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.