... Not shown is the fabric used for the van's pop-up roof section and the curtains, both of which are exclusive to this set

Construction commences with the van's chassis and engine (pictures below - as ever, click to enlarge). You get an early indication of the care and attention to detail lavished on this set while constructing the engine, which comes complete with hoses, metallic elements and a fan belt. I also love the elegant, clean lines of the front and rear bumpers (or fenders, for those in the U.S....)

The bodywork at the back of the van then starts to take shape, including rear lights, the registration plate and a hinged panel to provide access to the engine. The seats go in next, complete with the ability to recline, and the rear passenger seat even cleverly folds down into a bed as you can see in the picture below. I'm not sure about the gaudy claret and blue colour scheme, though - clearly an aquired taste....  After the seats come a variety of internal furnishings, fixtures and fittings including a sink with a golden faucet, some tan shelving and a plant in a pot.

Next the driver's cab starts to take shape, and a gear stick and pedals drop into place. A pair of doors to the passenger compartment are installed at this point, as is a fold-down table complete with a goblet of what looks like creme de menthe....yuk. I love the inclusion of the lava lamp at the back - very sixties, and a lovely little detail !

Now that the lower half of the van is complete it's time to start installing some windows. Each window in the passenger compartment comes complete with curtains - no expense spared ! More internal fixtures and fittings are then installed, most notably a mirror consisting of a shiny silver sticker applied to a pane of glass and placed inside a tall tan window. It's also time to put up a picture of a surf scene in the passenger compartment; the surf board features the letters "J H" which I suspect may be the initials of the designer. The driver's cab gets a pair of doors at this stage and also a steering wheel - left hand drive, unfortunately for us Brits, but understandable I guess.

The next step is to install the rest of the windows, including the rear window and the windscreen. This involves some tricky sticker action, of which more later. Once this is done, completion of the upper half of the van is a relatively quick and straightforward affair. The roof goes on next, and construction of the pop-up mid-section is more involved and time-consuming than it looks. Once the roof is on, all that's left to do is to build the two-tone front section of the van, where a pair of black hoses are employed to emphasise the interface between the red and white sections, and the wheels which feature rather nice metallic silver hubcaps. And then we're done !

In terms of moving parts, the model has opening doors to the driver's cab and passenger compartment. There's also an opening tail-gate and, as previously mentioned, an access panel on the rear of the vehicle which lifts up to reveal the engine. The coolest moving part is however the beautifully designed pop-up roof section This lifts up just like the real thing, and it works perfectly as well as looking great. The sides of this elevated roof section are made up of a ribon of orange fabric which neatly and invisibly concertinas down when the roof section is lowered - an extremely elegant and impressive bit of design.

In summary, building the camper van was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. Probably my most enjoyable build of 2012, in fact. So far, anyway. And not only was the build thoroughly enjoyable, but the finished model is superb in my opinion. OK, so I'm no expert when it comes to VW camper vans, but the designers look to have captured the overall proportions and feel of the vehicle extremely well. There are also a multitude of lovely touches both big and small - the elegantly-realised engine, for instance, and the splendid internal fixtures and fittings, not to mention the superb pop-up roof section. Furthermore, the model employs a ton of ingenious building techniques to keep things interesting right to the end.

My only complaint is the blasted stickers. Yes, I know I'm always going on about stickers, but they were genuinely a total pain in the backside to apply on this occasion. The worst offenders were the (transparent) stickers which are supposed to be applied to the (transparent) front and rear windows. It's extremely hard to do this neatly - you really can't see if they're lined up straight or not until they're actually stuck to the glass, and if you do need to peel them off in order to reapply them (which I did, more than once) it gives the affected window(s) an ugly, cloudy appearance. Bloody infuriating. Also irritating, though marginally less so, is the need to apply the VW sticker to a round tile. Again, I found it very hard to apply this so that it was (1) central and (2) straight. Honestly, in a set of this size and price, is it really too much to ask that these parts are printed rather than stickered. Really ? If LEGO can manage to provide a handful of printed parts in a £4.99 Cars set, it's impossible for me to fathom why they'd take short-cuts on a big, beautiful set like the Camper Van. Ridiculous.

Anyway, stickers apart I think this set is a minor masterpiece and I wholeheartedly recommend it. And if that wasn't enough to convince you, at £79.99 / $119.99 for 1332 pieces it's also pretty good value for money. The set is a LEGO exclusive in most countries, which means that availability is somewhat limited; in the UK you can buy it online from LEGO shop@home or in person at a LEGO brand store, and you'll get double VIP points in October so it's the perfect time to buy !

I'll be carefully packing up the completed camper van tomorrow and taking it along to the Museum of the Great Western Railway in Swindon, UK. There, as mentioned earlier, it'll be on display at STEAM alongside more than ten other variants in a variety of different colours. STEAM promises to be an excellent show this year - bigger than ever, and with an enormous number of excellent LEGO creations to see, not to mention a pop-up LEGO brand store so you can pick up your own VW camper van set while you're there; having attended STEAM for the past few years I can personally vouch for the quality of the displays. I hope you can make it to the show, and if you see a guy with DrDaveWatford on his exhibitor badge then please come over and say hello !

UCS AT-AT : Tricky

Last time I wrote about the UCS AT-AT build (here) I'd completed one of the AT-AT legs and started work on the remaining three. It took me longer than expected to finish them up (doesn't it always ?) but I eventually completed them as you can see below. Astonishingly, the four legs alone are made up of a total of 2,120 pieces, which means that once I'd completed them the model was more than a third finished, in terms of part count at least.

Suitably confident after having largely breezed through the first part of the build, I decided to face my demons head on and attempt the AT-AT body next. This was really the only part of the build that I'd been facing with a degree of trepidation, on account of the complexity of the structure plus designer Pete's warning that there might be mistakes in the LDD rendition of his design. Having at times struggled through the distinctly illogical LDD-generated building guide while constructing the legs, I was also wary of what the building guide would throw at me this time round given the significantly greater level of complexity that it needed to negotiate. As it turned out, I was right to be apprehensive....

Above you can see a screen grab of the LDD file for the AT-AT body (click to enlarge). It's 'only' made up of 1285 parts in total, so significantly less than the legs. Once again I had the added complication that the LDD file had been tidied up a bit by Pete after I'd sourced the parts, so some of the hidden internal pieces I'd collected were a different colour to those in the LDD file. Thankfully however this didn't turn out to be too much of a problem.

I got a hint of the challenge to come as I waited for LDD to generate the building guide for this section of the model; the operation took almost 10 minutes on my (reasonably high spec) iMac, yielding an impressive 422 building steps. First to be built were the structures to which the legs would later attach plus the large cylindrical structures slung under the body which I assume are the engines, then a bunch of greebles, and finally the floor of the body and the internal skeleton upon which everything else would ultimately hang. At time of writing I'm up to step 343 of 422, so a good way into the build, and you can see a few pictures of the build so far below (click to enlarge).

Attachment points for front legs & forward engine section.

Attachment points for back legs & rear engine section

Work in progress : Body - floor

Work in progress : Body - underside

Contruction of the body has been, to put it politely, rather tricky.... This is in large part due to the ridiculous LDD-generated building guide which I've been struggling to follow. You may recall that while building the legs I wrote about the sometimes baffling and illogical order of the building steps, plus the expectation that the builder is able to make parts float in mid-air as if by magic. Well, the building guide for the body has taken these issues to a whole new level of absurdity, and it's been a significant challenge to follow along at times. I've attached a screen grab of one page of the building guide below to try and illustrate my point; at one stage there were up to 50 Technic pins, axles, sub-assemblies and various other loose parts floating in mid-air. These are positioned in 3D space exactly where they will eventually reside when later sections of the build drop into place, but you're given no guidance on how they attach to everything around them. At the point when later sections eventually drop into place en masse, therefore, you have to figure out what on earth all these free-floating bits and pieces attach to. This isn't too much of a problem for most of the larger sub-assemblies, but for the individual free-floating parts, and particularly the Technic pins and axles, it's a huge problem because you can't actually see them when everything else is in place - they're hidden by other parts and/or located deep within the build. All you can therefore do is study the final page of the instructions in minute, painstaking detail and, skipping backwards and forwards between the final page and earlier pages, try and figure out where everything goes.  It's a colossal and totally unnecessary pain in the arse.

LDD is a superb tool, but a build of this size and complexity has seriously shown up the limitations of the building guide generator. Even so, I'm getting there, slowly but surely, and next time I post an update I should have finished the body and decided on what to tackle next. Hopefully....


<-- Building the AT-AT : Part 3                                     Building the AT-AT : Part 5 -->

Bling

Thinking back to holidays gone by, I can still remember how I used to agonise about which books to throw into my suitcase while I was packing. Given the lack of space, and the dire consequences of making the wrong choices and being left without suitable reading matter, such decisions were not to be taken lightly. The advent of the Kindle and the iPad has thankfully rendered such trials and tribulations largely obsolete, with a lifetime's reading material now available at my fingertips on a device weighing less than just one of the Stephen King novels that used to sustain me for a couple of days of leisure, but I now have a different choice to make. Rather than books it's now shelves full of unopened LEGO sets I stare at, waiting for inspiration to strike....

Every family holiday I try to take at least one LEGO set with me to build while I'm away, particularly if we're holidaying in the UK and space isn't at a premium. Last year a holiday we took in the UK just so happened to coincide with a 3-for-2 promotion at a prominent UK LEGO retailer, so on that occasion I left home with one set and returned with thirteen.... Good holiday, that, even though I did spend a good part of it in the doghouse as far as my wife was concerned. Usually I have just one set to build, however, so it's a decision that merits some deliberation. A pity then that on my most recent holiday I was in a rush and pretty much grabbed the last set I saw before I ran out the door. So would I regret my choice....?

My last-minute selection was Ninjago Set 9448 Samurai Mech, not an altogether left-field selection given my recent dalliances with the Ninjago theme (here) and mechs (here). The front of the box (above - click to enlarge) features the now-familiar green Season 2 Ninjago branding and is dominated by an image of the titular Samurai Mech brandishing an unfeasibly large sword in the direction of a rather weedy trebuchet and a couple of odd-looking non-human minifigures, one of whom has been catapulted through the air. Despite my ownership of a number of Ninjago sets, I have to confess that the words "Samurai X included" on the box really didn't mean anything to me at all, but I assume that they carry deep significance for the considerably younger target demographic. The back of the box (below) highlights a number of play features of the set which we'll get on to later.

Inside the box are three large numbered bags of parts, each of which contains a couple of smaller bags. There are also two instruction booklets and a modestly-sized sticker sheet; while the sticker sheet contains a total of 11 stickers, all are thankfully small. I'm not a fan of stickers, but if I do have to apply them, please let them be small like these ones.... The covers of both instruction booklets are pretty much identical to the front of the box, and both booklets weigh in at 48 pages in length. The first booklet walks the builder through construction of the minifigures, the trebuchet and the torso and legs of the mech. The second wraps up the build and also contains an inventory of parts, pictures of a number of the 2012 Ninjago sets and spinners, advertising for the Ninjago.com website and the LEGO Club, and the now-obligatory picture of a kid shouting "WIN !" on the back cover which is supposed to encourage us to take an online survey. There's also a two page centre spread (below - click to enlarge) showcasing what looks like all of the weapons which appear in the Summer wave of Ninjago sets. This looks very similar to the weapons listing that I highlighted in my review of Set 9455 Fangpyre Mech, albeit a Summer 2012 version.

Set 9448 Samurai Mech contains lots of interesting parts, some of which can be seen in the picture below. Pride of place goes to a brand new and potentially really useful part - an inverted 2 x 2 tile - which makes its debut in this set in dark bluish grey. While it hasn't appeared in any other sets yet, it's pretty likely that it'll start cropping up all over the place before long I reckon. The dark red slope curved 4 x 1 double with no studs and dark red window are also unique to this set, as is the flat silver propeller blade 2 x 16 with axle. Other noteworthy parts are the pearl gold mechanical arm and Ninjago Spinner Crown, both of which only appear in one set apart from this one, and there's a generous supply of pearl gold round 1 x 1 tiles, four of which are extras. The handful of dark red cheese slopes are also welcome, as are the red round 2 x 2 bricks with grille.

The set contains three minifigures. Given the shout-out on the box, I'm assuming that Samurai X (below) is supposed to be the star of the show. According to Brickipedia, Samurai X is the alter ego of Nya, another Ninjago character; Nya is one of the few female Ninjago characters, and younger sister of the fire ninja Kai. Apparently. The Samurai X minifigure features printed legs and a back-printed torso, although the detail is unfortunately hidden by her somewhat clunky armour which covers her torso front and back. She has a reversible head and a pretty neat 3-part helmet featuring a removable red face guard and pearl gold decoration on top. Apart from this set, Samurai X appears in Set 9566 Samurai X, a spinner set.

Nya's adversaries in this set are a couple of seriously ugly dudes called Aytar and Snike. Short and squat with an elongatated face and snake-like teeth, Aytar has half-height minifigure legs and a torso printed front and back. His headpiece is really the highlight, curving backwards and downwards to meet his back, and covered with bright orange lumps. I think he looks excellent !

Aytar is tooled up with a wicked cuved blade; spot the lightsaber which forms the handle. There's a trans orange printed 1 x 1 round tile on the hilt printed with a Constrictai symbol which only appears in this set and one other, Set 9443 Rattlecopter.

Snike is another creative variation on the snake theme, more humanoid than Aytar but still squat and seriously ugly, with yellow eyes and slightly protruding fangs. His torso is printed front and back with a scaly pattern and he too has a spectacular textured headpiece which curves downwards and backwards from the top of his serpentine face. Snike only appears in this set.

Samurai X is a perfectly fine minifigure with some neat headgear, but for me it's the baddies that steal the show; overall the minifigures get a big thumbs up from me.

Minifigures constructed, there's the small matter of a trebuchet to build before getting cracking on the mech. And small it is, albeit perfectly functional. I think the majority of buyers would probably be quite happy for LEGO to refrain from throwing bits and pieces like this into the sets if it brought the prices down a bit, but there's no sign of LEGO doing this so we'll just have to learn to love this stuff. Just about the best thing about it is that it heralds the first apearance of the inverted 2 x 2 tile in any set ever, which is something to celebrate for me at least. There are also a few dark tan parts, which are nice to have, including a couple of modified 1 x 2 bricks with brick pattern. The trebuchet seems designed to fire Aytar and Snike through the air at high speed, and this it accomplishes with some aplomb, although how effective this strategy is likely to be against the Samurai Mech is in some considerable doubt....

And so on to the mech. After guiding the builder through construction of the minifigures and the trebuchet, the remainder of booklet 1 is dedicated to the construction of the mech's torso, feet and legs. Booklet 2 then takes up the mantle, leading the builder through construction of the arms, shoulders and head. It's an interesting and quite fiddly build at times, and you can see the finished mech below in all its glory.

You'd expect the mech to be readily posed into an almost infinite number of positions on account of a generous number of articulation points - the torso rotates 360 degrees on the hips, rotation joints permit both forwards/backwards and outward movement of the legs, there's a ball and socket joint at the ankle, and there are also ball and socket joints at the shoulder and elbow. And yet I unexpectedly struggled to pose the mech into many good poses. This was partly I think because the ball and socket joints in the ankles are quite weak and therefore the positions often didn't hold for long, and also because movement of the arms is significantly restricted by the epaulets on the shoulders. You can lift the the epaulets in order to allow more arm movement, but the guns which are mounted on top of them then bump against the mech's helmet (which is actually the hatch to get into the cockpit), so it's far from ideal.

Similar to Exo Force Set 7714 Golden Guardian which I reviewed a few weeks ago, the Samurai Mech isn't short of weaponry.... The primary weapon is obviously the huge silver sword, but if Samurai X grows tired of using her exo-suit for close quarters combat, the two shoulder-mounted guns offer some ranged options. One of these guns is a good old-fashioned cannon, capable of firing a trans blue and gold projectile via a spring-mounted firing pin at the back. The other is a blue-tipped laser or somesuch. Both guns can be rotated and elevated or lowered to secure the perfect shot.

Too many LEGO mechs have a distinctly unfinished look when viewed from behind. This one is better than many, with gold detailing on the backs of the feet, part-tiling on the rear of the torso, and a pair of red tanks mounted on the upper back. The exposed red 2 x 3 brick looks incongruous, however, as do some of the exposed grey areas. Just a little additional effort here would definitely have lent a more polished air to proceedings.

Samurai X fits snugly into the cockpit on top of the mech's torso (below). When the mech's hatch is closed she's barely visible, but the black fan-shaped 'windscreen' is hinged at its base and can be dropped down to provide Samurai X with an unobstructed forward view.

The finished mech certainly assaults the eyes, with the garish red and gold colour scheme making it look decidedly bling... It's a brave, bold design, perhaps a little too fussy and ornate for my tastes, but undoubtedly pretty spectacular. There's commendable attention to detail in the design and it's certainly anything but boring....

At an RRP of £29.99 / $39.99 for 452 pieces, I think this set offers reasonable value for money. It's an interesting build, offers a selection of interesting pieces, and I like the three minifigures it comes with, particularly the baddies. I do have some concerns about play value, though - it's trickier than expected to pose, and unless I'm unknowingly heavy-handed, it feels a bit too fragile to cope with robust handling. Even so, if you're a fan of mechs, Ninjago or both and don't plan on giving the completed model too much abuse it's easy to recommend. Amazon are currently selling the set at 20% off RRP in the UK (click here to buy), while our American cousins can get it here, albeit at only 5 cents under RRP....

Still Going Strong

Another week, another series of Collectable Minifigures. OK, so maybe I'm being unfair - it must be at least a month or two since the Team GB Collectable Minifigures appeared on the shelves, but you get my drift.... With the wonderful London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics now consigned to history, the Team GB minifigures have gone from "must have" to yesterday's news and now it's time for the eighth series of Collectable Minifigures to strut their stuff.

Series 8 Collectable Minifigures (image from Brickipedia)

I smile when I think back to the dim and distant past when I'd actually buy random foil packets in the hope of eventually getting the whole set. Pah - what folly ! As chronicled here, such idealism (or was it naivety ?) soon gave way to the use of iPhone barcode scanner apps in the face of a frustrating accumulation of multiple unwanted duplicates. All was then well until LEGO got wise to our use of technology, and for the next couple of series we had to resort to trying to decypher an arcane and baffling pattern of dots (more here) embossed on the packets in order to determine the contents. Some people were better than others at doing this and I, it must be said, was absolutely rubbish. And then LEGO cottoned on to that strategy as well, and so it was back to just buying random bags, or else becoming quickly adept at feeling the contents of the packets while standing at the WHSmiths checkout. It amazes me that so many people seem entirely comfortable loitering for long periods at their local LEGO retailer, lovingly caressing a succession of foil packets in full sight of the general public while making strange faces and occasionally crying out in triumph.... That's really not for me, however, so I've now resorted to buying whole sealed boxes of figures and splitting them with a couple fellow AFOLs so we can all guarantee getting a full set. It seems a little unsporting doing things this way, kind of like fishing by dropping a depth charge into a lake and scooping up all the fish when they rise to the surface, but you can thank LEGO for that - it was they that started all this by removing the barcodes....

So anyway, back to Series 8, which is actually the ninth series of collectable minifigures for us in the UK as we've also had the Team GB minifigures over here, not that I'm rubbing it in or anything....

I'm always interested to see the reaction when a new series of collectable minifigures appears on the shelves. While there are sometimes one or two figures in a series which seem to get the thumbs down by common consent, opinions are otherwise often surprisingly divergent, with one person's favourite not infrequently being one of the weakest for someone else. For my part, there are definitely a couple of Series 8 minifigures which rank as my favourites, and the first of these is the Alien Villainess (below).

Honestly, I just love this minifigure. As well as seriously looking the part, this female alien badass is also more intricately constructed than the average collectable minifigure. There's actually a standard minifigure head hidden beneath that alien exterior, albeit dark pink in colour and unprinted; her lime green face wraps round the front of it, and her transparent pink 'brain' sits on top. The magenta printed dress and torso with metallic highlights look great, and are appropriately accessorised by way of a purple cape and collar, of which even Ming the Merciless would approve, and a pink-tipped ray gun. As an added bonus, this figure will fit beautifully into any Alien Conquest dioramas out there.

My other top pick from this series is the Fairy (above) who is proof positive that the new Friends minidolls don't have a monopoly on cute. Her sweet face and endearing expression, neat flick hairstyle, lovely transparent blue wings (which I believe are unique to this figure) and pretty torso print are just perfect, and if those aren't enough, she's even got a transparent pink magic wand. My wife is seriously enamoured of this figure, which means that realistically it's just a matter of time before it magically disappears....

Although the Alien Villainess and Fairy are my favourites, a number of others have also particularly caught my eye. I love the DJ's headphones (which are unfortunately fused to his hair rather than a standalone accessory), his torso print and his prized old-school 12" vinyl. Another figure which brought a big smile to my face was the Lederhosen Guy, with his stereotypical little 'tache and monster pretzel, while the Actor looks superb with his Elizabethan ruff and quizzical expression; the Actor is even helpfully supplied with a LEGO skull so he can be effortlessly posed in an "Alas poor Yoric..." moment...

I don't really dislike any of the Series 8 figures; a couple of them - the Evil Robot and Red Cheerleader - are ever-so-slightly lazy rehashes of previous collectable minifigures, seemingly identical except for a different colour scheme, but even then I still quite like them. Truth be told, it's actually quite hard to pick out a single dud from among the 16, and I find it quite astonishing that after eight series LEGO are still able to churn out such imaginative, high quality figures as these; it's testament to the designers that after so many series I'm still looking forward to the next one and can't wait for the first images to appear so I can discover what they'll come up with next - very impressive.

If you're hungry for more on Series 8 I can highly recommend WhiteFang's exhaustive and superb review on Eurobricks which includes a ton of superb photographs - click here to check it out.