Let there be light!
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.
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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.
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