Black Falcon's Fortress Updated

[The_Cook]

I finished this little build a few months back and just as I got it photographed Mark Of Falworth posted his Black Falcon's Fortress Re-Imagined;mine somewhat pales when placed alongside that creations scale and ambition but then mine was designed to fulfil a certain specific set of criteria. My goals were to produce an updated 6074 Black Falcon's Fortress with an identical floorplan but using the modern building techniques from 10223 Kingdons Joust.

The floor plan of the castle remains the same; two towers flank a large gateway and a half timbered building with peaked roofs perches upon the back wall. The large panels making up the towers in the original have been replaced by a mix of facet bricks and cheese wedges attached to 1x1 brick with stud on the side. Arches have been retained in the correct places which necessitated some head scratching to ensure the facet detailing accomodated the arches.

The drawbridge has been updated to use chains and lifting beams; the lifting beams themselves are attached using technic friction pins so that the drawbridge can remain up.

Articulation of the structure has been retained; the two sides are hinged and can be folded outwards from a split in the back wall. This versatility in the early castles (375, 6080 and 6085) allowed them to be played with as either an enclosure or as wall.

The half timbered detailing of the building has been retained but recreated using techniques lifted from 10193 Medieval Market Village. I was surprised to find that 62361 Vehicle, Mudguard 1 1/2 x 6 x 1 with Arch is still quite rare and I ended up having to source one through bricklink.

The rear wall of the building used a staggered pattern of light bluish grey 1x3 bricks with dark bluish grey 1x1 rounds. Whilst this provides pleasant detail and texture the pattern itself forms 4 wide panels with no interlocking unlike the original 4444 Panel 2 x 5 x 6 Wall. Once the parapets were added the construction gained sufficient strength but it's nowhere near as robust as the original.

I'm very happy with what I acheived;the ambitions were deliberately modest. The structure alone (excluding minifigs, weapons, etc...) is 660 bricks which is significantly more that the 430 (including minifigs, weapons, etc..) of the original. Most of the additional bricks come from the large panels being replaced by brick built solutions.

 

The LDD file is available from my MOC-Pages posting.

[LM71Blackbird]

A simple build that captures the nostalgic feel of the older castle sets!

[MOMAtteo79]

6 hours ago, LM71Blackbird said:

A simple build that captures the nostalgic feel of the older castle sets!

I completely agree

[Ravelino]

This brings back old memories..

Sure in comparison to Mark of Falworth's HUGE rendition this somewhat pales, but so does the original and I must say yours does less so in my opinion.

I like how you kept true to the original floorplan while adding new accents to features like the drawbridge, the "half timbered building" (great name since it's not technically a keep I think) and the brick solution for the BUWPs(big ugly wall pieces).

Therein lie also some (minor) points of dislike..

From the looks of it although the bridge is drawn by the beams there is no way to actually draw the bridge except to "thumb the beams up"..

Maybe you could add some sort of a wedge which could be operated from within one of the gatetowers to retain the "functionality", since in the original I think you could operate it from on top with a spool?

I didn't much like the yellow arches in the original but hey we had blue yellow green or red(maybe a little brown and pink) so we just had to go with it... due to the fact you used browns and added the MMV style the house now also doesn't look too nifty in yellow either.. maybe replace the yellow with tan or dark tan to get a more realistic colorscheme?

That leaves us with the "half timbered building"..I like how you removed another BUWP from the build but the execution leaves us with a weird dull reverse yellow L..maybe if you changed the color it would already help but what would really help a lot is to centralize that window using 1x1 tiles and plates like this:

Front

Back

Don't mind my color scheme it's so you could see which heights I used and how they fit. So the grooved 1x1s you see are the tiles placed in the middle in front and at the sides in the back.

The front part is actually hanging like this but if you add that on top of the reverse slopes they should be a snug fit.(you could even consider not using the bottom plates at all and build directly onto the reversed slopes.

All in all great rendition of a classic and although not as extravagant as a recent cousin still a noteworthy addition to the catalog of black falcon inspired builds!

Ps to remove the gaps you could add 1x1s with snot and tiles on the snot stud..it looks way more gappy in the photo though

Edited May 30, 2018 by Ravelino
Adding pictures

[leafan]

It's beautiful! I can just imagine my Crusader knights invading it and sacking the fortress.

[Mr. President]

This is delightful! It's elegant and highly evocative of that era of Lego.

This is the kind of project that has more of a chance of getting through Ideas, too.

[VintageLegoEra]

Awesome! :)

[InvincibleEagle]

The modesty of classic Castle meets AFOL elaboration.