Lego / Lepin: Millennium Falcon UCS / Big Set

Discussion in 'Lego and Other Building Bricks' started by purr1n, Dec 24, 2016.

  1. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    5 kilos of bricks. 5000+ pieces.
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  2. imackler

    imackler Key Lime Pie Infected Aberdeen Wings Spy

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    Lot of grey. Death Star?
     
  3. SSL

    SSL Friend

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    M. Falcon?
     
  4. Bigferret

    Bigferret Friend

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    Han and Chewie would be proud!
     
  5. Grahad

    Grahad Guest

    Lepin making the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs
     
  6. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    I bricklinked about 30% of the parts before I knew about the existence of Lepin. The Lepin route is definitely much cheaper. I believe unopened Lego kits go for several thousand dollars these days. I will probably finish off parts of the exterior or looser fitting parts with authentic Lego bricks.

    For now, Day 1 and Day 2 progress. Just taking it slow. Lots of parts and I only did a partial sort. Basically there are bags and bags of similar type pieces inside the box. There is no handy Bag #1, Bag #2, Bag #3 per build phase. Looking at the Lego manual, it seems that this may have been the case with the authentic Lego kit, but I am not sure. At least it will be easier to locate pieces as we go.
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    I'm not sure when Lego came out with this kit, but so far, the design seems solid with well reinforced internal structures. This thing is gonna be huge. Don't know where I will put it in the house.
     
    Last edited: Dec 26, 2016
  7. jowls

    jowls Never shitposts (please) - Friend

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    Bricklink? You could have just bought this...

    http://www.ebay.com/itm/272447068161 ;)

    This looks awesome. I'm helping my daughter build Slave 1 at the moment. Perhaps we can aim for this next year...
     
  8. ultrabike

    ultrabike Measurbator - Admin

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    Crap! This IS the Milenium Falcon! Awesome!
     
  9. Grahad

    Grahad Guest

    The set itself came out in 2007.

    I'm surprised at the yellow 90 deg elbows, I'd thought they'd be black or grey.
     
  10. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    Lego has been using alternate bright colors for things like elbows, swivels, and other connectors for other UCS sets, presumably to help in visual alignment of parts. I actually have a bunch of the 5x5 Technic corners in my stash, but they are black. The authentic yellow pieces cost way more and are like $10 each at the bricklink sites.

    Here is Day 2.5 progress.
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  11. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    Day 3: It suddenly dawned on me how big this set was, so I figured I'd really have to do some pro sorting before progressing.
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    There we go. Just finished page 33 of 153. 120 more pages to go.
     
  12. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    Day 4. More parts of the superstructure.
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    Now these two panels were a real bitch. Took me a long time to find all the little parts. I couldn't find two of the greebles so I had to raid my spare parts bin. I eventually found one part later.
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    This is what we have so far. There's Luke at the laser turret controls.
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  13. Torq

    Torq MOT: Headphone.com

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    Very nice!

    I had fun building my original Lego version ... was an intense 4-day build that took over the entire media room for the parts-sort. And it's a much more solid end-result than, say, the original UCS Star-Destroyer (which had a tendency to drop big panels if you looked at it wrong) ...

    You should get Luke out of there though. Get another Chewie mini-fig or something in there, hell, even a Leia (RIP) ... Luke can't shoot for taffy until late E:V ... and you'll have Tie fighters all-up-in-your-schiit ...
     
  14. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    I had heard that the UCS Star Destroyer was known for its flimsiness. Heck, even the UCS Super Star Destroyer that I bricklinked a while back was kind of flimsy. I used a lot of spare parts to reinforce the panels for the Super Star Destroyer and may do the same with the regular Star Destroyer if I ever decide to build it. I believe Lepin finally came out with standard Star Destroyer. I do wish Lego would occasionally offer these sets for sale again as the authentic Lego parts are just much easier on the hands and have fewer issues (read upcoming post). They did bring back the Death Star after all, but I find $500 a bit too high for not much improvement over the prior Death Star. The two ships I really want to build are the UCS Advanced Tie (Vader's TIE) and the Tantive IV Blockade Runner. Neither are available from Lepin or Lego, so I will have to bricklink them. I am hoping Lego will bring the Blockade Runner back (there are two versions) because of Rogue One. I am kicking myself because I almost bought the newer UCS Tantive IV when I had the chance a few years ago. I remember my wife saying that it looked pretty cool.
     
  15. Torq

    Torq MOT: Headphone.com

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    The main, long, panels are hinged at the spine of the ship and then held in place with magnets. The tiniest jolt and the magnets would let go, and the weight of the panels would rip them off the small 2x1 hinges and, well, you can imagine how many pieces spew themselves all over the floor from there.

    Had the first-version of this, and it was a fun build and probably the most solid of the original trilogy UCS ships excepting the Snow Speeder (which was almost completely solid). Bit of a shit to dismantle though. Has quite a bit of presence on display if not that visually impressive compared to the SD, SSD or Falcon.
     
  16. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    Day 4.5. More frustrating moments.

    This is one of the seven landing gears. I was going nuts because I couldn't find the seven 1x2 hinge pieces until I realized that Lepin screwed up and provided me with seven 2x2 hinge pieces. See the piece at the farthest right. The 2x2 hinge piece does work. The second problem was that the tolerance of the dark grey connectors was inconsistent, so the friction fit with the axle pieces was non-existent. Obviously this is a big problem for the landing gear part because the last thing we want is to lift up the model and have the landing gear fall off. I resorted to using glue to keep the landing gear on for some of the pieces. I know, travesty for a brick building set. But this is Lepin, not Lego. 20161227_205613.jpg

    I did an assembly line build with the kids to crank these out fast. A good lesson in volume production.
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    My son remarked that these parts looked excessively complex, but I think it's a nice touch and very much in the spirit of the real model. The only difference is the scale of the landing gear on the brick set is larger.
     
  17. Torq

    Torq MOT: Headphone.com

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    Nicely detailed, but was a seriously tedious part of the original build for me ... ;)
     
  18. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    Slave labor (kids) did help. I would have gone nuts on this if I had to do it myself.
     
  19. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    Day 5. Wow, this is getting scary because I am only one third way through the instructions. The awesomeness of the kit finally dawned on me: the parts used to construct the Millennium Falcon are fairly standard and can found in the various Creator or Technic sets. To my knowledge, there wasn't much or anything specially molded for this kit, like on the newer Technic vehicles such as the 24-Hour Race Car and Porsche 911. Given the size of the model, it's was probably easier for the designer(s) to use pre-existing parts to construct the shapes necessary.

    Part of the undercarriage. Eventually folded down and the last landing gear piece installed.
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    Rear engines. Those ladders are actually quite rare, at least in the medium stone grey color. My initial bricklinking idea was to get them in brown and spray paint them grey.
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    It's really starting to take shape now. We just completed page 50 of 153.
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  20. Grahad

    Grahad Guest

    Time to convince your kids to try and be a Lego Master Builder. ;P
     

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