Commodore Hornbricker

If you live in California you know that in the 4th grade you do a California Mission project complete with model. My daughter built this one with a little assistance from me. Sorry the photos aren't great quality.

That was directed at me wasn't it.

I know. I wish I had more time. I do check in as often as I can. Keep me posted you dirty bluecoat!

Did I see a Tournament of Retribution III mention . The Bluecoats finally finished licking their wounds eh! That would be Awesome!

Thanks for the birthday wishes. I got two of these! Seemed fitting as I manage a City and work in City Hall. Turned 39....sheesh

Thanks for all the nice reply's. It was a lot of fun to build with her and to build again in general its been over a year since I built anything other than the new modular buildings by Lego. The model attracted a lot of positive attention at her school (most of the kindergarten through 4th grade boys have elevated her to god like status) and you'll all be happy to know she got an A+. My wife wanted to donate it to the Mission as a permanet display. I am thinking about it....its almost all my brown tiles on the darn roof, plus its gotta be around 10,000 pieces easy. Maybe a temporary display would be better .

WoW. That's a lot of sails. She must be really fast. Interesting idea

I am posting these picture again here so folks can comment on them if they'd like as the staff has asked that the memorial thread where I originally posted these not be cluttered with comments. I put together these three armies as a tribute to Zorro. There are 480 British soldiers. About half are the original redcoat torso. The other half is the new torso. They all have brown backpacks, blue epaulettes and brown muskets and all wear the new printed shako. The british forces also consist of 192 British Naval Officers. They are all the classic bluecoat torso and have yellow epaulettes, black bicorne hats and a cutlass. There are also 64 French Royalist soldiers fighting with the British. They consist of the two existing torsos that feature the Fleu de lys. They have white backpacks and epaulettes, and black tricorne hats with white feathers (eventually I'd like all to have the white rimmed tricorne (only 4 have those now). The Spanish Army has 418 soldiers. 320 soldiers are the brickbeard torsoblack epaulettes and black muskets. Eventually I'd like them to have black backpacks - but i'll have to wait until they become more common. The remainder are a mixture of classic armada torsos with black epaulettes and those wearing castle breast plates. All 418 have the spanish helmets. Finally there are 448 French soldiers. They are all the governor torso with brown backpacks, the old plain shako, brown muskets and red epaulettes. Most have white pants. 64 have red pants. In total there are 1,602 soldiers in formation to honor Zorro. It took a good deal of time to put together these armies. The French and Spanish armies I started working on earlier this year.

Great job. It is a beautiful set of village structures. Should go great with your pirate era theme.

First try and rinse them with the hose to get the bigger "bits" out as best you can. then toss a bunch in a pillow case and tie the end off real good and put them in the washing machine with some old towels and wash in hot water with detergent. I haven't had to deal with this specific issue but I have rreceived so really filthy Lego off EBay in the past and it has worked well.

Great review! With all the PotC sets out it is heart warming to see a classic set reviewed in such a nice way. Unlike punkkid364, I missed almost all the classic pirates originally because I was too old. While I now only own one of these sets officially I could build a lot of the out of my collection. Big Cam is right on. I'd buy a bunch today for that original price. Nice job.

Great call on the Indiana Selleck (he wishes he had that second chance). Nice little scene. Gotta love the clutter of the storage area. For the record most english officers are much more organized!

Lovin the broken bottle and the splatter effect. I had to place a big order! Brickforge is great and there stuff adds that little special extra to mocs especially comics.

In special circumstances sure...but I don't read his question to include that. It's funny because Lego never made a bomb ketch or rocket ship and the question was about ships Lego made. Like you say row a ships boat alongside 1st rate man o war and you sink her but what does that have to do with the question. My money's on the IFS vs any other Lego tall ship. I'd go SES finishing a distant second in fighting strength.

Hmmm. It occurs to me that since the IFS and the QAR and FD (if ever produced) aren't actually from the same theme, meaning the IFS is from a normal pirate line and the others are from PoTC a pirate line with magic/supernatural powers, couldn't you just as easily say that when the crew of the FD teleported over to the IFS that the crew of the IFS time traveled and came back in the Imperial Star Destroyer?

That's just funny

Bigger ships with a bigger professional crews and completely stocked with military supplies - wins every time. If you are a smaller ship, the Flagship doesn't want to sink you. She wants to slow you down to board you and take you as a prize. If you are on any of the other smaller official lego ships you have 4 chances: 1) run for it 2) surrender 3) scuttle your ship 4) have at least 2 or 3 ships of similar size with you to even the odds.

The overall topic of this survey was rather interesting. The Lego Group has always seemed like such a closed off company in terms of actual real dialog and direct communication with its AFOL fan base. I wonder if times are changing and they are recognizing many of the opportunities they are missing. I guess time will tell. I always enjoy these surveys. Just to mix things up this time I took the survey pretending to be Big Cam!

Thanks for all the comments! I love minifigure armies. They are all packed away in formation waiting for their next opportunity to gather on a field of battle (which we all know the Redcoats will win!).

Lovely little ship. The smaller ships are the hardest to build in my opinion as your piece choices become so limited and you don't have the scale and size to work around some of the limitations. Great color and detail. She looks a wee bit stumpy at the bow but I still love it.

Absolutely gorgeous. Like everything you do. I wouldn't change a thing! Keep on building. Your stuff always inspires me.

The Pearl has been available in my local area at Target, TRU and Lego stores here in California for about a week. I had heard Nov 1 for awhile so it caught me off guard.

Great review and a great set. I'd have to say after buying it and building it that the Pear ranks in the middle of the pack of all the ships Lego has produced. The black hull pieces and sails made this a must have for me. Well that and the fact I have all the ships so far and I'm not going to miss out on the Black Pearl, that would be stupid.

I love this. I am getting it for sure. Does Davey Jones, Pirate Sponge Bob and Patrick remind anyone else of Big Cam and Blackmoor and Croissant?

As my army building efforts continue I have decided to create a company of French Royalist soldiers to fight alongside my Redcoats.