Str0ngbad

4. 1 point 17. 1 point 29. 1 point

Welcome! It sounds like you are in need of bricklink. It's a website where individuals from around the world sell Lego parts, figs, and sets. Click on the buy tab and then search for parts. Choose a category such as 'Minifig Hair' and browse for what you are after. It may seem confusing at first but it's worth learning your way around. For any questions you have about how to find your way or use the features on Bricklink, there is this thread. You can usually get great answers pretty quickly there. Have fun. :)

I would enjoy a vikings theme ( though not as much as fantasy) but i find it unlikely right after this pirate theme. Only time will tell but with LOTR/Hobbit out of the way, I am sure I will be all over whatever they box up for us.

AmperZand, I do not own the Nidhogg for comparison but I am familiar with the parts and am confident Smaug is the larger creature. I didn't see a comparison picture of the various tails above but Smaug's is much longer and more detailed. Eyeballing him against a sheet of paper, I think his wingspan is roughly 17 inches and he is about 19 inches long. Wyvern, dragon, I don't care. I get somewhat tired of people correcting others about wyverns when I don't think the definition of what is/isn't a dragon is something the English tradition has the right to decide. Some eastern dragons have no wings so I don't think a little variance in how the front feet are attached is so significant. I am a big Tolkien guy. I left the third movie livid because of how very untrue to the book it was. However, the representation of Smaug is not one of the many things that bothered me but something that I was comfortable allowing license for. Regardless of his Middle Earth accuracy, the Lego creature is incredible. His front appendages are incredibly pose-able, versatile, and actually far better suited for use as legs than Lego's other molded dragons. Wardancer, I think a forest dragon Smaug would be wonderful. If you ever do get him painted, please be sure to post it. If it were me though, I would not replace his wing-hands with other limbs. I absolutely love them the way they are.

MAB is right. The shaved piece was my first try, I later just threw whole bricks in. If you ever DID need to shave pieces for some other crazy reason, I actually just used scissors... held at a ninety degree angle and dragged across the side of the brick. I am really looking forward to seeing your project.

The Gray Havens are my favorite location in all of Middle Earth and your build is quite elegant. My only critique would be the second floor of the round bit where the build joins at a ninety degree angle looks a little... skwooshed? I think it is because of how wide the arches are compared to their height. Regardless, it's a beautiful build.

Captain Pirate Man, in the interest of keeping this thread on topic, I am responding in a private message but the short of it is you can usually build your own cheaper if you are willing to put the time into it and possibly make some minor substitutions. This whole Castle 2016 business seems to me like it's just as speculative as a future LOTR wave except that even though I think the rumors are largely baseless, it will likely be true to some degree anyway. I wouldn't expect LEGO to leave a gap this large around for more than a year and I expect the Hobbit sets will be retired even earlier than usual so a castle-ish theme next year makes sense. I don't see much reason to discuss it now other than wishful thinking but wishful thinking is an enjoyable enough pastime.

I am not sure they ever planned on six total waves of Middle Earth sets given that when they got the license there were only going to be five total movies. Regardless though, I don't think LEGO is mistaken as to their sets' popularity considering the largest retailer in the US declined to stock the most recent wave of Hobbit sets. WalMart wouldn't do that without reason and that in itself will cut sales of the line by a tremendous amount. I would like to fault the movies for being subpar but if I'm honest, the franchise just doesn't appeal to the same number of kids as Star Wars and Super Heroes. I live near a retail store that is more or less a pawn shop for LEGO. They sell bulk bricks and sets but their primary product is minifigures. It is awesome. I'm there more often than I'd like to admit buying their awesome version of Pick a Brick and only twice in the last three years have I seen a kid come in who was primarily interested in the Middle Earth sets/characters. If I were ten now, I would be all over Batman and Ninja Turtles. All that said, I am terribly disappointed to not be getting another wave. The fact that your daughter and her friends love Middle Earth sets more than anything else (especially stuff saturated in pink) is awesome. While I don't think that translates to a significant oversight by TLG, I definitely think it is a parenting win. Hopefully she'll be happy with super heroes this year (I don't see that line ending anytime soon) and next year TLG may have something new that fills the current gap.

If you want Smaug (and he IS incredible), I would get him now. It's up to you whether you want to go in for the whole set or not though. Unless you manage to find this set at Target or Amazon on clearance (which I imagine is going to be very, very unlikely) I wouldn't expect the price to drop since LEGO is the only other retailer I know of. That's for the USA. If you have other retailers where you live who are carrying the set, you can weigh the likelihood of finding it marked down better than I can. I grabbed mine off of Bricklink last week for $45 as I expect the price to go up rather than down and let me tell you, I don't remember the last time I held something so delightfully swooshable. :D

This. If we don't get it in the next line, we'll probably have it in fifty shades of purple first. I personally would be thrilled to get the old inverted arches in bley too.

+1 to Ludzik. Very well packaged, pristine parts. Always a pleasure.

It also depends on the color of Lego you melt. Some of them separate rather than melting straight down. I know pearl gold and silver did this terribly but some of the other colors were not a smooth texture; kind of grainy. I know it worked great on the primary colors as well as on green and flesh and not so well on dark brown. I don't recall if I tried anything else. What I was experimenting with this for needed gold and silver and when neither of them worked, I left it behind for people who wanted yellow elf ears. :P Also, if you're still interested in this, you should check out Kaminoan's books as suggested above. I only have his first one but I think he may have published a second last year.

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All sold. Mods, would you please lock this?

Partly because the Hobbit films are finished after next year and were originally planned to finish this year. Mostly because of the amount of primary material, particularly characters, they have left to cover. This year we got five sets with 11 new characters or versions (prints) of characters. Left to be made are Galadriel, Eowyn, Merry, Pippin, Faramir, Denethor, Gothmog, Witch King, Gondorian soldier, Haradrim, Mumakil, Isildur and Sauron. I'm sure that I left someone out but that list is reasonably exhaustive and even assuming all of these get made it comes to only 13; barely more than this wave which had so few sets. I hope that I'm wrong about this. I would love for them to give this theme two more waves as I think that a lot of what I want to see might not make it into a 3 wave window but would be very likely given 4. I just don't see much reason to expect a fourth wave.