Mr Benn

Have a look on the store calendars for your country - in a lot of places there are double VIP points on all purchases between 1 - 15 March.

Enter it in the competition here on Eurobricks! (from Front page!)

Very nice indeed! Wasn't the little holodisk round though (making the new 1x1 round tiles good candidates?) - or course I may be remembering it wrong, in which case ignore me. Help me Obi-Wan, you're my only hope!

Given that it specifically states that the accessories cannoy be used either, I believe this is a big no to using the figure or its accessories. But I would also guess that you could have a place in your vignette for the accessories to go!

I spotted this too - luckily the colour of the birds on the roof doesn't *actually* matter in terms of the aesthetics, I've swopped the colour to one of the other greys and saved a good few pounds - I'll look out for the 'correct' colour in the future!

Back in the olde days of 12V (now hitting its 30th birthday!) there was a remote controlled decoupler, 7862 (http://brickset.com/detail/?Set=7862-1) But it didn't work all that well. And there have been none since. I'm sure there are some snazzy moc designs for these around now, some people on this board are amazing at their ingenuity for improving the functionality of the new sets!

The best you could hope for is to find them in the PaB at your local Lego store - you can get a LOT of those into one of the cups rather than paying a few cents each! Sadly the only colours I've seen them in at the stores is trans orange and lime green... only good for psychadelic ballast!

Great to see more 12V layouts on the boards! Same problem as ever with Lego trains though - at some point your wife/S.O. is going to demand their floor space back! Some of the modifications that you can find for track and layouts - like the bridge rectifier above - are brilliant, but I try to keep things simple by just making sure there are no reversing loop-style issues in there in the first place (thought obviously this does restrict design a little bit!)

Whilst the pdf quality definitely isn't as good, I printed out the manuals for Market Street and Cafe Corner - it's certainly nicer building from paper than a backlit PC screen especially if you're looking at it for EVER! Of course it does involve staying late at work and then hogging the colour printer, but apart from that it's fine ;-) I've seen how much the genuine instructions go for - for super-completists that's fine, but I think it's a ridiculous amount to pay when ultimately you don't display the instructions!

^ This. I don't know why people get so upset about MB or Kreo - it's ALWAYS good to have an alternative, and actually having more competition keeps Lego on their toes a little bit more. There are too many good licenses around for Lego to deal with, so I'm sure that there are a lot of people around who are pleased that Hasbro has released the Transformers Kreo sets (despite some opinions here that Transformers are 'horribly overrated' - try telling the general population of 6 to 10 year old boys that!)

I think that the most accurate reply to your question is 'it's variable'. It ranges from excellent to unbelievably shoddy. Good discussion on brickset about this: http://www.bricksetforum.com/discussion/2119/uk-rest-of-eu-pixmania-15-off-e-g-kings-castle-60-postage/p1

This sort of question tends to come around quite regularly... I know a lot of people, particularly on collecting forums, can find it very hard to break the habit of keeping sets together. I think that it's part of the slightly-OCD nature of Lego fans that makes us worry about ever being able to put original sets back together - sort of the 'opportunity cost' of using the bricks from the set, to put it into economic terms! Personally, I keep my modular buildings, Star Wars stuff (and, for some reason, trains) built as instructed, but I'm finding the custom building urge stronger and stronger the further on I get a greater desires just to open up set bags just for those one or two pieces... there are models that will never fit into the city(ish) theme of my layout, such as the Pharoah's Quest line, and whilst I have completed the PQ line all of the bricks will be used for other things - I think there will be a Egyptian museum on the horizon! The solution in many ways is to ensure you have good parts sorting, so eventually you can find all the pieces that you might want if you ever want to rebuild again, but as others have said, once you start firstly tweaking your existing stuff, and then full-on custom building, you won't be going back!

I have two sets opened and one in the box - so the Emerald Night has two coaches currently, and I have changed my other engine to red (very easy, cost me about £7 on Bricklink in new parts) to be a Hogwarts Express, so it can pull three Harry Potter set coaches (i.e. the doorless deathtraps) instead!

I tend to pick up keychains when they're on sale, then I summon my inner strength to yank the holding pin straight out of the top of the head.. a little modelling putty and a tiny spot of paint is enough to cover the hole and then you have yourself a minifig! I have enough stuff hanging off my keys already (notably... keys) that I don't need anything else dangling around...

You're not alone. Brickset discussion here: http://www.bricksetforum.com/discussion/2173

Nice review Whitefang :) I quite like this set, apart from the fact that the groom looks more like a 16 year old on prom night with the magician's torso - luckily there are a few better 'suit' torsos that would suit the groom better. The bride on the other hand is really nice - I like the fact that they have made her the same height as the groom for a change, and how the dress is now longer than the standard dress slope! I certainly wouldn't expect these to be given out as wedding favours to people given the cost (we didn't do favours, we did a raffle instead so a handful of people got really nice things and it was great!), but it certainly would be a nice gift to give to people getting married sometime!

Really realy nice MOC. Would love to see it with the top off to see what's going on inside. Also - and I'm sure it would be a pain to do - you could potentially add some blocks with studs pointing out in the region just behind his cape, so as they whizzed past they hit the cape to give a bit of a flapping/movement effect...

Brilliant work - I'd love to see this integrated into a layout of similar quality!

I do like the 'minifig-eye-view' of the town - it always makes even a small town seem so much more interesting. And I also like the integration of the PoP stuff into it too! As has been previously mentioned, this is really spoiled by the poor quality pictures - really recommend that you take the time to take some better ones before posting more photos.

I think that Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright are people that know they wouldn't be where they were without the fan community, and since the days of Spaced have always been good about reaching out to fans - even though Simon is now a superhollywoodmegastar it's great to see he's still taking an interest... I don't know if Lego would ever release a bar - it's not quite the child-friendly thing they're looking for - but I really like your modular pub regardless of the movie connection!

This is fantastic - the Railway series book was the first thing I thought of when I saw this, even before I started reading any text around this! Does is actually use any rack and pinion mechanism to go uphill, or is the chain in the middle of the track just for show? Would love to see the bottom of the train if it's actually working like this. Might make corners a little tough though!!

Having just recently put several of the boxed sets together, I just wanted to see if the things that bug me about the building process really do it for anyone else too... So as it's just after Christmas, we've all had to spend too long with our parents and so a good rant is really good for all of us! So, to start off, I hate... 1. Seeing x2/x3/x4 in instructions after a very dull little build 2. Seeing in the piece call out box 'x32', usually when it's hard to find 1x1 or 1x2 plates 3. Finding out that the 1x2 brick you need at step 45 is the one that you mistakenly used at step 4, right in the middle of the wall that now has a lot of delicate structure around it! I'm sure you all have plenty more... let that rage out!

Loving this house - a really smart exterior, and a brilliant interior too!

For the last 3 series I've just gone and bought a box - it just makes life easier (yes, and more expensive I suppose, but beats trawling around trying to get full sets)... Anyway, in my experience there do seem to be 'clusters' in the boxes - for example I got through two rows of the box without getting a single one of three of the figures, at least 3 of each of which then cropped up in the next 20. So I don't think it's entirely random - the boxes must have to be packed in a certain way anyway to ensure that the right quantity of each figure is in the box, there's probably a very secret formula to finding that fig you want!

It is indeed from the Captains Cabin POTC set - I have a few of these so I'd like to make the globe a bit of a recurring motif throughout the bank at some point!