ShaydDeGrai

As truly impressive as the exterior is, it's the interior detailing that really sells it for me; I just love seeing something this big that still sweats the little details and rewards the viewer for taking a closer look. Awesome work.

Great job on the wing mounting! Between the sweep and the torque those things must withstand, there's got to be some cool engineering going on under the covers. Oh yeah, the outside is impressive too

My dad saw action as a teenager in WWII and has vivid memories of it to this day (he can't remember what he did _yesterday_ but he remember the 1940's (both the war and its long aftermath, economically, politically and culturally)). I also have an elderly neighbor who lost both her parents and worked as forced child labor in a munitions factory during the war. So I don't think you can exactly say there's nobody around anymore who'd take offense to a LEGO tanks-for-tots theme. Don't get me wrong, I've built tanks, air planes, landing craft, pillboxes. I remember re-enacting the invasion of Normandy after watching The Longest Day and making an absolutely pathetic attempt at building an aircraft carrier after seeing Midway, but that was _me_ as a young teenager with _my dad_ there putting things in perspective as we worked, not a brightly colored package sitting on a shelf in a toy store screaming "play with me, I'm fun!" I hate the cliche, but there are certainly 'teachable moments' to be found in even the darkest passages of history, but it's not TLG's job to decide when a child is mature enough to "understand" history and mass marketing toys that, in some people's minds, glorify WWII without that understanding, is just not right. Aside from the terrible realities of war in general, WWII is a particular ongoing sore point because it was so encompassing and because of the many buried secrets that are only now coming to light. Atrocities on all sides are slowly being declassified. Archeologists are only now starting to take a hard look at concentration camp sites. On one hand, half the world's population has some personalized family lore about how the war impacted a parent, grandparent or family friend; on the other hand, holocaust deniers are alive and well across the Americas and in Europe and they keep trying to spin the facts, downplay the tragedies and weave lies in their favor. I've heard plenty of arguments along the lines of "but LEGO already does ..." or "Orcs/Pirates/Ninjas/Stormtroopers/Etc are violent, and they make them..." to this I can only respond thus: Given the history of the Hitler Youth and Nazi indoctrination programs, how do you think TLG and the media would react if a Neo-Nazi organization held a rally started handing out official LEGO Panzer Tank kits to every blond haired, blue eyed kid they could find while sending kids who didn't look "Arian" enough home empty handed ? (And if you don't think that would ever happen, then you probably haven't been paying attention). Jedi fighting droids is an abstract fantasy; racism, cults, intolerance, youth violence and even child soldiers are all too real today. If you want WWII models, that's fine. Download some photos, buy some parts and build away. If you like how it turns out, by all means post some photos and share it with people who can appreciate it for what it is, but I support TLG in NOT mass marketing tanks-for-tots even though, as a kid, I probably would have wanted one.

If this is going to be a licensed theme, then it might be bad news for Marshall's (generic) Modular Western Town as they might not want competing western themed kits (just as Pirates is on hold until PotC plays out and LotR is the new Castle series) I hope it doesn't, I'd take a generic "West" over a Disney "West" any day, but at least its something. I'm holding out for a nice western style steam train...

I've posted a few early drafts of the individual statues here before but I thought I'd share how things with a brand new King of the Eastern Shore model (the first draft had a little accident) , a revised King of the Western Shore, and a tiny fellowship in brick built boats for scale. I hope you enjoy them. If you'd like to see more shots (including more close-ups) check out my MOCPages folder. As always, comment will be read, questions will be answered (eventually) so please feel free to say hi here or there. Thanks for stopping by.

Fantastic layout! Gorgeous but at the same time inspiring; just looking at that makes me want to clean out my basement, break out my trains and spend the next five years building a "real" layout like yours rather than my dinky, annual Christmas Tree loop. Great job.

I used to teach at an engineering school and often found ways to work LEGO prototypes into my lab courses. I usually had better luck with the Lego Education site than scavenging Technic models for parts. The prices weren't great and the selection varied, but for bulk purchases of generic parts and parts packs it was pretty good for filling the bins in the LEGO prototype lab. It's been a while since I've done business with them, but it might be worth investigating.

Wow, I don't know how I could have missed that, maybe I knew about them and just repressed the memory. Oh well, Bricklink here I come...

The top slot varies with the moment and whether I'm think of "least important feature" versus "outright detractor" but my short list usually goes something like this: #5) Sticker sheets - either give me a model that is so textured and colored that it doesn't need stickers, or pre-print the bricks #4) Nested/excessive bags in the packaging - it's one thing if outer bags are numbered to break up a large build, but little bags inside big bags without numbers or a dozen unnumbered bags when two or three large bags would have done is just more packaging to open, sort through, and dispose of ( I realize this is done to make things more accurate for weight based packaging machines but still...) #3) Oversized specialty parts - I like big models made from large numbers of small generic parts, not the other way 'round #2) Overall playability - I'm a builder and a collector. I think of LEGO creations as display pieces more than toys (okay, I admit I play with my trains, but who doesn't...) #1) Gratuitous play "features" - Flick fire missiles in Weather Top? Really? When do we get little lasers to put on the sharks' heads for the next underwater theme?

I don't know, but I'm putting together a shopping list and warming up my credit card just in case

I used to teach a robots class where we'd often prototype things in LEGO parts before heading to the machine shop. We had brick built linear actuators at that time (no official part available yet) and the new parts are clearly stronger and smaller than the ones we used to build, but for the types of models I was assigning, it was pretty clear that you needed both. Pneumatics did some things very, very well. LA had other fortes. Sometimes the mechanism itself was less important that the form factor and we just went with what was easier to fit/mount. LA had the advantage of smooth starts and stops, controllable velocity and precision placement down to the size of gear tooth; Pneumatics, not as good on these fronts. Pneumatics fit into tight places, faster to react, faster to reach max/min extension, controllable strength (via air pressure in the reserve), lighter (results in less torque at the base when articulating multiple joints) and more vibration tolerant. LA's need either embedded motors or a drive transmission to move them. This adds bulk, weight and complexity to the design. In the case of LEGO models it also raises the question of batteries and snaking power cables. Pneumatics need pressurized air, this means a reserve, hoses and some way to recharge the reserve dynamically (we used to use geared motors to drive a brick built compressor for our tanks, giving us the worst of both worlds: hoses, wires, tanks, motors, drive chain _and_ batteries...) LA can lock their position solely by the force of friction through a worm gear. This can be both a blessing and a curse. If you want a model to hold a pose without draining batteries or bleeding off air pressure, it's a big win. If your model is subject to external forces (possible large ones) it's a good way for things to break off or even snap. Pneumatics need active pressure to hold a pose, but can also be bled off quickly if need be. If a pivot point is over torqued, safety valves can trip, bleeding off the air and allowing the model to move with the external force in a timely fashion rather than fight against it and risk breaking something. And finally, for the true geeks out there, pneumatic valve networks can be configured into the mechanic equivalent of NAND gates and PLAs so with enough valves, tubing and air pressure you don't even need a NXT brick to control things. I suppose I could probably build an actuator-based relay-like system with the addition of a few non-LEGO conductors, but it would never be as compact as the valve based implementation.

The question of why not choose another building vs. why not choose another architect are, in most cases two sides of the same coin. Selecting Le Corbusier was not a foregone conclusion. Most buildings of note for the past thousand years have had known, documented architects associated with them; some of those people were quite famous and/or influential in their day. So I think the question of which building to select, who designed and why does the designer or building really matter in a larger sense is key to selecting future Architecture sets and that is the very core of "why choose X (building/designer) instead of Y (building/designer)" There are many excellent French architects to choose from and they are responsible for far more well known and architecturally interesting projects than the Villa Savoye (again, my personal opinion, biased by the fact that many examples of the Modernist movement do nothing for me). As I mentioned, Le Corbusier/Villa Savoye isn't an architectural example that jumps out at me when I think of France. I think: Pierre de Montreuil - Notre Dame, Saint Denis & the Abby of St Germain-de-pres; Jean Baptiste Androuet du Cerceau - Le Pont Neuf; Salomon de Brosse - Luxenbourg Palace; Jacques-Germain Soufflot - Le Pantheon; Claude Nicolas Ledoux - The Royal Salt works at Arc-at-Senanes; Ange-Jacques Gabriel - L'Ecole Militaire; and, Charles Garnier - the Palais Garnier/Paris Opera House. Any one of these would make a great kit and have more than enough historical notes and trivia to fill out the usual architecture collectors instruction book. I think Gothic, Neoclassical, Rococo, etc. styles of architecture are a lot harder to realize in a small LEGO model (compared with many Modernist examples) but that's what makes for an interesting build (if it is done right). I think the Villa Savoye model is fine for what it is (and I'll probably get one) but by selecting Modernist examples, the Architecture line really isn't pushing the envelope either artistically or in build complexity. I wasn't too keen on the Farnsworth House either for pretty much the same reason and if their next offering is something like Habitat 67 I don't see myself lining up to buy one.

Great Review, thanks for that. I haven't done anything with the Monster Fighter's theme yet but I think I'll be picking up this one just for the "creepy old house on the fringes of modular town" aspects. Maybe I'll add a pet cemetery in the front yard or something to really make it seem like a realtor's nightmare.

I don't have a problem with TLG offering licensed themes; it helps pay for the development of new molds and introduces new parts that can be repurposed for MOCs, they even serve as a sort of "gateway drug" to get people interested in LEGO kits who normally can't see past their Star Wars or Lord of the Rings or whatever fixation. So on one hand I think it grows the community and gives us all more to play work with. I do have a problem with TLG only offering licensed themes, whether out contractual obligations or fear of cannibalizing their own lines. I don't like that PotC has supplanted the tradition Pirates theme of that LotR has, presumably for the duration of its run, taken over Castle. Don't get me wrong, I'm a great fan of LEGO Star Wars, but I miss Blacktron. As a collector, I can cite dozens of reasons why licensed themes are a good thing, but as an AFOL, an engineer and a former teacher I worry that we spend too much time handing kids a story to act out rather than encouraging them to come up with their own narrative. A castle, space or pirate set from 30 years ago might look pretty simplistic compared to today's LotR, SW, or PotC offerings, but I think they did a lot more to nurture a rich imagination than the licensed kits.

Wonderful review, thank you so much. Personally, I'm not a big fan of Modernist Architecture (a genre, in my opinion, too often dominated by glorified boxes stacked in unusual ways) so when I think of all the iconic buildings in France that they could have explored, this one wasn't even on my radar, but that's more a critique of the subject matter than the execution. The model looks very true to the subject and seems like it will make a nice addition to the collection.

When my LEGO experience started, there were no mini-figures. I remember I had some brick-built posable figures with big round, printed heads, studs for ears and specialty wrist parts (picture a lamp holder stud attached to a ball and socket joint). They never did much for me, but I remember scavenging them for parts because there was no Technic line in those days either and those articulated wrist, elbow and shoulder joints opened up all new paths of exploration for me as I taught myself how to break out of the studs-on-top building mentality. I remember also, I'd guess it was about 1975 because I have this mental association with Space:1999 and the Muppet Show (shows how _my_ brain works...), TLG came out with slab-like pre-mini-figures, no hinged joints, hands or even a printed face, just a leg section, a torso, a blank head (same mold as the current figure, I suspect) and interchangeable headgear. I used to stick in 1x2 plates between the torso and the legs to look like a belt and make the figures a little taller. I still have a bunch of these in storage somewhere, but the fact that they wound up in storage is probably an indicator as to when my mind started segregating LEGO piece from mini-figure. Now I'll be honest here, I've never really jumped on the mini-figure band wagon. I've wound up with a lot of them over the years and I love some of the really elaborate design and printing that have gone into the Collectables line and some of the licensed themes (LotR, PotC, Star Wars, etc.) but I rarely buy a set just to get the figures and the CMF craze made it to series 7 before I picked up a couple on sale as an impulse buy. "Lego," for me, means construction set (or sometimes art medium), mini-figures are just set dressing if the scale is right. I realize that a creative person can find clever ways of integrating parts in non-traditional ways (I'm working on a model right not that uses my growing collection of orange brick separators as bricks) but when I first open a kit and look at the parts, most of them say "I'm needed to build set XXXX but I can be anything." Mini-figure parts leap off the table and say "I'm Theodin's breastplate!" or "I'm Jack Sparrow's hair!" and that level of "intentional specialization" is what divides the sea of bricks into two camps for me. A horse is a horse - which makes it a minifigure, same goes for cave trolls, parrots, dinosaur parts, etc. The line, of course, is both fine and blurry. Unprinted heads make great bricks, as do droid arms and skeleton legs, but in general, _my_ LEGO world is divided up into universal pieces that can be anything, and specialty parts designed to build figures (mini or not). Citing your Monk droid of the rook of the chess set, they break down into generic parts so I wouldn't consider them mini-figures (though the horse head qualifies as a MF accessory in my book) but the parts that make up Jabba are so specialized that I would throw him in the mini-figure camp even though his parts don't resemble those of any other mini-figure on the market. Anyway, that's my two cents; but lately my two cents is worth more if you melt down the pennies for the scrap copper...

Hey, I stumbled across a little zip-lock baggie of these just the other day whilst digging through/pretending to organize some of my older parts bins. I'd never had much use for them, but I had no idea that they were relatively rare US-only parts. Looks like you learn something new every day. Thanks for that.

This is really, for me, the pitfall of LDD. In virtual space everything just stays where you put it. In real brick, you often end up with something that can't even support it own weight or is so delicate, sections collapse under the pressure of squeezing bricks together in the course of building things. Still, it is a useful prototyping tool even if, as you've discovered, it lacks something when transitioning to the real world. I've learned my lessons the hard way when it comes to larger scale models (having dropped 5000+ piece models only to see nearly every single piece come completely separated from the others and find its own unique vector in which to fly) so usually if I know scalable strength is going to be an issue I resort to technic parts (the long ones with the studs for "normal' brick connections, the smooth beams for locking vertical tiers of bricks together). To make long "studs on top" beams, I use two rows of long technic (1x10 or better) bricks connected laterally by black pins, staggered by a 50% overlap between the left and right runs, and sandwiched on top and bottom by 2xWhatever plates. I'd use beams like this to run front to back along the length of the model. Then I'd use shorter, similar construction as spacers between the core beams. They can be connected with stacked plates, but using "L" shaped technic bricks and pins in the corners will add even more rigidity. Taken together these form a structural grid within a horizontal plane. For something like your camper I'd think you want to create at least three cross sectional grids that define the trailer at the wheel base, the longest point where the cab comes forward, and the top. In the vertical direction the structural grids can be connected with columns of (mostly) 2x4+ bricks and plates, but an ordinary stack can still get vibrated to death if it gets too tall so put in a few technic bricks with pins and use technic beams vertically to pull everything together. The magic sequence to remember is that brick-with-pin, 2 plates, and another brick-with-pin lines up perfectly with the hole spacing on the beams. The vertical connectors will keep the stack in compression and the tube and studs on the individual bricks will help fight shearing forces, so taken together you should be able to build a pretty strong and durable infrastructure. Once the shape of this inner cage is worked out, the only task left is skinning it with the camper exterior. For maximum strength you'll probably need to build the skin and the cage simultaneously so that the skin fully integrates with the frame but since the frame is being built mostly from bricks with studs you should have plenty of contact surface to work with. I'm sure there are other viable solutions, but that's how I'd tackle it. Hope this helps.

Awesome, just plain awesome... Great work guys, I'll take two

Thanks for the great review! While I've had a luke-warm response to most of the LOTR offerings to date (maybe I've just been waiting for so long (40+ years) my expectations are a little unrealistic) I think that this is my favorite of the official offerings to date. I've already got one and will probably be picking up several more for parts, figures and horses. It's not a "home run" in my book (and why on earth (or Middle Earth as the case may be) are there flick fire missiles in it??) but overall, it's a good little kit.

Very nice! Keep up the great work.

Thanks for the review. I picked up this set mostly for Gandalf and to get an extra horse. While I think the designer made an honest effort to capture the scene from the movie, there's not much to that scene. For my money, the most important aspect of the sequence is Frodo hopping in to the cart and riding along, but the cart isn't big enough for two. By itself, the cart is fine; I could stick it in Medieval Market Village and be quite happy with its shape, but for this scene, it's the wrong scale. I'd make the cart two studs wider, a little longer and maybe add a tailgate that can actually open (but leave the wheels the same size) These are fairly minor modifications, I just wish TLG had thought to do them from the outset. I think, in the end, this is really the "stocking stuffer" set of the new line; a kit adult LOTR fans (but not necessarily AFOLs) get as a token gift to assemble and stick on a shelf or the corner of a desk - LOTR's answer to kits like HP 4736, Freeing Dobby.

Nice Job! I really like the rock-work of the base forming a plateau for the scene, it adds a very organic feel to the scene.

@LEGO Historian The second cover, I think, really talks to the target audience, but I think the first has more artistic merit for a general eye catching "Notice ME!" sort of effect for the general public. On the flip side, you risk having real AFOLs looking at that one and probably thinking along the same lines I do when I see the local news having a cute girl in a bikini reading the weather report even though she can't even spell "inclement" let alone "meteorology". If you could somehow reproduce the visual effect of the first one rendered as a LEGO mosaic of translucent tiles and cheese wedges (even if they were just placed sideways, unsecured on a sheet of lucite for photography purposes) it would add a touch of LEGO authenticity to the image and might give you the best of both worlds. It's still the sexy blond in a bikini reading the news, but at least the girl is a 'real' news anchor not a spokesmodel.