More car manufacturing

This year's second Lego car

The construction process started, again, from a halfway colourful Technic frame. Pretty quickly it became clear where the main important bits were going to live in, such as the wheel rotator setup.

Some of these following photos showed, if you stared at them carefully, that I had started building the wheel rotators wrong. I noticed it only when I was testing the rotation and the L-shapes didn't align as I expected them to, and they wanted to turn to the wrong direction from the flight mode. When I noticed it I fixed it but made no specific mark when I took my photos.

After the wheel setup was built, the car's exterior started going forward in leaps and bounds. The lower front was surprisingly complex in its shape.

In addition to the chromed strips the wheel wells and the nose's edges brought the familiar look up. The Time Machine was such a child of the eighties, that this was the only conceivable look for it.

The car's rear deck was pretty modular-looking at this point. Would've been cool if you could just swap in/out the different movie versions, but alas, it was not going to be (I had spoiled myself already by checking the I/II/III variants earlier).

The rear lights were just damn cool. In an eighties way, that is.

Slowly but steadily the car's outer edges got built. All the primary colours disappeared under layers of black, grey and silver/chrome.

Finally it was time to add some interior details. Here we just had the handbrake, the dashboard base and the switch for the time circuit.

The light brick went there, and it got a TNT-plunger -like press-switch, but at this point I couldn't imagine what and how it was going to behave in the final model.

Flux Capacitor, the

It wasn't that long since I last saw the first two BttF flicks, but I could hear the sound effects as if they were on tv as I was building! Of course there wasn't a perfect lit transparent three-pronged Lego piece but the grappling hook was a great part for this model.

*giggling*

The segment LED displays - those that showed the destination time (red), current time (green), and the last time departed (yellow) - were pretty neat. I kinda expected them to be printed, instead of having to misalign stickers badly. But that's how it was, I just didn't like stickers myself, so I grumbled a bit. The important thing was that it looked fantastic.

Not much leg space between the seat edge and the steering wheel...

I was pretty sure I had read that the windshield was a unique piece just for this set. The shape was peculiar, so I didn't think there were awfully many other normal uses for that kind of a piece.

For some reason the roof and the top parts of the gull-wing doors were built now and then the build process continued to other areas of the car.

The rear of the car started getting fleshed out. Random knick-knack, attachment points for the frame and then these massive cooling funnels. Or that's what I always thought they were.

Gull-wing doors

The doors were lots of fun to build, massive and bulky as the real ones seemed to be. For the longest time it looked like they were going to be without the front edge, like in the next photos:

But the front edge got built after all, I had just expected the A-beam to be solidly by the windshield, not in the door. I imagine anything else would've been way too bulky.

Last edges and cables

These rear edges of the car were pretty tight setups, and they got clipped on to the frame quite sturdily in the end. Lots of time was spent on the translucent blues and the chrome strips. Just imagine if this was also lit up somehow!

The cables were pulled from front to back, guided by the little blocks with side hook so that they didn't get pulled by the doors.

94 Pu

The bright yellow Plutonium case that Doc Brown cheated from the Libyan terrorists was cool. It only had space for two containers, as opposed to the vastness of the Playmobil Plutonium box. Still, much better than no box at all.

It even fit nicely into the trunk with the hoverboard! At least at this point, with the trunk lid waiting for assembly in the semi-distant future.

Last bits

The back of the Time Machine got filled up with details and greeblies. At long last the cooling vents got built, again greatly kicking up the wow-factor.

Being my own self, I glued the register plate stickers so that I could flip it for an original or the 2015 version. The transparent window plate wasn't something you could actually just turn around, it had to be popped off the frame for that. Would've been too flimsy otherwise.

At this point I locked my sights to the 1985 Time Machine. It was the most nostalgic ones for me, surprise of all surprises.

These cables here weren't actually important, aside from being details, I just got so excited seeing them for the first time in decades. I had a good set of these, in various colours, back in the heyday of Classic Space.

Alternate version accessories

During the three movies some changes were made to the Time Machine. During the first one an electricity-conducting rod was added, in the end the Plutonium-powered setup was replaced by a Mr Fusion from the distant year 2015. And the 1885 version in the third flick was more steampunky.

Back to the Future Part II

I just built the Mr Fusion with its bananas and soda can contents at this point. I didn't undo the rear deck of the car to try it out yet, because I was barely done with the car itself. The other major change was the bar code - register plate in the back.

Back to the Future Part III

For the Part III car I should have reversed a few steps and undone the hood, so the box could be bolted on. Didn't feel like it right after finishing the build. Just like I didn't swap the wheel rims just for that at this point.

Almost all the pieces were there, when I built the box to see how it looked like. Just a couple of silly bits were not duplicated, so if I wanted to get it completely done, I would've needed to take them off the original or Part II setups.

Project VI/22

A time machine in a DeLorean

This Spring we took a long weekend abroad, and the target location happened to have a Lego store. Of course we visited the thing as soon as we saw it, on the first afternoon. I exclaimed out loud "hey these have a dozen time machines here!", but I didn't grab one straight away because I didn't think we could carry it back home. My partner was confident we'd make it if we just transported the bit bags themselves. I decided that I'd fetch one before we left.

Then the thrice-cursed tourists cleaned the shelves of the LEGO 10300 sets. I swore. A lot. Once again.

Later I got hinted of a new batch arriving to Verkkokauppa.com so I placed my order. They claimed it'd be delivered at some point in the Summer. Somehow I had missed the original first batch and the lego.com store didn't look promising, either, so this was one chance.

I had almost forgotten the whole thing when I finally got a "come fetch it" message to my inbox. That was several months after I could've already happily carried a set home, but such is life.

There were some more stickers than I expected. Somehow I thought that at least the time displays (here you were, here you are, here you are going to go to) would've been printed, as well as the lid of the Plutonium box. Small details, I wasn't bothered by those, I just liked the printed ones more because I didn't have a fantastic track record for aligning stickers.

Great Scott!

 

Finished: Project V/22

Draconis Combine - 5. Sword of Light

Funny thing, the last time I was declaring something in this paint pattern completed, I said I should get more of them. That was over a decade ago now. Apparently I've had many things on my mind since, but it was interesting to check what I have been promising or planning over the years. And to be honest, it was a fact that there ought to be more of these lightsword units, one or two sets of four.

SL-17 Shilone

Mumblings

This Shilone was a fun addition to my strange BattleTech collection, but I really didn't see this one end up on the table anytime soon. Not only because the last game was almost ten years ago while the next one has been in a limbo, but because we really haven't used flying things. In addition to the basics of the Zoom & Boom method I also had no real clue of how these units were used in a 'Mech-heavy BT game.

To paint this was a nicely simple and I really liked that it had its own decent stand. The model itself was in a completely different scale than my tiny tiny Sabutais, which was a plus for the painting side of life. My engine glow effect could've end up prettier, but for that I guess I should've needed even smaller brushes. Still, I had a lot of good time and that was the key factor here.

Specs

With its 65 tons Shilone belonged to the Medium class. Used the flying devices in one singly BT game I really didn't know anything about its durability, speed, propellant, even if they were mentioned in Sarna. For what it was worth, a Shilone was good enough to incapacitate a Sovetskii Soyuz -class heavy cruiser, if you flew it through the command centre's viewports

Armaments

I had commented on the tools of violence while painting, but here they were for clarity. In the nose, below the cockpit, there was a front-facing LRM-20 launcher. Next to the cockpit, in one of the wing folds, was a Large Laser. Around the midpoints of the wings there was a single Medium Laser, on each side. Finally, in the base of the leftmost horizontal stabilier a rear-facing SRM-4 launcher was protecting the six.

Photos

This time the offering was a collection of blue-background photos. Maybe suitable for an ASF unit? Looking at the focusing, I should use the actual camera instead of taking these with the work phone.