Miniproject VII/24

Executor

Yesterday was the Father's Day in this corner of the globe, and what I've shared in the 'Mumblings about that was anything silly, like this time. The Return of the Jedi 40th anniversary block -decorated set was quickly built, all its six hundred-ish bits. Then it was moved to safety from the cats.

My construction proceeded like an AT-AT on Hoth.

Long stints of greebling was done, that was fun. I guess there could've been more asymmetric parts, but I also didn't remember the movie model that perfectly anymore, so I guess it was pointless to yap about it :D

 

Finished

It ended up looking fine. Even the cats didn't try help more than by biting the plastic bags.

Right after my quick and silly photos we moved the Executor to sail the space over the bookshelves, right next to MP-36 Megatron. This was good.

Miniproject V/24

Lego 10338

A couple of years after Optimus Prime the next Transformers Lego was released this summer. I wasn't nearly as excited about this one (the Goldbug version was for some reason more to my liking) so I hadn't ordered this as my first thing after waking up on the release morning.

My partner reminded that if this one sold well, maybe there were going to be more. In addition to that piece of wisdom, Bumblebee was a neat character so I wasn't really fighting myself much when I encountered the box in the shelves of Verkkokauppa.com the previous weekend. And this was the reason why we didn't jump from the 1940s to 30350s without a gentle sidestep.

Bumblebee

Building the set took a bit less than two hours in the same Sunday afternoon I bought it. The rest of the family unit were watching cartoons while I was smiling happily by the table.

The roof could either take an Autobot emblem or be left plain with a flat 2x2 plate. Clearly I chose the emblem.

Two options were available for the register plate, I opted for the model 1984 as the one presented first. The other one went into the spare part pile.

On the left side of the hood I could again choose between a marking and more yellow. I had no reason to save the emblems anywhere, so I put it on also for the comic book effect.

There was a tiny bumblebee trapped inside the car. What looked like a hifi set behind the windows turned into a jetpack in the robot mode. That was something I didn't clearly remember from the eighties, but that was a few years ago, so...

Volkswagen Type 1

We ended up with a cool beetle!

 

The robot mode

With a gentle amount of twisting and turning the VW Beetle turned into a smirking rohbut. The instructions emphasized the leg and torso angles with separate pics and the reason became pretty clear when you stood the robot on the table: standing straight like an arrow he'd fallen on his mechanical nose as if struck by scraplets.

Maybe I had some more shelf space for a couple more :D

Project III/23

Running in the Death Star trench

The Autumn side Father's Day brought, in addition to the mumblings-unrelated things, some Lego! This has been a good theme for years and I was more than happy to build things.

It was an action diorama. I remembered seeing someone building (or upgrading) this one as an automata, but it could also have been a yet another fake memory of mine.

The trench

Building this set was quick and hassle-free, just perfect for a quick afternoon build. It only had almost 666 pieces so the expectation was "almost done".

With the first bag's baseplate done, the next couple were full of greebling at random places. My set was missing one light grey ingot (99563) from the center-middle, that I could complain about to the Danes and get a replacement. I just wasn't familiar with the process and wasn't sure if I wanted to bother.

With the floor of the trench done I moved on to the sidewall, that received a good amount of greeblies. In the middle you could see a couple of the claws that I had set 90° wrong, but I fixed that as soon as I noticed.

The completed sidewall sat sturdily on the baseplate and it got then impaled into it with two (for some reason of different length) studs. Undoing this might be interesting, but I didn't see that appearing into my calendar anytime soon.

Black squadron

In this scene Darth Vader was escorted by two wingpeople, both in TIE/ln starfighters. Unlike what the instructions said, I set the green laser blasts a bit offset for both of the firing units, because I just found it more visually appealing than the dual-firing ones.

To get the best-looking and most active scene I might have to fine-tune the angles of these a bit still.

Red 5

Then the baddie of the scene, flown by the Red five from the Red Squadron of the space terrorists, his Incom T-65C was a pretty decent representation in this scale. While building it I was wondering a bit why the spaceframe's front and back halves were only connected with two studs instead of all the four available, but maybe it looked better this way, greeblie-wise. The S-Foils were not adjustable: the split-wings were going to stay open so you couldn't use the fighter on a more calm scene just as it was.

Diorama

With the fighters built and installed only the Taim & Bak XX-9 heavy turbolaser turret was missing. It was a pleasantly poseable piece, even though it didn't have any green turbolaser blasts for the barrels. As befit the scene.

We were running seriously low on space on the shelves with these various Lego sets we had accumulated over the years :D