PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Meccano Tintin - Seaplane

That's the three sets in the series. Here's the second set, the seaplane.

The Seaplane has 320+ parts and I've seen it listed for about 60 bucks. Again it's kind of a novelty item to me, I like Tintin so I'm vaguely interested, and it's easy to keep a picture you download off of the internet. Someone who is into Meccano would be more interested in the product. I was going to say I didn't know anyone with Meccano brand loyalty but I think I might. I don't know that he reads this so we might never know, unless I ask him. Sometimes surprise is found in what people do with their spare time.

 

I wonder how a nuts and bolts man would look at this set? Model or parts pack? I suspect it's the appeal of building the model. A lot of people like making models, all sorts of models. And certainly the variety in technique and end product is huge. At the last TCLUG meeting we were talking about the lack of plastic model kits in places like Target and WalMart. When I remembered a day or two later I looked up plastic model kits on the internet and there's still a pretty good number of kits available but the price on a 1/25 model kit of a car is about 25 bucks. That seems expensive to me but it might be such a small market that it's the cost now. That Meccano set is 60 bucks, even with it being metal and painted, that seems steep for a smallish plane. I do like the fact that the Meccano parts are painted. The applying of paint on a plastic model kit was always my downfall as a model maker. I tried but never could achieve a good enough level of quality to want to continue. I have to admit the appeal with the LEGO system bricks is the lack of a need to paint. Even with the limited color pallet, when compared to mixing paints, you can achieve a lot of interesting work.

nanoblock Tintin Series - The Unicorn

That's the big set of the series of four Tintin set from nanoblocks. The box says over 3000 pieces. That's a lot and the price is higher accordingly. I've seen it range from $175 to $220 on various sites. The Unicorn is the ship from the Tintin books The Secret Of The Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure. Those stories are used for the basis of recent Tintin movie. In the story Tintin finds a nice ship model of The Unicorn. It turns out that a relative of Captain Haddock sailed the ship that model was based on. That model leads to an adventure and treasure. It's how Captain Haddock ends up with Marlinspike Hall. I bet it would be an adventure building that ship, what with it having 3000 tiny little pieces, and sadly I have no Nestor to build it for me. It looks pretty good on the box. Here's a better picture of the ship.

Not much to say about it, not something I feet I need. For the price of the set I could get a lot of LEGO, or a bunch of dvds, or some practical shit. I prefer having the picture version of it. The real version of it would take up some bit of space and that's less appealing.

nanoblock Tintin Series - Moulinsart Castle

Here's another of the nanoblock Tintin sets. The set calls it Moulinsart Castle, Herge called it Chateau de Moulinsart in his original story, we know it as Marlinspike Hall in the USA. It's got 1500 pieces and I just saw one on Amazon for 85 bucks. You get to build the building sitting on a yellow base with some green shrubbery. There's a lot of light tan and bluish gray. Hard to tell from those pictures. It looks like the Herge drawing well enough. It's a nice enough building but I've never ever gotten excited about it in the comic. I find that period of French architecture less interesting than other eras. I'm not a fan of the roof style that much but you can easily build it with mostly common LEGO slopes.

nanoblock - Tintin Series - Shark Submarine

Here's Professor Calculus's shark shaped submarine from Red Rackham's Treasure. It's the continuation of the previous book in the series The Secret Of The Unicorn. Sadly the model, while nice enough, doesn't capture the smile of the drawn version. There's no Tintin figure to go in the sub either. The sub isn't that big, about 5 and a half inches from nose to tail and just under 3 and a half inches tall. There are 900 pieces in the set and I've been seeing it on Amazon for prices that range from $62 to $110. That's just crazy talk. It's just not worth that too me. I guess I can admire the box. I save a lot of space by going digital anyway.

 

nanoblock - Tintin series - Rocket Ship

I kind of lost interest in Nanoblocks and was surprised to see this set when I was looking for something else. It's part of a series of 4 that came out December 2011 in Japan. Probably last fall I put the bunch of nanoblocks I had picked up away in a box. I didn't have an immediate use for them so they went into storage. The lack of interest kept me from following the Nanoblocks Japan site. I started looking them up since I have an interest in Tintin. I more interested in the comics but I like saving pictures of toys and things related to the series. It's too much to expect to buy stuff like that when it's produced overseas and not marketed here. You can find them for sale on the internet but at a pretty high price. The rocket set is 81 bucks from someone on Amazon. That's a lot, even for 1100 parts. They are small parts and they're only red and white ones in the set. With those pieces you get to build the space ship from the Tintin story Destination Moon. That's actually kind of cool. It's a good story and one that's pulled out to read. I have to finish the couple of books about Herge first and one is taking a while to get through. It's often that way, some books drag, some don't. There's a Herge drawing on the box cover and it's from the Tintin comic book. It's a nice rocket. They do a fair job on getting the shape to work out. It's hard making round shapes with just plain bricks. I don't think they look good. It's not something I tend to try to build. I'm still not interested in buying one but I do like it. I'll enjoy the pictures for sure.

Cobi 27050 Union Catapult

 

Gary brought a copy of the 2010 Cobi Brick Catalog to the comic con a couple of weekends ago. I had heard of the line before but hadn't picked any up. Here's the 2011 catalog over at Cobi's site. Some of the sets are kind of interesting. I liked the Knights theme and the Romans & Barbarians were pretty entertaining. Gary said he had seen some sets at the Hub Hobby store in Richfield. I popped over there during my lunch hour one day last week and picked up a cheap set. 27050 Catapult set was $9.99 for 50 pieces. Twenty cents a piece isn't a very good price per part. The Cobi shop lists them for 9.99 Euros. Some of the pieces are larger but a LEGO set with that many pieces would be in the 5-7 dollar range.

 

The top pic in the post is the set I got at Hub Hobby. It says Grunwald 1410 on one side and Tannenberg 1410 on the other side. Grunwald is a real battle in Poland. The battle took place July 15, 1410 in the fields between the towns of Grunwald and Tannenberg; here's a longer description of the battle. Poland and Lithuania kick the ass of the Teutonic Knights. Those guys suck, coming around causing trouble. I am guessing that the Grunwald sets are mostly for the Poland market and the rest of the world gets the more generic Knights label. 

 

There's a nice bunch of parts that you won't find in a LEGO set. I like that 1x3 slope and the 1x2 curved slope. The brown color might be a little light for my tastes. There's a green plant thing that's got nice detail in the stems. That piece turns up in white in another set, being worn by a minifig as a crown. There's a 2x4 plate attached 90 degrees to a 1x4 plate. That little gray piece straight below the axe is a handle for the shield. It's a handle with a stud. I can see that being useful. Same for the 1x1 round plate with the stud on each side. That's how they make the round rocks for the catapult. The two halves go together and they form a really nice round textured boulder. The individual halves of the boulder can be used for decoration or who knows what.

 

The sets got one guy and a catapult with some logs as protection for his knees and feet. There's a flag on a spear and the bottom of a chest. That minifig guy has a nose that sticks up from the face. His skin color is a sort of tan. The knight has a nicely printed torso and I like the simplistic white design on the red flag. It's printed both sides. The shields got a label, in fact, they put in a whole sheet of colorful labels depicting the banners of the participants of the battle. They have some great symbols, don't they? The instructions are pretty good, clear and easy to read. That's the last page of the booklet. It shows a top down and side view of the finished set, as well as a nice illustration of the handle piece and the 1x1 round plate with the stud on each side and how it fits the boulder pieces. I built the set and took it along to the TCLUG meeting. Brian's 5 year old daughter Lindsey had a great time catapulting the boulder at the soldier. I'm not sure that I will rush right out and buy any more sets, that would cut into the LEGO budget, but I can look at them online. Glad I got one for now.

nanoblock - towers and tombs

 

A few days after I exchanged some emails with Larry Kilgallon, the prez of Ohio Arts, I got a small package in the mail. It was packed with baggies full of nanoblocks. There were 4 sets, a Taj Mahal, a Eiffel Tower, a Sagrada Familia and a giant panda, and their instructions. No boxes but still an over 60 dollar value. Nice, huh. I love getting free stuff, so feel free to send me something. Make sure it's nice. I wrote to Larry and thanked him, promising to comment on my blog about the sets when I got done building them. He mentioned that the sales over the Easter Holiday were good and they we excited their new line was catching on. I wonder who's buying them. It would be curious to get some more reviews of the sets and find out what people think about working with them. You can also join the nanoblock facebook page. My earlier review is right at the top of the page. Funny how I get around places. Here's a nice graphic on the size of the parts. For those who don't understand metric, let me tell you, they are small. While I was over at facebook I clicked on the chat button and a guy I knew from Winnipeg asked me if I wanted a couple of copies of my 1976 Christmas Booke. They were in Chester Cuthbert's science fiction collection which went to the Unversity of Edmonton when he died. Sure I said, send them to me. I don't have many copies anymore. They might come in handy. You never know.

The first one I tackled was the Taj Mahal. Like the rest of the building models in the series the base is 3 3/8 inches on a side. That's 20x20 studs in dark gray. The set's got over 400 pieces, almost all white ones, and there are a few left over when you are done. I had to use my stamp tongs to handle the huge number of 1x1 parts. It didn't help to have both my middle fingers and right thumb wrapped in bandages from cuts on the end of those digits. I was attacked by a can of sliced pieces, and that's all I'm sayin'. Those bandages made it hard to pick up the larger pieces. The Taj Mahal looks ok. The model I mean. You can tell what is it supposed to be. The size of the model and the types of pieces mean they have to cheat the round towers, using bundles of round 1x1 parts, but you get the picture. The designer has to find a balance between the features of the original and the scale of the pieces in the set. Some features are moved slightly and other features are eliminated. What seems odd to me is the buildings white base. It's not depicted. That's such a large part of the original that it seems odd to remove it. Still not too bad a set and a good source for white parts.

 

More stacking in the Eiffel Tower. It's stacked about 5 inches high and there's a lot of dark gray pieces in the set. The box says more than 200 parts and a lot of them are the larger parts. Lots of 1x2, 2x2, and a few 2x4 and 2x8 pieces. There's  some yellowy tan and brown and dark green, but only in small quantities. Still a good set for basic gray in the larger piece size. There are also 8 1x4 clear bricks. You'd need a lot of those for an office tower.

  
I thought the Eiffel Tower was pretty good. For some reason I like the pink 1x1's that dot the base plate. Is it a bunch of tiny naked French men out having a romp in the park? Or better yet, tiny naked French women. I'll never know. Even after I got out my magnifying glass, I couldn't see anything.

 

That's the Sagrada Familia. It's a Roman Catholic Church that was started back in 1882 and remains unfinished. It dominates the Barcelona skyline. It's the work of Antonio Gaudi, who's a favorite architect of mine. It was a set that I was interested in but seeing it in person I don't think the set does the original building justice, the colors are wrong and while the building's shape is similar the detail is lost and the detail is the king in this man's work. The set was the only one with an open bag and there were some parts missing. Mostly 1x2 bricks in white and clear. Would have been nice to have those. The rest of the model is mostly brown with a bit of red and  dark green. This was the hardest set to build, not because of the missing pieces, but because of the instructions. I actually used my magnifying glass to read them. That's where the larger sets fall down, with their hard to read instruction sheet. It's just too small of an image and they cram the whole build onto one letter size sheet. The way they indicate where to put the next pieces are going makes it very hard to see where the edges of the pieces are and what size they are. I went ahead and finished the main part of the model, skipping the small part on the left side. I mostly wanted to see the massing of the main towers. Since there are no tapered pieces it makes the hard to replicate the cone shape of the 4 main towers. They look like straight towers. That's Guadi's model of the unfinished church. It would have been pretty neat looking, very organic. Sadly it won't get finished in my life time. You can see more of Gaudi's work here.

 
I took the sets over to the TCLUG meeting last weekend and what was waiting on Brian's pool table? More nanoblocks. Lonn had been shopping for stuff on ebay and come across the Dark Hue Color bulk brick set. It's got 800 pieces in 4 different colors, dark blue, dark gree, brown and a dark yellow. There are 7 brick types, 1x1 round, 1x1, 1x2, 1x4, 2x2, 2x4, 2x8 in uncounted quantities of each. There's only one of the 20x20 baseplate. They aren't out from Ohio Arts yet but there were hints that they are coming. Lonn bought the set and was disappointed that it had no instructions.    
All there was inside the box, other than the pieces, was a cardboard tray and a paper insert. The tray is like the trays that used to come in the older LEGO sets. I miss those trays. I use the ones I have for sorting and works in progress. They come in handy. Undaunted Lonn did build the ship and it looks pretty good. I'm not sure I would have bothered. The baggies in the paper tray above are Lonn's, those are the parts that were left over from building the ship. At the end of the meeting Lonn passed along his nanoblocks to me. Hopefully I will do something with them. I'm starting to mass a few pieces and once I bust up the sets I can sort and see what's there. Who knows what's next.

Hello...kitty

I bet you thought I was going to talk about those nanoblocks again, huh. I got a couple of the Hello Kitty sets when I went to TRU looking for nanoblock sets. Hello Kitty is from MEGA BLOKS, the company all rabid LEGO fans hate. I don't hate 'em, not for selling a similar product, but I am disappointed in their quality. Over the years I've bought several sets from MB. I used to buy their sets for the cheap bricks, especially when they were on clearance, back when I didn't have that much real LEGO. I've since got enough LEGO to weed those clones out of my building stock. I gave them away to some kids I know. Sad for those kids, huh.

 

I kept a few accessories from the MB sets that might come in handy some day. I'd occasionally buy a set of interest to see how they work. With many of the MEGA BLOKS sets there's a repeated cycle of buying, disappointment, and giving away. That reminds me I still have a MEGA BLOKS Spiderman set out in the garage. I wonder what kid's been bad enough to deserve that? It wasn't a very good set. I find a lot of the MB figures look deformed and creepy. Not so the Hello Kitty figures though. I thought they looked pretty cute. I brought the sets to the TwinLUG meeting and they were met with mixed feelings. Roy wouldn't touch them and Max took a pic and called them awesome on his Flickr page. I would agree but I'm a pushover for cute things. Look at that little sailboat. Cute or what?

 

You should be able to tell which set is which from the titles. 10812 Sailor and set 10816 Picnic. I thought the Hello Kitty figures were pretty nice. They can't do much, the body is one solid piece, the hands are short and can't grip much of anything. At least the head goes around. I picked up a couple of the cheapest. The Sailor set is 4 bucks and you certainly don't get too much, it's only got 7 pieces. But I like the figure and I thought the sailboat was great. The sticker is already applied to the 1x6x5 wall panel. The other set is 8 bucks and it's not much better with only 15 pieces. They are nicer pieces. It was those few accessories that pushed me over the brink of purchase. I'm such a sap.

I kind of like the base plate with the rounded edges on two sides. It has vignette appeal. I think the recessed area to the left is for connecting another plate to this one. If you had four? There is a second set in the same format with a swing set and a different costume (see below). There's a nice umbrella but the flowers are one single piece. There's a nice glass and plate. Sadly the figure can't really hold onto them very well. It was the cupcakes that sold me. You get two of them. I like the table with it's wavy edge though it doesn't stay attached to it's legs very well. I'm not sure what I am going to do with the sets but I'll keep them around for a while. Here's a picture that made me laugh while I was poking around google images. I couldn't find a link to where it came from on the message board page it was posted to. Made me laugh though.

 

There are a whole bunch more sets but I doubt that I would buy anymore of them. All the larger boxed sets have houses and buildings in them. It's very much a small doll house to play Hello Kitty with and I don't need that. I just wanted those cupcakes. They rock. Here's a pic of the large house set, the other $8 set, which has a nice swing, and another of the $4 sets. Not much interested in getting those sets for the most part. They just  aren't worth the money spent. The pic on the bottom right came from A Modular Life, a blog about LEGO and stuff from a gal in Singapore. She did a post on the MEGA BLOKS Smurf sets too. They are pretty smurfy and I'm not too interested in those. Smurfs and I have a history. I'd say let's bury the hatchet but that's a sore spot. Better just forget about it. Aren't those kitties cute.

 

 

nanoblocks - This little piggy

 

After building the Nueschwanstein Castle I went out and bought some more nanoblock sets. I got this pig. I think he looks great. He could be Freddy the pig and you know how much I like that porcine. Animals aren't something that I build on my own so observing the process of how they go together is good, right. Maybe I'll build some of my own animals. No matter, I have this cool pig. He can collect dust in my living room for a while. He doesn't take up much room, he's only about three inches long. That won't hold much dust, huh.

  
This set has over 100 pieces, at least that's what the package hints at. It got a lot of larger pieces, 2x8 bricks and lots of 2x4 bricks. It's held together quite well. I've taken it to two LUG meetings and it hasn't fallen apart yet. One ear came off but it was in the box. There are quite a few extra parts left over then you finish building the set. The animals all come in a plastic envelope that has a ziplock built in. The instructions we a bit easier to read than the ones for the castle.

  

Giant panda in the house. I know, he's not that big, he's just about 3 inches long. I thought this one looked pretty good though he looks pretty grumpy. Maybe that's me reading something into those eyes. All the bagged animals are 8 bucks at TRU. The panda has over 150 pieces and there were a lot left over when the set was finished. Maybe they figure people keep dropping the pieces. I know I dropped a few while building these sets. I managed to find them all but I have a bare hardwood floor and a powerful flashlight.

I took these to the TwinLUG meeting last month and people were interested enough to chat about them for a while, at least until business took over. Two or three people expressed an interest in getting some of the sets. There is certainly a noveltly value in the size of the pieces. I can barely pick up the smallest ones.

   

I thought this dog was the best.  He's got a great face. I thought it just said dog to me. I hope the guy or gal that designed him stood there and had one of those moments you get when something comes together just perfectly and you get that little shiver.

The package says he's a terrier and that there are over 110 parts inside. Once he's built, there are a lot of good parts left over. I could see buying multiples of some of the smaller sets for the colors. Especially that pink. The dog's got a dish with food. The dish falls apart pretty easily, it only connects with two studs, one on each side. Some of the building methods used in the sets seem odd to me. They stack a lot and often don't tie things together very well. Some of the pieces are held on rather tenuously.

So, part of me wants to part these sets out and start building a stock, and another part of me wants to keep them as little decorations. Might be best to do nothing, at least for a while. I've got to get past the projects I got going right now.

Because of the first post about nanoblocks I got a nice email from Larry Killgallon, the president of Ohio Arts, commenting on what I wrote. Nice, huh. Ohio Arts is distributing the line in the USA. Larry says they are having fun marketing the sets and that they are selling well. That's good news, hopefully there will an opportunity to expand the line. In Japan there are bulk brick packs in various color themes. There are much larger, more complex, sets with 2-3000 piece counts, including a large version of Neuschwanstein Castle with 5800 pieces. We exchanged a couple of emails and Larry promised to send some sets. Wow! That was real nice, huh. I'll tell you what came in the mail tomorrow. The time has slipped away and it's past bedtime.

City Gone Mad

 

I have come to believe it was about 1985 that I started to seriously buy some LEGO. The Basic Brick set 350 had come that year and I got 8 of them for about 12 bucks each. That gave me a nice start on some bulk. I started small, mostly just noodling around. It's the stuff you wouldn't take pictures of, and there wasn't anywhere to put stuff like that. I did take a a roll of 35 millimeter film and printed those pics. This is them, scanned, slightly cropped, with the brightness, color and contrast tweeked a bit.

 

I started making buildings first, then it grew into a statement about uncontrolled building. In the world of those small plastic buildings the right to the air space above buildings gets sold and they build in it. The buildings don't have much detail, especially compared to the Micropolis type building, but that wasn't the point. I certainly didn't have much gray back in those days. It just wasn't as common as it is currently.

 

It's kind of hard to see everything. The pics just aren't well enough lit and it's a pretty big lump of plastic. It was about 2 feet deep, 30 plus inches wide and more than 2 feet tall. The smallest buildings are supposed to be 3-5 story buildings, then bigger ones are built over them, finally the giant upside down U-shaped building gets tossed up. You can see more pics at Flickr.