FREE Instructions PDF https://www.mattelder.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Chopper-C1-10P-Droid-Star-Wars-Rebels-Instructions-mattelder.com-.pdf Rebrickable Parts list: https://rebrickable.com/mocs/MOC-161380/TribalNobody/chopper-c1-10p-droid-from-star-wars-rebels/#parts G’day, LEGO enthusiasts! Welcome back to the Family Bricks channel. I’m Matt Elder, and today we have something truly exciting for all you Star Wars fans …
G’day Everyone, Matt Elder of Family Bricks here and in this video we are going to look at this London AFOLs collobarative white castle build that I was apart of. The castle is otherwise …
In this video we are going to review FunWhole FH 9001 Wood Cabin Retro House with delight lighting kit. We will start off with an unboxing and see what the set contains. From here …
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G’day, LEGO enthusiasts! Welcome back to the Family Bricks channel. I’m Matt Elder, and today we have something truly exciting for all you Star Wars fans and MOC builders out there. In this video, we’re diving into the captivating world of LEGO with a close look at this fantastic LEGO Chopper C1-10P astromech droid MOC from Star Wars Rebels.
🤖 Join us as we take a deep dive into this incredible creation, where we’ll explore its amazing features, provide you with a timelapse speed build to see it come to life, and share the treasure trove of instructions so you can build one for yourself.
🔍 Let’s start with a quick overview of what makes this LEGO Chopper C1-10P astromech droid MOC a must-have for any Star Wars or LEGO fan. From its intricate details to its undeniable resemblance to the iconic character from the series, we’ll showcase what sets this MOC apart.
⏱️ Next, we’ll roll up our sleeves and take you through a mesmerizing timelapse speed build, so you can witness the construction process in all its LEGO glory. It’s a satisfying journey, and we’ll share some tips and tricks along the way.
📜 But the fun doesn’t stop there! We know you’re eager to get building, so we’ll also provide you with instructions for this MOC. Best of all, these instructions are available for free, ensuring that you can bring Chopper C1-10P into your own LEGO collection.
💡 Whether you’re an experienced LEGO builder or just getting started, this video has something for everyone. So, grab your bricks, prepare your workspace, and let’s dive into the fascinating world of LEGO and Star Wars together.
🚀 Ready to start your LEGO adventure with Chopper C1-10P? Check the video for all the details on where you can find the instructions and more information.
🔔 Don’t forget to hit that “Subscribe” button and ring the notification bell so you won’t miss any of our exciting LEGO adventures, MOC reviews, and building tips! Join us in celebrating the fusion of creativity, fandom, and LEGO building. Let’s get started, and may the Force be with you as we explore this fantastic LEGO Star Wars Rebels Chopper C1-10P astromech droid MOC!
G’day Everyone, Matt Elder of Family Bricks here and in this video we are going to look at this London AFOLs collobarative white castle build that I was apart of. The castle is otherwise known AFOLbwick Castle, London and was shown at the STEAM Great Western Brick LEGO Show 7th-8th October 2023. We will chat with the main designer and a handful of the 20 odd builders involved, highlighting various features.
We will show you where you can get some free instructions from if you’d like to build. We will have a time-lapse build of the main tower and a wall piece, and some tips on building. We will finish off with some footage of the various details of the castle.
Here is a video that goes through the whole show and I’ve started the video at the section on our castle. Was great to hear that the kids section with the cave and lights was a highlight
BrickBods (Ian & Carrie) Review of Steam Event.
Transcript from the Show
Good everyone, Matt Elder of Family Bricks here, and in this video, we’re going to look at this London AFOLS collaborative White Castle build that I was part of. The castle is otherwise known as Afolbwick Castle London and was shown at the Steam Great Western Brick Lego Show 7-8th October 20123.
We’ll chat with the main designer and a handful of the 20-odd builders involved, highlighting various features. We’ll show you where you can get some free instructions if you’d like to build this. We will also have a time-lapse Speed Build of the main tower and a wall piece and some tips on building. We’ll finish off with some footage of the various details of the castle.
Please like the video, subscribe to the channel, and hit the Bell to be notified when we upload videos. It greatly helps the channel out. This video is brought to you by Macatsim Holiday Homes in Margate and Broadstairs, great for a week’s holiday or a weekend escape being just over an hour east of London, UK. Treat yourself to amazing sunsets, a Lego wall, or great food. Visit www.macatsim.com and mention this YouTube video, and we’ll look after you.
Jon Gale – Main Designer
I’m here with Jon Gale, and he sort of designed and organized this. So you just wanted to go through what your involvement has been?
Hi Matt, yes, thank you. I came up with the idea for building a large castle for London AFOLs about a decade ago when I saw the Tower Bridge set included a little London city of London Shield. I quite liked the idea of getting that. So about ten years ago, I bought about 500 of those shields in anticipation of eventually building a castle.
Origins
In the last couple of years, I’ve taken over as a project coordinator for London AFOLs and decided that now was about the time to build a castle. We went through several rounds of voting and discussion and eventually settled on building a White Castle. A lot of people don’t know that castles back in medieval periods quite often were whitewashed, so that was a good excuse to have something that wasn’t just your typical gray castle. Most castles you see are going to be gray in the Lego world. It’s easy; the pieces are there, and they’re easy to reuse for space and other things later. But we decided white was the way to go.
I then set about building with some actual physical bricks and built one of the towers. It took about four or five weeks, I think, to build one of the towers for the first time. That includes a full spiral staircase on the inside. You can see one of our partially constructed towers here.
And then the walls actually hang off of the central core. Part of the castle was made possible by the Titanic set because down the center of here is a 47 stud long rigid hose, which is then covered in Technic pins, and the stairs kind of hang off of that. So that dictates the height of the castle, but it is possible to make it taller, but it just adds complexity. So, that’s the core of the castle. As you can see, it’s all entirely studless.
All of the bits that you would see as a minifigure using this castle, if you were to watch around as a tiny figure, all of those bits are actually scaled to a minifig and both studless and anti-studless. So that was probably more of a challenge. Without a broken open section like this, it’s impossible for the public to see most of it, so it’s probably pointless. But I kind of did it as well for the experience of myself and for my fellow builders.
Making Instructions
Then I decided that I needed to make Studio instructions for it so that my associates in London AFOLs would be able to build it rather than trying to build it from just a teardown video. So, I ended up videoing myself dismantling the tower. It took about 45 minutes to dismantle it, and then I used that video on a trip to Portugal for a Lego show on the plane, turning that video into instructions that I could then share and tweak. Back to the castle, I did the same thing again for the walls.
The walls have got quite a lot more complexity to them than you might realize because there are sections here that I can just show where there’s a lot of building upside down in quite small spaces to get the crenels and the merlons on the walls, the machicolations, the little gaps down between them. So there’s a lot of bits where these walls are actually upside down. More detail and technical kind of challenges were included by adding a little red stripe around it. We thought that was quite good because it kind of worked with the Red Cross, which is on the City of London Shield. Adding a little bit more detail than just a plain White Castle, but again, making a one-brick thick, wide strip in an otherwise vertically oriented wall added a bit of a challenge.
General Stats
Then we could carry it on around the towers as well. Overall, designing the instructions, the walls, and the towers took about 100 hours. In total, the build time between all of the builders for this is around about 750 hours, and it’s about a quarter of a million bricks. The actual setup at the show took us 6 or 7 hours one evening and then another couple of hours the next morning to get things ready for the public.
And the nice thing about having round Towers is as more people were turning up with Towers, it’s quite easy to adjust the design, change the shape of it. You can take out a little section of the wall, close the walls in a bit, and then once it’s in its final position, you’re then able to add the walkway to access the upper door and join it into a continuous Outer Circle. These are just a fairly simple construction, but it allows you to do it without knowing the layout of the show in advance.
Our members were also invited to bring scenes for the inside and outside, and we’ve added a few little bits in here. At a later show, it might be nice to have a full baseplate courtyard, but that is a lot more time and effort than we were able to commit for this show.
So that’s the main part of the castle. Obviously, the main big thing here is the keep, which I think Matt will have spoken to the designers, so you’ll see that in a lot more detail. Final touches were things like adding the moat around it and just adding in the little animals and scenes. Another 150 soldiers on the top, these are Lego Dimensions Cybermen because it’s a nice way to get a silver metallic silver type of figure and then a bunch of other bits sourced from Lego to go with them.
Matt Kelly – Keep Designer
I’m here with Matt, and he’s done this fantastic keep here, so I just thought I’d get him to talk us through a few features and what the challenges in building it. Yeah, so the keep was built by SW and my wife, and our two principal were involved Dary. It’s designed in sections, so it’s built as four walls joined together. Challenges really have been in the size and height of it, and obviously getting detail in. I build the structures, and I then do the motors and all the bits and pieces. Then I hand it over to Sabrina, and she does all the fancy details because that’s not my thing. I do big solid structures and I do motors that work.
So, we got a little pig in here; he’s actually being roasted. Hopefully, we’ll be done by the end of the day, and we’ll have a nice hog roast for the team. Down here, the little guy with the blacksmith, he’s actually got a working anvil, and to do that, we had to take one of his arms off so he’s got a little hammer. Then we’ve got the king and the queen and everybody having a banquet.
There are some wonderful details that you’ve got in here, and the stained glass windows at the back are actually all little one-by-one tiles. So each of those arches has got nearly 90 pieces of Lego in it, and we think in total there’s probably over 40,000, close to 45,000 bricks just in this castle keep if you…
Yeah, amazing! Up on top, what do we got here? Up on top, we’ve got a Falcon, so he’s flying around, and so the Falconer has a little H on top that’s just there to disguise the motor mainly, to do that, and just a motor on speed control. And then round on the side, there is…
Leaving guys, the idea is that the guys are walking through the window upstairs. There’s a guy with a he’s stolen a ham, and he’s being chased by one of the guards. So they come up through the window, they’re chasing upstairs.
Lighting
The other real challenge has been doing the lights for it. So we’ve used a lot of LED strip lights; they make lights, they’re good. And then in each of the rooms, there’s one of these little, like P lights. And then there’s nearly, believe it or not, there’s more cable inside there than on some of the lighting rigs I put in for bands. There’s about 20-odd cables in there and battery packs and various things to facilitate the lights and the electrics.
Yeah, some fantastic work there, and even some little funky details up here as well. Robin Hood, a few fun characters as well. Every build I do personally has to have a Batman in, and Batman’s hiding on the side of the tower. That’s just something for there to get the kids involved and something that people say spot. There’s a lot to talk about on this display, but any display I do is to sneak a Batman in, then the kids board or interested can say, “Can you spot the Batman?” Nice little touch.
John – Gate House Designer
I’m here with John, and he’s going to walk us through the part that he’s done for the collaborative build. I wanted to do something a bit more than just a tower or a few wall sections, and this is a castle. You’ve got to be able to get into the castle. What we need is a gatehouse. So I started with John’s original design for the towers. I built two of those but made them flat-sided so I could put walls right up against them and leave enough space in here for, well, we’ve got to have a working drawbridge.
Originally, I made this with a phone control, control plus the powered-up app, so I would work it from behind the table. But then we thought, behind the table wouldn’t it be a really good idea if we had something interactive here? So, I got this so that visitors can work the gates themselves. I’ve got three medium help-up Motors inside here and a load of string. So that’s some brilliant functions you got there.
And I guess the usual sort of question is how long do you think it took you to do and what’s sort of in it? I think given that it took a couple of iterations to get it right, probably around 100 hours, I think, spent on this. I rebuilt this house completely because after I had a disaster, it imploded completely just before a show. I thought, we rebuild this more structurally sound kind of method with a lot of Technic inside to make it solid because it’s a different design to the original one. It’s not as sturdy in its original design, so I had to redesign them in the core, so that added a whole load of hours to the project. I mean, who counts these hours anyway? Yeah, exactly. As you can see, the tops are slightly different. What I can do actually is just remove the top of here.
Controls
Brilliant! This is a cheap Lenovo tablet that we had kicking around the house, which is a freebie from five or six years ago. We don’t really use it for anything useful, and it’s too slow and old and out of date, so it’s the perfect candidate for having small children punch at it. Oh, brilliant!
We got the kids all set up going through a little witch’s pumpkin patch in the cave, little potions, little guy sword in a stone, going about it. Came up with a turn onine here, little procession up into a little sarcophagus, and you got toad in the back, a nice tree over the top.
Timelapse Speed-build – Tower
Now we’ll go through and show a time-lapse of building out one of the round cylindrical Towers. You start off with this funky little base configuration, then go through and build the spiral staircase by building the individual stairs and then just spinning them around and placing them in place. There, you can see you build up the individual supports to really hold it in place. Next up are six of these roundish type sections, which you go through and build. Because you’ve got the staircase, they’re all individually different because obviously the doors and windows are at slightly different heights. Thus, it’s not a matter of just doing the same section six times. It is actually slightly different each time you build it. It is quite a challenging build, but then when you get to the end of it and all comes together, it is very satisfying.
Having then done it, lots of really interesting techniques. You are looking between 10 to 16 hours for each tower for the 4 and 1/2 thousand pieces and weighs the better part of 3 and 1/2 kg or 7 lb each. Get all the sections in place, and there is something very satisfying about that curve shape.
Build out the top platform, which is all pretty much built sideways and getting some really interesting angles in there, finishing up with the top rounded section, which is then also built upside down as well, and the last interlocking pieces. So when you come to the last two panels to put onto here, panels five and six, best just to actually take these individual pieces off first, put them in top and bottom, and then attach the whole actual faceplates. Because otherwise, if you put one in when you try to put the other one in, you’re going to have no way to grip on it and push it in. So it’s just a more optimal way of doing it.
Timelapse Speed-build – Wall Section
Here, we’ll look at building up one of the wall sections. Just start off by going to be using lots of these masonry bricks stacked three high. So just go through and build out 40 odd to begin with, just make the rest of it go much faster. Start by building the top half section of the wall. This is actually a lot more difficult than what it looks because you’ve actually got a one-tile thickness stripe there in the red going all the way around. If you didn’t have that, you probably just build this thing straight up. Here, you got a combination of different techniques, and then here going to be using to flip things upside down and different snot techniques and also just different jumpers and techniques. Those Shields really hook in in a nice comfortable tight manner.
Here are some more techniques to be able to get things to go basically upside down. The finished effect of being virtually studless is actually quite worthwhile, and it’s really nice. Each one of these 12-stud wide sections is about 700 pieces. Then go through and build up so you can put in the brown handrailing, similar to the tower, the merlons built in upside down as well. The bottom half is built up using pretty much three identical sections that you just build as individuals and then join together and put on the bottom.
Free Building Instructions
If you do want to build this, there’ll be links around the video to places such as BrickLink where you can get instructions for building steps pretty much for free. This one is on Jon Gale’s account because the original design.
Different steps here. You just cycle through, and the nice thing out there as well can flip it, move it around, see what’s going on, and see all the different ways it goes. Some of the steps can be quite dense in terms of you’re going to be doing lots of pieces at a time, so build this up once and repeat it the whole way through. So, while there are only 500 steps, sometimes you are putting a large number of pieces per step, and it will take you some time.
You can also go in and have a look at the 3D model as well, again, same sort of thing, spin around, look so if you need to double-check anything. And I think the intent is to then put in some of the other wall sections and that and have the instructions available. So if you want to go through and build your own, then you’ll be able to do that. And certainly, if you do manage to build it, then post some photos or links on any socials so that we can have a look, and it’ll be great.
Final Details
And we’ll finish up here with some shots of the castle and the details.
[Music]
Thanks very much for watching. If you leave the word “castle” in the comments, we’ll know you’ve watched this far. If you’ve enjoyed this video, hit that thumbs up button and consider subscribing to the channel. And a share never goes astray. If you want to see my custom Sonic Hedgehog course compared with the official set, check out this video. Otherwise, this video will show you how to build it. Here are some other videos you might be interested in.
In this video we are going to review FunWhole FH 9001 Wood Cabin Retro House with delight lighting kit. We will start off with an unboxing and see what the set contains. From here we will take an overview of the set all lit up and some of the features of the built model. We have some brief comments about the figurines included before a time lapse speed building with commentary. We will look at the specifics of the light and a slight error in the sticker sheet. We will talk about playability, value and design and offer some suggestions for improvements.
This was provided to us by the manufacturer, but the opinions will be our own so let’s get into it. This is a LEGO ‘Compatible’ building construction brick toy set. $30 Amazon Preorder gift card information (til 22 June 2023) can be found on the funwhole.official instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/p/CtI6NlwukT5/?igshid=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng==
G’day everyone Matt Elder Family Bricks here and in this video we’re going to unbox and review this A-frame carbon retro house by funnel set number F9013. It comes included with the Delight day and night lighting kit. We’ll start off with an unboxing and see what the set contains. From here we’ll take an overview of the set all lit up and some of the features of the built model. We have some brief comments about the figurines included before a time-lapse speed build with commentary. We’ll look at the specifics of the light and a slight error in the sticker sheet. We’ll talk about playability, value, design and offer some suggestions for improvements.
This was provided to us by the manufacturer but the opinions will be our own. So let’s get into it.
Please like the video, subscribe to the channel and hit the Bell to be notified when we upload videos. It greatly helps the channel out.
This video is brought to you by macatsim Holiday Homes in Margate and Broadstairs. Great for a week’s holiday or a weekend Escape being just over an hour east of London UK. Treat yourself to amazing sunsets a Lego wall great food visit www.mccatsim.com and mention this YouTube video and we’ll look after you.
Whats in the Box?
It’s all come nicely wrapped get into it and see what’s in here. So we have the front of the box, it’s actually really nice graphic and was printed out well nice and slick. On the back just doing the on off so let’s have a look and see what’s actually in it.
So it looks like right off with some of the actual day and night lights looks like they’re funky brick separator, battery pack, into three lights and tweezers. I love that in fact it comes with tweezers makes life so much easier.
The chunky thick instruction book. so let’s take a shape. Nice and glossy and what do we got there? 420 odd steps and we start going through some of the bags so these are all the bags you’ve got bags number one through twelve and there’s multiples of each there’s about 30 odd in total. But the one thing I did notice is in bag number 12 you’ve actually got some sort of little figures and things. Which could be interesting because certainly last time when the criticisms I had was that they didn’t have any sort of little figures, which put the scale out so hopefully fingers crossed that uh helps address that issue.
Overview
One of the big selling points of this kit is obviously lights. So we’ll just go through and have a look at them. You’ve got a couple in the peak of the A-frame, there another one on the underside of that door, light there for the sliding door, and then we’ve got one for the fire pit. And coming further along, there’s you know one for the bedroom, one for the outside lamp there. And then as we come along even further into here my battery box, there you’ve got a couple in the actual Apex itself and then down in here.
You’ve got some on the ceiling and then also that little fire barbecue. In there has some light as well we come around to the side here you have the strip lighting for the water which helps give that a really nice sort of feel and glow. And then you’ve got one for this sort of lantern here as well. So you’ve got quite a number of Lights which go the whole way around and it gives a really really nice effect.
So just having a little bit of a look at some details, you’ve got this nice little porch area here with a bit of a swing and a sliding door. Under here which works nice the other door does open as well some little logs there for the fires. A little thing here with some food that’s cooking and some other little apples and things like that. A nice little brick build tree which is good to see, really gives it that feel of being off in the woods.
Up on here you’ve, got like a quite a large telescope. It’s almost like a gun and a nice little rocking chair. And downstairs a bedroom down here, and as we keep on coming further around, you obviously have the battery box there. In the top here you have another bedroom with some other paraphernalia and a clock, a little bit hard to see there. And then downstairs is sort of like your little cooking sort of area with the piano and sort of general sort of lounge sort of room to get into.
Coming a little further along, I like the way that they’ve got this little suggestion of the stream. And they’ve also got some really cool funky pieces, like particularly wedge plates in these sort of translucent sort of bluish colors. And then you keep on coming further around over to sort of like a little fishing area or some extra little fish which are being kept. And a bit more of that water hanging off the edge and it’s pretty tight, because one of the things you’d be worried about, just bumping that and those popping off pretty easily, but be moving us around and they’ve stayed on pretty well.
Figurines
This is the first time I’ve actually seen their figures so these are interesting and got some nice printing. And you do have to put them all together which can be a little bit challenging. They do have very specific left and right arms and hands, so you do need to be careful when you’re sort of watching them. I guess with the minifigure having been ubiquitous for the last 40 years, anything that doesn’t look like a minifigure is going to be somewhat “off” in your mind.
But then again, I remember before the mini-figure these other sorts of figures that we used to have. So the mini-figure itself isn’t locked in my head. And this just gives you a sort of comparison point for an actual one as to how they sort of compare with it. These the other two figs which come in the set, so it looks like a mum and a dad. And sort of looking at it it reminds me a little bit of a cross between a Playmobile figure and a mini-figure. I think they have their own charm and they are growing on me.
Speed Build
And now we’ll do a time-lapse Speed Build so you can get a sense of how this all comes together and what the building experience is like. As with anything, you start off with the base. And the base by the time you build it all out it’s a little bit smaller than a 48 by 48 base plate. And in this one it’s quite interesting in that it’s got a little section down the side you can see there in blue, which is for your stream. And you’re building out a little bit of a garden way and now we’re actually building out the elements to the side of the house, laying out some of the floors and going through with the tiling.
And now we’re starting to put in the first lot of lights and attaching them all the way around to the different places they need to go to now starting some of the Interior with the piano and a few bits of the furniture that actually a little fireplace in the middle is quite clever as it holds up the next floor and then you build up some of the front facing of the A-frame itself going through now just doing a bit of the actual floor some more lights and here we do the top part of the front of the A-frame and it has a little cool feature with the actual circular window there’s a couple of beds that you get to build in this and then we go through and we build out part of the downstairs area.
This area too once you actually build it all the way through it’s actually a little bit difficult to get at now we’re going through and doing one side of the A-frame roof there’s just a lot of these little black tiles and every once in a while you put on these stickers for a bit of texture and those stickers can get quite tiresome after a little while here you’re going through and building out the rest of that room which as you can see there’s not really much access for Play.
Putting some flowers on the outside give a bit of texture and a bit of awning adjusting some of the lights just making sure that they’re all feeding into the right places and building out some more of that room before heading on to the second side of the A-frame roof again the black tiles the wood texturing on some of the stickers occasionally and it Clips together quite nicely at the top and then also at the bottom to hold it in place build out the upstairs window.
And then heading around and starting to now really put in all the details and the vegetation starting off with this trellis putting in what looks like some grapes and things and from here it’s just adding in lots of little details and there’s a fair bit of it different Leaf colors and grass pieces along the first story as well before heading off and then actually building up a brick built tree which feels nice and solid and doesn’t look like it’s too janky and missing a whole bunch of leaves. Install the last of the light connections.
And finish up building some of these curious little figures that are in the set do like with this how they’ve given the lights their own sort of little case and you know it’s relatively well done a little bit more exclusive what have you.
Unboxing
So just having a quick little look in tweezers right without those standard battery box brick separator that they have for theirs and then just looking in at some of the lights themselves we can see what’s in each light kit so it looks like you’ve got a couple small one by ones, and then a couple of two by two rounds. Next one’s connector, some extension wires one by one rounds, that looks like a little strip of some description, and the connector well one by one rounds and the USB plug.
And a quick look at the Stick of shade, looks like you got most of the wood panelling in there a few other little ones that you come across I’m not quite sure what that is but we’ll find out the one thing that’s nice when companies are able to build the lights into the kits is you can plan them out a lot better and they look like they’ve got these new pieces as well which have little holes underneath so that you can fit the wires under there more snugly which is a really good development because then it enables the wires to be guided a lot better than what was previously you’re not so much clamping the wires and there’s less frustration with trying to get it squished down in between pieces where it’s not necessarily meant to go because you’ve also got similar little ones here with the little grooves there which are over here in the black as well.
So it’s really clever they’ve come up with something like that these bags are pretty hot open so yeah a good to have a knife handy to get anything.
In terms of playability I think this model is great you’ve got lots of different things for your little characters to interact with and move around with in different spaces and being able to create different scenarios. So I think they’ve done a really great job in ticking off all those sort of main things you’d expect of like a cabin in the woods in terms of value this has got 2061 pieces so I’ll give you three seconds think of a number of how much you think this would retail for?
Three.
Two.
One.
In the US at the moment it’s listed at 99 pounds on their website and in the UK have been told it’s going to be about 120 pounds which has a little nitpick the US and UK price you’d want to be closer together if not the UK price being slightly less but when you think that this is over 2 000 pieces here plus a light kit if you go if you’re a general sort of guide of about 10p or 10 cents per piece you’d be looking well over 200 pounds or 250 American dollars so with this being over half the price of what you’d expect normally I think the value there is quite phenomenal and it’s a little thing but you actually get a proper tree with it as well.
Design
In terms of design I think the design of the last year of these have gotten so much better. This is obviously the current one, this was the first one that they released about a year ago which I did a review for that and at the time. I commented that it just felt too big it was a little bit over scaled for like normal figures and things whereas. Now if this is one of their normal figures that feels like it has all the right proportions.
Whereas this one it just felt like the house itself was just too big if you’re trying to have it in figures and put it in cities and you can even see it with the trees here, they’re basically the same height same type of build. And this one okay it might be location but it feels like it’s being dwarfed by the house a little bit, whereas this one it doesn’t feel that same sort of way. And maybe this base is just a bit bigger so it gives it that chance to just spread out and breathe a little bit more. Whereas this one is much tighter on your traditional 32 by 32 sort of size.
So for me I can really see over the course of a year just how much their design sensibility has grown and sort of been refined. And they’ll probably have more pieces and then things to play with now but they both sort of still feel like they could be in the same universe in the same space. If you want to see my previous review on this one check up in the card or around the video for it.
Left Overs
These were the pieces that were left over at the end of the build. The main ones which I would highlight is at the end of the first part of putting the roof together you did have a whole bunch of these pieces left over. Which did seem a bit weird and I was sort of wondering do they get used later on and then you do get almost a full set of spare arms and hands. And there aren’t too many little small pieces left over so most of the time it is pretty tight on what’s in the bag is what you’re going to be using.
So if you do happen to drop something on the floor it goes missing you do probably want to find it because there aren’t too many excess pieces. When you consider it there’s over 2 000 pieces in this set, this was the leftover sticker sheet some of these are extras in terms of these ones.
Here the pieces which they wanted these to go on to were the curtains in the downstairs but when I tried to do it, these are actually an eighth length whereas the pieces are in their six length. And then I didn’t realize to the end they did actually provide the six length versions so the shorter versions. And then I’m guessing with their QR code you can go through and find the differences in the instructions the stickers themselves.
Stickers
As per the instructions are these two step sort of ones we you lift it off with this extra bit of seal on it and then you put it onto the brick, and you take that plastic film, and then peel it off. So if you’re not used to that, they can be a little bit quirky and why, particularly when it comes to putting all the wood texture inside the roof panels, you do start to get a little bit crazy with that when you’re doing them so often and having to do sort of two peeling steps.
Instructions
The instructions though in general were pretty tight pretty easy to follow. The usual sort of thing you just have to be a little bit patient with the tweezers and some of the wires. I don’t think there is too many mistakes in there which I came across. If there was one slide Improvement, I would suggest is for a couple of these lights particularly the fire ones is if they’re flickering and flaming. At the moment, that’s such a changing color because of my finger going in and the camera adjusting to the focus. But they really are a good number of lights here and again it’s just little my nitpicks at this stage.
Summing Up
Over all it’s a great value set with lots of lights and features if you’re looking for an addition to your City forest you can’t go wrong with this.
Thanks very much for watching and if you leave the word “cabin” in the comments, we’ll know you’ve watched this far. If you’ve enjoyed this video hit that thumbs up button and consider subscribing to the channel and a share never goes astray.
Here is the other fun hole wood cabin review. Here are some other lighting videos you might be interested in. Alternatively here is another video that might be of interest. That’s it from us here at Family Bricks thanks for watching and we’ll see you in the next video.
In this video we are going to look at adding this Lightailing LED Lighting Kit into this UCS LEGO Star Wars X-Wing Starfighter set 75355.
We will unbox the light kit and see what is included in it. We will have a quick look at the features of the light kit once installed. From there we will have a timelapse speed build of installing the light kit and some of the issues we ran into. We will talk about manipulating the LEGO model in general and some tips around this. We’ll look at the back of the model and how visible the wires are before finally concluding with our thoughts on this light kit. The light kit has been provided by the manufacturer but opinions expressed are our own. You’ll find a link around the video to where this can be purchased from.
Affiliate Link to LIGHTAILING LED Lighting Kit for LEGO 75355 X-Wing Starfighter https://amzn.to/43O8aj9
Time codes to the Video:
0:00 Introduction 1:13 Lighttailing Unboxing 2:00 Instructions Overview 3:33 Lights included Overview 5:04 Lights in Actions & Overview 5:53 Time-lapse Speedbuild & Commentary 6:33 Long vs Short Wires 8:53 Time-lapse Speedbuild & Commentary 9:15 How to Hold the Model 12:16 Back of the Model & Wires 12:55 Overall Thoughts
Transcript from the Show
Let there be light!
G’day Everyone, Matt Elder of Family Bricks here and today we are going to look at adding this Lightailing LED Lighting Kit into this UCS LEGO Star Wars X-Wing starfighter set 75355.
We will unbox the light kit and see what is included in it. We will have a quick look at the features of the light kit once installed. From there we will have a timelapse speed build of installing the light kit and some of the issues we ran into. We will talk about manipulating the LEGO model in general and some tips around this. We’ll look at the back of the model and how visible the wires are before finally concluding with our thoughts on this light kit. The light kit has been provided by the manufacturer but opinions expressed are our own. You’ll find a link around the video to where this can be purchased from.
Please like the video subscribe to the channel and hit the Bell to be notified when we upload videos it greatly helps the channel out.
This video is brought to you by mccatson
This video is bought to you bay Macatsim Holiday Homes in Margate and Broadstairs. Great for a week’s holiday or a weekend escape, being just over an hour east of London, UK. Treat yourself to amazing sunsets, a LEGO wall or great food. Visit www.macatsim.com and mention this Youtube video, we’ll will look after you.
Lightailing Unboxing
To be you know pretty sort of standard type box literally just a little sticker on there to show that it’s this one so we must be reusing this and using for other sets which I guess if it keeps down costs and everything like that that’s good. Um otherwise let’s crack this open and see what’s in here
[Music]
So this was everything that was in the box and a little surprise because normally with like kids you’ve got like lots of little individual bags for Lots but I’m guessing maybe they’re all wired off a single source and so all togetherit’d be interesting to see with that battery box and the instructions and one thing I don’t like when they do instructions in these boxes which are bigger than the boxes is it leaves it with a little bit of a curl. Not the end of the world but just means you’ve got to flatten it down otherwise it’s really just more annoying to deal with
Instructions Overview
Within the instruction packet you had the actual instructions it looks like a another bit of information
and a general sort of sticker slash service card thanking you for your purchase having a quick flick through the instructions sort of see how they’re doing theirs is going through it does look like giving you sort of photos on the key parts to take apart and pull apart to insert the actual lights and how the
wires are going. So give a bit of an overview here having a look doesn’t seem to be anything too
difficult but I guess the nature of the model is such that a lot of what you’re going to be doing is doing four times given the fact that it is an X-Wing with four parts to it. The instructions themselves
yeah nice glossy seem to be good quality photographs and everything like that and has a really good feel in your hand so it’s not flimsy cheap lightweight sort of stuff and they always use other ones you can buy from us. Another small booklet with universal instructions in several different languages basically just showing in generic terms how to deal with different cables and what they feel is the right way in the wrong way and connecting and often to the other languages.
Lights Included Overview
Seeing this as a single packet might as well just have a little bit of a look and see what we get out of this.
[Music]
So it certainly looks like they’re all done into groupings probably all coming back to the central USB connector there a few little modified bricks with electronic circuits in them that looks like here one by one round circles somepoles but then these looks like full length bar lightsaber type and that’s standard. We’ve got some holes in it a little light if you can see that it’s only appears you got something in there those little bubbles within the actual bar itself curious as to how that’s going to work
So your battery box is pretty standard you know studs, anti-studs either side. Three Double A’s with
USB connection and an on off switch so nice thing with them being all together like this is a single light is before you get too far and just pop it in there and test and see what it’s going to be like and just make sure that everything seems to be there so it’s like four purple lights there a couple red ones a few other bits and pieces all look good so that’s a good start knowing that at least what you’ve got is actually working and you’re not building the whole thing and then finding out that something’s wrong.
Lights Included Overview
Let there be light!
Oh that is pretty cool so just checking some of this out you’ve obviously got the lights from the cockpit coming through which is really nice then underneath here you’ve got this light coming down to highlight and illuminate the plaque and also to the Luke Skywalker Minifigure. Of course then too you also have the main guns with these custom sort of red lightsaber blades which really make it look excellent and then from behind you can see getting a lot of the purple from the engine.
And this is the reverse view so you can see all the purple here coming from those little engine nodes and then again the canopy cockpit weapons and a bit of the blue going forward from the plaque illumination
Time-lapse Speedbuild & Commentary
We’ll go through a quick time lapse here and most of it’s the same you’re putting lights in the rear engine and then a light on the gun and it’s mostly done the same way you pull them off you take off part of the rounder engine component and then slider along the front of the wing and then down along the thin axle to the front of the gun. It is quite challenging getting it along and I also find taking off that little red 4×4 piece helps.
And then in the bottom here we’re going to put some of the lights into the actual cockpit and that got a bit tricky and you’re having to sort of take off the side and it just didn’t go back nicely in theory you can attach it without needing to take that side off but there’s just the connection points are not strong enough to actually do that.
Issue – Long vs Short Wires
Okay I just wanted to quickly stop it here and say up to this point here it looks like I’ve made a mistake. I’ve done the first lights into here and then for the second one you’re meant to flip it upside down and do the one underneath but I’ve actually gone and done the one on the other side and we’ll have to see if that’s going to come back and bite me.
The other challenge with this is the instruction book comes up and says there’s some short versions of these and then some long versions of these the lights depending upon which part of the wing you’re looking at the challenge with that however is that these from what I can see here have no discernible differences like how do you know if it’s a long or a short and particularly when you had the other two all together so.
There was four of these there’s no way to see well what’s short and what’s long like if there was somewhere that there was a color on there or marking or something that would be really useful so we still have yet to see whether that’s going to come back to bite but that that was something which was quite annoying.
So with the two lines I did have left I’ve managed to unroll them out and being able to see the difference here and there is a long this one here is a long one and this one here is a short one you can kind of see it seems to be the length of the cable out to the actual main engine light as such and the difference appears to be roughly you know about 10 centimeters or four inches because once you get past that the
lengths, to the other little tiny ones which is going to have the lightsaber blades seem to be exactly the same length give or take. So what this means with what I’ve done already is either by pure fluke I’ve managed to get this short one on the short and the long one on the long position or if they are around the wrong way it doesn’t seem to have made any noticeable difference now if it hasn’t made any noticeable difference why they would worry about this I’m not 100 sure but it does feel like if they’re going to make the difference between a long wire and a short wire make it obvious because otherwise you’d be untangling all four of them all at once before you’ve got them anywhere in there and that just seems like a recipe for disaster in terms of wires going in the wrong places or just increasing the general frustration of trying to put these lights in even more.
Time-lapse Speedbuild & Commentary Continue
So we’ll finish off the light installation and the bottom two wings are pretty much the same as the first two. The main thing though is you see you’ve got a pair of tweezers which I’m always using which were not included they’re very very helpful for doing this and highly recommend having a pair. To clean up the wires I use the black twist ties that were included in the set that would have otherwise been thrown out and just helps to keep it tidy.
One useful thing I have discovered to manipulate it is when you’re grabbing onto it you need to be grabbing onto it in the very top or the very bottom parts and if it’s upside down like that’s the best way to manipulate it is actually with one hand grab onto the top and bottom here and then the other hand you actually want to roll it over so that when you pick it up and turn it you can flick your wrist grabbing onto that part there so you can then lift it and flip it straight over we’ll mount it straight on its stand.
How to Hold the Model
Like that I have found the way that you handle this really makes a difference I found there’s a couple of places if you grab onto it it’s fine any other places and you’re gonna start having all the different panels pop off if you grab onto this or that or these top ones or the bottom ones here invariably anything will just pop off also too.
If you’re trying to grab onto the engines invariably your fingers bump in and knock these tiles out it’s a place I found really useful for grabbing onto it is the cockpit glass and then the white plate on the underside of the cockpit. So you can grab one finger on top one on the bottom and then at the back of the plane it’s on the top and also on the bottom again if you’re slightly off you’re going to be touching these panels and they fall off really easily and there’s been a significant part of when putting these lights in during the process going back and having to reattach all these little panels and angles and it’s just the nature of this model and trying to put lights in that can get quite frustrating because you’re trying to wrap the wire around or something or flip it over or move it and then something just breaks off and then all of a sudden these panels because of the angles they’re not easy to get back on.
The easiest way I’ve found is to take the hinge joints apart put one in the main core of the model the other way back onto the outside panel and then try to reattach it as per the instructions because of the angles. If you’re just trying to attach it with the hinges completely joined it was really difficult to get enough pressure because again you’re going to be touching onto other parts of the model and that happened a lot you’re trying to reattach one part and you’re grabbing it the wrong way and then the other panels start falling off.
So you put this four by one light bar on underneath here which unfortunately then means you’ve got to drop down this piece here on the actual stand which means the back piece is supporting all the weight and if you do move that that pops off quite a lot I get the effect they’re going for I just think it’s too much of a compromise.
Ideally I think this bar here should be like in the cockpit where you have two one by twos on either side of this gray piece and then that can have the light coming down because if this pops off then the whole thing drops down and then all of a sudden your whole display model has dropped down a couple of brick heights because there is a fair bit of weight being supported just solely through that little plate there.
You can see the weight of it has popped this off the back piece there and it’s not sitting on the one in front so it’s actually just sitting on itself sometimes if you get your hands in the wrong place the pieces which will snap off you won’t be 100% sure of where they go back so it might be a good idea just to have some set of instructions handy in case you need to refer to them around.
Back of the Model & Wires
The back here in relative terms is pretty clean okay yes you can see some of the wires here coming in different places but considering it is the back of the model you’re generally not going to be seeing it much. And the nice thing about it too is you’ve been able to mount the battery box here on the anti-studs so it will stay in place there and that then also helps push a lot more of the other dangly wires forward into there.
And because you’ve got the display plug on the other side you can’t really see it and if you want to take it off the standard relatively easy to do you pretty much you know just detach the battery pack that you got here you can detach the USB if you really want to connection and then with that you can just lift it straight up and it’ll come straight off.
Overall Thoughts
Overall my thoughts on this is that the light kit is fantastic like it really adds so much to it the colors that they’ve used here in terms of getting the the Cool Blues underneath here offset with the warms and the purples just looks fantastic and for this effect that timer recording this is about £37 or about $42 American dollars.
Now given the X-Wing itself is over 200 in relative terms it’s not too bad sometimes if you have a set which is 50 pounds in the line Kit’s 40 pounds it’s sort of like almost one to one which does seem a little bit silly at times.
I think I’ve discussed previously a few little nitpicks here and there around the edges I think if you’re going to do this you need to allow about two to three hours to go through and I did it over a couple of sessions and mostly a lot of that time is just because when you’re touching the various parts the actual base Lego model itself the panels can come off really easily and that’s just inherent in the design of it by the Lego and not so much anything to do with the actual lighting tail light kit.
The wires are mostly hidden and I like the fact that for the most part they are white so it does blend in a couple of places where it won’t is where it hits the Grays on some of these cannons here but in the dark can you really tell the difference I really do like the fact that they’ve gone to this extra effort here just to try to get something down onto the plaque so that doesn’t become a complete dead area and enables them to really get this contrast between the cools and the warms of the rest of the lights that they’ve used.
So definitely if you’re into lighting up your models and particularly something like a UCS one like this it’s definitely something worthwhile considering even the back is done quite nicely so you can have it displayed in different angles and you’re still going to get a nice effect.
I just can’t remember too well from The Source material that if there was some little flashing lights on some of the wings that could have been a nice addition but again that’s sort of nitpicking around the edges.
Thanks very much for watching and if you leave the word “light” in the comments we’ll know you’ve watched this far.
If you’ve enjoyed this video hit that thumbs up button and consider subscribing to the channel and a share never goes astray.
Here are some other lighting videos you might be interested in. Alternatively here are some other videos you might also like to watch. That’s it from us here at Family Bricks, thanks for watching and we’ll see you in the next video.
In this video we are going to compare the old Pab Jugs / cups to the new LEGO cardboard boxes from the Pick and Build walls (aka Pick a brick) – which is better value. Is this a case of shrinkflation by LEGO where they are reducing the size of what it is but still keeping it at the same price.
In the UK, these are £14.99 each. One was recently filled up at Lester Square city store in London. The other was done at the Bluewater LEGO store which is east of London (which seems to be one of the trialing places for these boxes, along with a store in Berlin).
We will be doing this with a 4×4 plate element as this would help getting us better sizes in the box and seeing which is better value. Is this a good move by LEGO or a step backwards?
G’day everyone, Matt Elder from Familybricks here and in this video we’re going to compare the old Pub jugs to the new Lego cardboard boxes for your pick and build walls and see which is better value is this the case of shrinkflation by Lego where they’re reducing the size of what it is but still keeping these at the same price in the UK these are 14.99 pounds each and this was recently filled up at Leicester Square store in London and this one is done out of blue water which is in east of London and they seem to be one of the traveling places for these boxes along with a store in Berlin
Now we’re going to be doing that looking at a 4×4 plate element as it’ll help us just getting better sizes in there and see which is better value and is this a good move or a step backwards.
This video is brought to you by mccatson Holiday Homes in Margate and broadstairs great for a week’s holiday or a weekend Escape being just over an hour east of London UK treat yourself to amazing sunsets a Lego wall or great food visit www.macatsim.com and mention this YouTube video and we’ll look after you.
So it’s in at the Lego store in London Leicester Square which is the now the biggest Lego store in the world again and went through and packed one of these pad cups filled with these pieces now the reason for this is getting these in large quantities in the UK is virtually impossible if you want 10 to 20 and get it off Bricklink no worries anything over that you have to go through multiple cells and even then they don’t have them and then if you go off to Germany or the continent in Europe the postage gets so expensive though it starts to become an economical so I wanted these anyhow.
So this has been done with an optimal configuration which is based upon using two by four bricks but I’ve just changed it slightly for my purposes so there’s a link around the video to somebody else who did this about 11 years ago. So you have that in the top first layer, second layer, third layer, fourth layer assistant and I’ve got some loose pieces in the bottom just one more unflow pieces now did the same on this other cup here.
Sure I could have probably pushed putting more of the smaller pieces in between and things like that but I thought even just doing that much and having that taped down was really pushing it so I didn’t want to push it too much further so we can go through and do a count of these and see how many of these 4×4 plate pieces that we got and then just because the numbers the black pieces are actually two by four bricks just because when you’ve got odd numbers in terms of the bricks you can put across you needed the black ones and my son wanted them for a building project at school.
So I was in a Bluewater Lego Store this evening which is east of London in the UK and they seem to be one of the few stores which are doing the trials on the new boxes so I’ve loaded them up here again I’ve probably pushed the sizing on a little bit but you can sort of see really close relatively firmly and snuggly and they’re also going to be doing the thing where you can reuse them and Gap in the UK 75p off and to do that they then stamp it with this.
It’s relatively easy to fold it together and I haven’t undone this so I’ll just go through it and do that now and this is what we see we’re going to go inside so I’ve packed these 18 plates high so if there’s 17 plates they’re comfortable at 18 they start to bend over the packaging there at the back it’s about 23 studs this way and then about 11 studs this way. I’ve pushed these a little bit so in terms of getting four by fours in maybe another packet like that and then in the corner I’ve been able to slide in a plate a two by four brick another two by four brick and a plate and then in this case two they’re also how far deep it is I’ve been able to get two stacks of these sitting on top of each other.
So I think you know that’s pretty tight there’s not much more space in there and even there’s some sort of pushing because it is bulging a little bit so through the magic of editing let’s find out how much is in each and how they compare.
So for a pub jug stacked in this order this is the breakdown of each of these little sections here so in this section here you have 33 plates two bricks next one 36 plates four bricks next one 42 plates four bricks next one 51 plates four bricks next one 51 plates five bricks and then three plates on the end that then gives you a total of 216 4×4 plates 20 4×2 bricks and then this enabled you to have a lot of small pieces you could do a lot more than this depends upon how much you want to push it and whether or not the store will let you get away with it.
For the new boxes, if you do them in Stacks like this you’re going to have in that stack there is 18 then 18 18 18 18 and this here is then seven on the top plus seven underneath same thing again 18 18 18 18 7 plus 7. These ones here and then stacks of nine with another stack underneath so you have nine and nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine then in this corner little piece here you have four lots of two by four plates in the white and then four two by four bricks there taking that all together that gives you a ground total of 298 4×4 bricks four four by two bricks and then four two by four plates.
So overall in the Old Pad cups you get 216 4x4s versus 298 so you get an extra 82 in this okay you are getting slightly more 2×4 bricks and then it’s going to come down to how many small pieces you are comfortable with and can get away with stacking in the store.
Of course none of this is taking into consideration the actual time to go through and do this and it’s actually quite surprising this to stack like that took me about 10 minutes this the stack like that took about 20 because with this you’re just clicking the bricks together and counting up the stacks with this you’ve got to be aware of how many you’re stacking in each row and things like that just from actually putting all these together this was so much more enjoyable because while I was doing this I was actually having a chat to the staff member.
While I was doing this I was just focusing on making sure that I was getting the right number of plate stacks on each line surprisingly I think the new boxes are actually far better value than the original cups initially when I first heard of them moving onto the boxes I was quite cynical about it going this is going to be one of those shrinkflation sort of things but there’s always make much more sense to have square packaging rather than the rounds because it’s literally a matter of trying to pick a square peg into a round hole.
You know just in general this is a much better experience it’s not as time consuming and it makes a lot more sense.
The only thing I would have liked to have seen is for these boxes to be more in line with the numbering system which works with Lego because along this side it’s like 23 studs along this side it’s 11 studs and the height is 17 plates you know had they made that 24 studs had they made that 12 and okay that height there might be 18. it’s just going to make so much more sense in terms of being able to stack and pack them as then they’re in nice multiples of fours or sixes or twos yeah the dimensions that they have are basically three prime numbers 17 11 and 23.
Maybe that is intentional and it’s only the crazy people who go through and do things like this the thing that will be interesting in the future is just seeing how far you can push this I don’t feel I’ve pushed this a huge amount I mean I certainly feel that has been pushed to the absolute maximum and when I took that up to the counter I was almost prepared for them to say no.
In which case you’d lose about 51 plates and five bricks out of that to get that to close properly and this one you know if you’re skimming off the top and things like that you’ll probably lose on maybe plates just because of the way that some of these are stacked is there a more optimal stacking configuration from this than possibly could be I don’t think you get too much more happy to be proven wrong
However and from a storage point of view I think having these and having them stacked on top of one another is going to be more space and user friendly the only downside is is that if you have the lid closed on that yeah what’s in there where as opposed to this what’s in there these you can obviously say straight through what are your thoughts on the new boxes have you been able to come up with any optimal stacking configurations.
On your way out hit that Thumbs Up Button a subscribe and a share never goes astray thanks for watching this far and if you leave the word boxes in the comment we’ll know you’ve watched the whole thing if you’re looking for some Lego Storage Solutions check out this video if you want to see how our custom Lego Sonic the Hedgehog mock Compares with the official set check out this video alternatively if you’ve ever wondered why Lego monorail is so epic check out this video otherwise this might be of interest that’s it from us here at familybricks and we’ll see you in the next video.
Is this fan made LEGO Sonic the Hedgehog Green Hill Zone alternative/expansion MoC any good?! In this video we are going to look at an alternative build to the official release of Sonic the Hedgehog LEGO Ideas set 21331. Is this any good as an expansion module to add to the official set? We will look at the individual modules, compare Dr Robotniks/Eggman’s and a couple of suggested layouts. We will also highlight a few errors we found in the instructions showing you how to build everything.
PDF Instructions for this expansion are available for free from rebrickable.com and are by the original fan designer of the set – Viv Grannell, also known as toastergrl online. This is a smart move by the fan designer as it encourages you to buy another set, or 2, like what I’ve done here. https://rebrickable.com/mocs/MOC-99580/toastergrl/21331-modules-badniks-expansion-pack/#details
If you want to find out more details about my custom Sonic the Hedgehog level MoC, check out our video card above or details on my website mattelder.com/sonic for Free instructions.
Transcript from the show
G’day everyone! Matt Elder family bricks here and today we’re going to look at this alternative build to the official release of Sonic the Hedgehog Lego ideas set 21331. Is this any good as an expansion module to the official set? We’ll look at the individual models, compare the Dr Robotnik/Eggman’s and a couple of suggested layouts. We also highlight a few errors we found in the instructions showing you how to build everything.
PDF instructions for this expansion are available for free from rebrickable.com and are by the original fan designer of this set, Viv Grenell, also known as Toaster Girl online. This is a smart move by the fan designer as it encourages you to buy another set or two like what we’ve done here.
This video is brought to you by Macatsim Holiday Homes in Margate and Broadstairs. Great for a week’s holiday or a weekend Escape being just over an hour east of London UK. Treat yourself to amazing sunsets, a Lego wall or great food. Visit www.macatsim.com and mention this YouTube video and we’ll look after you.
So you we have the official set with the Robotnik on one side and then this is the rebuild extension set so you can see this is using all the pieces and this wall does quite well with what it’s got. It does feel that there’s less volume and bulk of stuff there. So we’ll look at some of the individual components starting off with the larger one which is going to be this sort of section here with two lamps, a palm tree there with a TV on the top and a little hint of spring there some little recessed parts there and then the spinning around to the back very similar sort of thing. A little unfortunate that that blue sticks out but when you put some plates along it you won’t see it.
A couple of smaller little platforms just to be able to bulk things out and you’ve got there with the little plant. Same sort of build as the original set and then split levels here with another TV and then over here you’ve got this corner piece. Then you have some of these guns here used to the spikes just done quite well here. We have one of the enemies which is really cool the way that they’ve utilized these see-through parts for wings using the same includes speakers for the face. Another enemy made up and looks pretty cool nice little Sharpie spiky and a Dr Robotnik or Eggman depending upon your market.
And parts of this are the same as the one in the set but then other parts are different. It does feel a little bit on the fragile side and certainly before you put the hands on it sort of doesn’t stand properly and has a tendency to fall backwards but good to see it trying. And the weapon is only just in there, it’s very easy to have that pop out.
So now there’s just different ways that you configure these and put them together. So now we’re going to combine the sets and you start off by taking the black pieces off the side of the official set, broken them up into the modules and now starting to reconfigure them all together here and they slide together pretty easily with the use of Technic pins and axles.
“So here is the module layout. One option is a mix and match of the extension set plus the actual original base Sonic set. You can sort of see that the first two bits are an extension of some of the original and come around using this corner piece to come back down into sort of more the original set with the loop there and a Robotnik. It gives a nice bit of variation and being in a corner module like that, you then have some flexibility if you don’t have long straight runs or you need to get it to wrap around or even if you want to extend it even further.
I can certainly appreciate wrapping around because this is my other custom Moc one which is much bigger and trying to find a space to have all the different parts you need, sometimes you just have to have a bit of flexibility. If you want to find out more details about my custom Sonic the Hedgehog level Moc, check out our video card above or details on my website matilda.com/Sonic for free instructions.
Now we’re going to take this apart and reconfigure it so it’s all in one flat straight line. So, you put the modules in with the pins again and then add the black side tiles in that we’ve got from before on both sides. This is module layout suggestion number two and it’s obviously just all in a straight line. Again, it’s mixing in the original set with also the alternate build that they got here and it gives just a nice little panoramic visual going across the whole length. So as you move along, you can see all the various little elements and it just expands it and gives it that more full sort of feeling.
Obviously, when you just got the base set to deal with, there’s only so much you can do at a certain price point but certainly, you know, adding in some more, you get a nice bit of variation within it. The nice thing is that the original fan designer has gone through and you can sort of see over on this side is the fan design palm tree and over here is the actual official one. So they’re trying to keep the language of it the same so it all fits together and it’s not too jarring and I think they’ve done a really good job at that.
If you look closely at some of the pieces, you’ll notice that here being the set it’s got two high but some of the places over here it’s three but that’s just because they’ve had to work within the piece that have been available in the set. So if you’re looking for those very particular details, you’ll be able to pick them up as being slightly different and it’s interesting to see this take on Eggman.
Because obviously, this is the main set and then this is the brick build. They’ve never redone the head certainly there’s a bit of criticism around the way that that was done. So at least you got another alternative. So at the end of the day, would I recommend going out and getting a second set to be able to do this?”
I think it’s gonna be if you’re a really hardcore sort of fan or you like the additional expansion to really give it that Fuller sort of volume and build out you will have a lot of extra pieces left over and it might just be waiting until some more extension sets come out later on in 2023 which are rumored but certainly if you’re able to pick this up at a discount which they do do occasionally it might be worthwhile doing once you finish the main build.
This gives you an idea as to the number of pieces that are left. It feels like there’s about half. Some of those black ones will get used when you put it all together. Only downside with trying to build this set is you do have so many pieces so it’s probably worthwhile trying to null it out if you want to do it quickly. It’s been a while since I built the original set and now I remember I’ve forgotten just how tedious it can be putting together some of these one by one plates.
So you get the two High plates throughout the whole thing like you know 10 of these eight of those one step one slide issue at step 48 there’s meant to be three of these pieces but in the set I’ve only come across two so far. I’m going to pull the next one out of my own collection but enough to see I’ve started to sort through some of the colors to try to figure out if I am just have it buried under something or if it’s actually missing. And at step 93 we seem to be short of one of these one by two reddish brown tiles so I have to go into the Personal Collection and grab one.
Thanks very much for watching and if you leave the word end in the comments we’ll know you’ve watched this far. If you’ve enjoyed this video hit that thumbs up button and consider subscribing to the channel. A share also never goes astray. If you’d like to check out our fan Moc versus the official set, click the video here. If you’d like to see a review of the chemical plant zone expansion Moc, check this video. Alternatively, you might like these videos with more details on our fan Moc and how to build it. That’s it from us here at familybricks. Thanks for watching and we’ll see you in the next video.
In this video we are going to review JMBricklayer 30001 3 In 1 Medieval Weapon Kit. This consists of the Catapult, Ballista and Bombard. We will start with an unboxing of the set and then look at the features of the 3 builds, and any other items of note. Following this we will then review the set overall in terms of Build Experience, Value for Money, Displayability, and Playability, and finishing off with an overall score for this set.
This was provided to us by the manufacturer but the opinions and review scores will be our own. There may also be an affiliate link around the video for which we may receive something (which helps the channel continue to make videos such as these). So let’s get into it.
G’day everyone Matt Elder of family bricks here and in this video we’re going to review the JM bricklayer 3001 three-in-one medieval weapon kit this consists of a catapult blister and a bombard we will start with an unboxing of the set and then look at the features of the three builds and any other items of note following this we will then review the set overall in terms of build experience value for money displayability playability and then finishing off with an overall score for this set this was provided to us by the manufacturer but the opinions and review scores will be our own there may also be an affiliate link around the video for which we may receive something which helps the channel to keep making videos such as these so let’s get into it.
Unboxing
So this is how it arrives to me I have an outer mailer and then the actual box inside bubble wrapped so I’ll just crack this open here it is I’m packaging here it looks like it’s got some of the parts of it are shiny and then just the black background and it’s the remarkable ancient machines thirty thousand one 568 pieces three in one so you can see the three different ones there having a look over on the back back is just straight up and down details uh a few little other bits and pieces there again the three different models on the side and your general details and one of them on the other side there looks like it’s got a little Target as well so overall a relatively nice presentation I would shame the boxes a little banged up let’s open it up and see what’s inside.
Box Contents
So with everything laid out you have the box there and then we have the seven numbered bags instruction book four wheels and the additional bag with the rubber bands and elastics so having a look at the instruction book it’s got a nice weight to it nice glossy finish it looks like it just uh general information and then straight into the building looks like some pretty standard instructions what’s that showing you how to fire that one and then I guess this is then the start of the next one so it’s interesting 116 and 117 starts the next build and 230 from looks at you build the last one build the target on the back so it all looks nice clear concise and no sort of Frills with it.
Catapult
Here we have the Catapult design which is really cool and it’s pretty solid and chunky each of these main three pillars here you got the two on the angle and the one there all solid really supporting the structure and the mechanism you’ve got the spiky Wheels which you can imagine during the day if that’s rolling along and you’re here it’s going to slice you up on the front you’ve got another sort of aggressive spiky design as well and this is common dual three models so if you are building between them just take that piece off and don’t take it completely apart because you can use it on the other one.
Color Scheme
The color scheme is this sort of earthy retro sort of style so you have these types of sand blues for the metallics and then you’ve got sort of the the Browns and the greens and the desaturated oranges for more sort of like woods and then your elastics and rubber bands are generally in the black here.
Elastics / Rubber Bands
Speaking of elastics we’ll just come over here I’ll show you the mechanism in a moment you’ve got the main one is here which is really really taut and stretched so the only thing I’d be a little concerned with is the longevity of the rubber bands if you leave this sitting on a shelf for a long time I know with other ones I’ve had they can break down or really stretch in that and in this case here this one is actually you don’t have to take half of this apart to have it like lying loose so as at least the ones in the back here controlling that sort of mechanism you can just roll them straight off and they wouldn’t be too much of a problem to keep in a relatively loose state so you don’t lose stretchiness over time. I’ve got this on a pretty frictionless type surface so it does move pretty well easily.
Firing Mechanism
So let’s have a look at the main functioning mechanism you’ve got the arm here which is going to go up and down you can sort of see that rubber band in there moving about as you do that and then in the back you have these sort of go up and down and that’s going to be your catch mechanism for it being ready to fire so we’ll just try to get this down in here that drops down try to lift both sides make sure it catches there so it’s there ready to be fired let’s move it over and then to fire it just press down and off it goes now to go find that thing.
Projectile
Found that thing down behind the radiator which was fun and it’s actually a crisscross of these rubber pieces probably a good thing it’s rubber because when the Catapult fires it’s got a fair bit of kick to it so if that was solid and that kept on hitting anything I could imagine that that’s going to make a mess of things or at least this is somewhat a little bit safer and this is the leftover pieces for the set which feels to be about another third again so it feels like they haven’t really compromised the model and just made sure that they’ve had the appropriate number of pieces and types for each model to get it to work.
Target
This is a cool little Target simple straightforward build but just adds a little bit of extra Dimension to it so if you were getting good at these things you could go through and try to hit it and practice doing that and this is the brick separator which comes with the model which is kind of interesting a little bit different and not really sure what this for but it’s got a little bit of flex and opens and closes so imagine just to grab onto something the only downside is doesn’t really have anything if you’re trying to get Studs off studs so if you’re trying to get these off nothing really sits in there not like one of these ones where you just put it on and get it off there.
Ballistic / Ballista
Here is the ballistic or what you might think of as a giant crossbow on Wheels and the bass structure similar sort of design to the others so again you’ve sort of got the wheels with the blades some nasty little spikes and blades at the front there and then the main differences up here although this base is built in a different way too the overall top superstructure mechanism is relatively straightforward just a couple of rubber bands elastic bands in there you’re able to slide that main part back which we’ll walk in here when that flips up like that and then just pushing down here is the release mechanism and the firing works pretty consistent and it’s pretty good your missile as such is just a Long Rod with a cone type piece on the end and that just slides straight in and the firing mechanism is pretty straightforward to be this PC sliding along when that lifts up.
Building Quirk
The only slight building Quirk I would say is when you’re putting on these elastic bands again they want you on page 308 when you do the step to basically thread it in and around through the pile on there which there’s just not enough clearance in there to actually do it so I think again it’s one of those things where it sounds like a good idea to do it digitally but it’s not until you actually do it so let’s say back a couple of steps about 295-ish when you’re doing this here you should be threading that elastic band around there so then when you put it in there you can then get it I had built the whole thing and then had to come back and pull this apart that was just a pain.
It’s not the end of the world but it’s just more of a hassle to have to come back and do that otherwise everything else is pretty straightforward as you’d expect and again this is just one of the ones where you wrap it around and then you pull this through and just connect it straight onto it and it’s pretty good to be able to hit the target and it’s pretty consistent and here are all the leftover pieces so you probably use maybe about half but given that that superstructure of sitting on the wheelbase is quite simple it’s not all that surprising.
Bombard
Here we have the bombard which is a good size and it’s nice and Big And Chunky and it’s pretty solid the main mechanism sits on there pretty tight rolls relatively well this is a pretty smooth frictionless surface all around just some nice detailing the spikes chains a little bit of gribbling on the side and the earthy wooden type color scheme of sort of you know the Browns the oranges and the the greens work quite well and they get sort of quite believable as something which is Medieval and this one’s firing mechanism you come in here either side there’s a piece in here you slide back that piece here it moves up and down and we’ll just clip into there and then from the back here you have the release mechanism which you push down and it fires out.
Issue
Now this is probably where this model starts having a few little problems I’m assuming that I built this correctly which I’m pretty sure that I have this is quite rigid in the way that it sits there the way that you go about firing it however it does seem to have some pretty little quirks about it and things just have to be just right on the back here you’ve got a piece here which if it goes down too far it almost seems like it will catch when it goes to slide in so try that again like that so it hit there and it didn’t allow it to slide all the way through and when I’m firing this I’m holding it in a very particular way.
Kids Struggling
When the kids first saw this and they went to fire it it took about eight or nine goes because they could get it out and even then I had to say here don’t hold it there up hold it here sort of thing because a lot of the sliding mechanisms there it seems to have very tight tolerances and if it’s not just spot on it won’t fire properly so again if we just go through you can sort of see as I lifted that up that slid back in didn’t do that again that locks down if you have that all the way sort of down like that when it goes to fire you’ll see that it’ll get caught again and then if I lift that piece up at the back it then slides the rest of the way in so with that one there it seems to be there.
You’ve got to have that kicked up a bit but not too much because then it seems like it’ll hit that part there so probably about 135 degree angle so you can sort of see that in there try that and again something got caught it almost seems like when you push this down you can’t push it down too much otherwise when that slides in it will get hit and caught again so let’s just try that again that might help if that goes all the way back in slightly up still having an issue so I’m just going to make sure this time too that when you slide it in you put it in as the way the instructions suggests so maybe there’s a bit too much friction if you do it one way as opposed to the other of that push this mechanism all the way back down to the catch make sure that’s going all the way in that’s up a little bit let’s push down.
Partial Solution
I’m still having issues okay let’s give this another try and what I’m going to try to do this time is actually with my fingers there be lifting up when I push down just so that it gives just the marginal bit of extra clearance for the mechanism to slide in so push this down here I’ll lift this up a bit and then at the same time push down on that and that seems to fire out much better so I think that’s where the design issue might be with this again I’m pretty sure that this is built correctly because
Further Examination
When you put these pieces in here there’s only certain ways for that to go but I did notice and I’ll take the wheels off to show this these side pieces when they attach on they seem to just slightly change the angle so if I just detach these a little bit because there’s one on either side so you can sort of see how all that is sitting in there lift that up a little bit okay so that should be more at rest there so these positions seem fixed these are pretty solid in there now what I find is if you just put these straight on this little Edge bed here will catch here so if we just try to put that on there the natural tendency is for that not to be cleared like it’s just a fraction of a millimeter and then to put that on all the way you kind of just got to lift it up ever so subtly and that really seems to lock that into position so there’s no other ways particularly when you put the other side on as well again same sort of issue I know it’s not 100 aligned because the pins are not always in but that’s where you can I assume get this in here just in there.
When I first put that on, it made an indent into that piece so that’s in there and that’s sort of holding that whole piece in place and firm and rigid and as I sort of going through before just when this mechanism slides in here there’s not a great deal of clearance in this back piece here when that comes out let’s get that to catch so you just got what you’ve got on this Square rectangular piece here there’s a few studs I know it’s difficult to see but this actually slides over the cross of those studs and that’s going to be providing friction which is going to be slowing down this release mechanism here’s that bit I was talking about before and that’s how it releases again it could be encountering problems because I just haven’t built this correctly but if this is a way that it’s meant to be it just seems like the tolerances are just slightly off which really slows down that mechanism and as I said you’ve got to be you know lifting this up and pushing that down at the same time so.
Real vs Digital ?!
You can sort of see how these pieces here are touching and even if you move it around you can kind of always see in there there’s no sort of daylight or clearance through to the back and even on the other side again the same sort of thing there it’s it’s touching it but then if you look at the instructions or at least one of the pictures of it you know this is generally the only thing you can really see I don’t know whether this is a digital render but you can just see it looks like there’s a bit of Gap in there so that makes me I wonder if this is digital it’s very easy to miss those tolerances or if I built it wrong that might explain it so they could be just a slight little issue there and there’s no all the real I suppose that’s the other angle that you can see in there and again it looks like you can see through it so has me a little stumped
Rubber Bands / Elastics
The other thing from experience is that these rubber bands or elastics here are really really taut so I think if you’re storing this um you’d probably want to do it so that those are just released like that because certainly I’ve had on other mocks that I’ve built elastics which have been stretched for a long time and you know after a couple months of course when they’re taught the whole time they’re going to lose their elasticity and eventually they will just snap so I mean that’s relatively easy to get on and off there because certainly when I built this it was late at night and then I’m filming this in the next morning so overnight I’d taken both of these off because the last thing I’d want is for them to sort of snap but you know that might just be something to be aware of the longevity of those if you leave them in that place.
For the most part this is pretty solid again I think the problems you’ll find is when you’re trying to use this mechanism here and you’re grabbing onto it in weird places in particular these front bits here if you just move your fingers on them slightly they will come off relatively easy but these are just minor and then on this one here the ones on the edge you’re only attached by one stud so it’s just a shame they probably couldn’t have figured out a way to attach that there but given that angle and things maybe it wasn’t possible and of course with these spikes sticking out you know too much vigorous action and they’re going to pop off but they’re locked in there pretty tightly and when you’re putting these rubber bands elastics on it’s not really clear in the instructions how you sort of do it so the way that I found is you go through there once you bring it back over and you pass one end through the other and then that will give it that tightness there and then once you’ve had it sat on here for a while that then really locks in there and also to notice how I’ve got it on the upper side because originally I had it down on the undersign like that and it was further down and again because that’s lining mechanism is an extra bit of friction and that won’t slide back properly so you need to be paying attention to that.
Instructions
The instructions for this one are pretty good for the most part but it does feel like you are doing a lot of steps and you’re being quite dense in them and there are a few little quirky ones and it’s not a hundred percent clear so you can sort of see with this one here when you’re putting the plates on it’s good that it sort of points out where these red ones are but you don’t ever get to see it all together so you can’t really double check because when you go on to the next step you’ve then put on two of these long pieces here so you can’t see well where’s it meant to line up and there’s a few little ones like that throughout this set of instructions so you are taking your sort of best guess but a lot of times depending upon where the pins lie and just checking that your pins are all right you can sort of do it by process of elimination.
How to Loop Rubber Band?
The other quirky little step I found is around 179 they don’t actually show you how to Loop these over which I’ll go through in a separate one and show you but this can be a real pain because it took me a while to figure out how to actually get this to work because it’s just like here oh it goes in there but it’s not that straightforward and simple so certainly for your younger hands and things like that you can see people going to run into this and go well how do I deal with this and there’s no sort of other place in the instructions which show you how to do these little loops and Knots which I think is really really needed like I understand when you’re building instructions showing these flexible sort of pieces and things has always been a challenge but this being such a critical part and step and if you can’t get this it’s going to drive you a little bit insane.
Awhile to Connect In
The other thing is when you do this assembly it’s like 179 but then these pieces don’t actually Connect into anything for quite a number of steps so they’re still floating there then you’re going off and building this whole other assembly while these pieces are still just floating so you know this whole other assembly you’re joining the assembly together they’re still floating there still floating there it’s at step 202 that they actually then go through and attach to something now this might seem overtly critical but the thing that I found when you put these pins in through that elastic for the first time they have a tendency to fall out pretty quickly so you need to be able to get them in there and make them taut and everything so I think this is one of the things where they’ve built it and then probably just digital instructions and then not really tested it because for mine you’d almost be want to be building this whole sub assembly first before you put in that elastic on step 179 but again that’s just something which is really nuanced but something to be aware of if you are building it so when you finish the build for this these are the leftover pieces so you can see probably used on two thirds three quarters of them this model does seem to use a lot of the bits.
Rubber Band Tying Trick
now I just wanted to go through and give you a quick demonstration and show you how you get this sort of knot here on step 179 so I’ll have that just as the pin piece there you have your elastic what you do is you grab one end of it and roll it over so then you get these two Loops here forming and then you rotate the two Loops in on themselves so it comes over like that have your PIN put it in the middle there and then you just gradually pull on this other end here and that is how you get that in there
Overview Review Scoring
Now to give an overall review for the set we’re looking at the JM bricklayer 30001 medieval three in one set released in 2022 and it consists of the Catapult bombard and the ballistic it has a price of 39.99 us which is about 35 pounds and about the same in Euros the set consists of 568 pieces this comes in at about 6.2 P per piece or about 7 cents per piece which anytime you’re getting these days under 10 cents per piece on average you’re doing quite well each of the models will take about an hour hour and a half to build the build experience we go 75 because we took a few points off for critical points in the instructions either just not being there or really not clear the builds are nice and challenging but the instructions would benefit from just having a final polish to really smooth things out value for money we gave 90 because for what you get in the price you pay we find it to be great value you are getting three distinct models with three distinct firing mechanisms the brick quality is on par with any other major brand
Playability
For playability we gave this 75 because it is kind playable once you get beyond the firing mechanism and rolling it around it doesn’t really offer too much beyond that
Displayability
For displayability we gave it a solid 80 the models display quite well and got some nice details in them but nothing that really knocks your socks off.
General Comments
The target market would appear to be those who like these sort of medieval type weaponry and Military fans it may also appeal to those people who like the beam and pin type Building Systems the pros of the set is that it’s a great value with three functioning models which are completely different from one another there are a variety of building techniques which are used in it and it’s generally a quality product the cons would be that some of the instructions are not clear in key steps there’s no sort of little figures that come along with them and it’s very much what you see is what you get so in summary it’s a great value three in one functioning set if you’re into this sort of subject matter and builds then you’re really going to enjoy this so the overall score comes in at a solid and respectable 80 percent
Summing Up
what are your thoughts is this something you’d be interested in purchasing let us know in the comments below or just type the word “JM” and we’ll know you’ve watched the complete video. If you’ve enjoyed don’t be afraid hit that thumbs up button and it will be super awesome and subscribe and share link around the video to where this can be purchased if you’d like to see how my custom Sonic the Hedgehog mock Compares with the official set check out this video otherwise here are some other videos you might be interested in thanks very much for watching this family bricks video and we’ll see you in the next one
In this video, we are going to have an extensive look over this Super Malio / Mario LEGO Compatible Peach’s Castle by Lepin / LQS 67601. We will look at the features of the set, a time lapse speed build and examine the instructions. We will look at the design and consider where it originated from along with our usual build experience, playability, display ability and value discussions.
Following on from this, we will sequentially look at the build after each bag to get a better sense of the internals and construction process. Finally we will leave off on a few little issues we found with the build.
Further information on the Holiday Homes / Airbnb / Short Term Lets can be found at http://www.macatsim.com/
Both flats, Broadstairs and Margate are about 75-90 minutes east of London UK. Margate has a LEGO themed Holiday Lets / Airbnb Short Term Stay awith a LEGO Wall. Broadstairs has an iconic red London bus bunk bed (at time of recording).
Time codes to the Video: 0:00 Introduction 0:55 Features of the Set 3:08 Closer Details 5:45 The Back of the Castle 6:30 Comparing with LEGO Disney Castle 7:10 Timelapse Speedbuild 9:36 Instruction Book 13:39 Design, 3d Model & Rebrickable 16:01 Build Experience 17:15 Playability 18:00 Displayability 18:30 Value 19:00 Unboxing 19:32 Everything Included 20:16 Sticker Sheet 20:28 Bag 1 21:00 Bag 2 21:33 Bag 3 21:59 Bag 4 22:19 Bag 5 22:49 Bag 6 23:05 Bag 7, 8 & 9 23:32 Bag 10 & 11 24:48 Build Issues 25:16 Summing Up
