Crafts « Robot Claw

Archive for the ‘Crafts’ Category

Let’s Go Sith!

Monday, April 5th, 2021

I made this:

It’s one of many new mosaic kits that LEGO has released. You can assemble one of three images, and I chose Darth Maul.

The instructions say to assemble the mosaic separately as nine tiled pieces with 256 studs apiece, but since this would require having all 12 colours going simultaneously I instead chose to do it by colour.

This way I saw it slowly come together as I worked, and I think I felt this method is much quicker than what the instructions suggest.

To be honest it wasn’t exactly fun, especially when I got to black. I had to place 877 of these identical black studs one at a time! My fingertips were aching when I was done!

All told it took a few hours over two days. Given the tedium of assembly and the (presumed) greater tedium of dismantling it I very much doubt I’ll ever make the other two designs!

It’s bigger and heavier than I expected (but does come with brackets for wall mounting) but looks good from a distance. It would have looked better using the smaller flat pieces rather than studs, but I can see why they avoided that since it would have made disassembly extremely difficult.

Overall it’s more of a curiosity that a success. I don’t think I’ll be buying any more of these, but it does make me more interested in designing a mosaic of my own…

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LEGO Bonsai

Tuesday, January 26th, 2021

It also has a cherry blossom mode, with pink flowers, that I’ll probably make in the spring.

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The New Jigsaw

Monday, January 18th, 2021

I love jigsaws made by a company named Pintoo. The pieces are plastic and fit together with barely an atom between them. The finished puzzles look great and you could easily frame and display them.

I’ve bought a lot by this company and given several as gifts. I think 500 to 800 pieces is an ideal puzzle size, but recently I got a 2000 piece puzzle:

This is a lot of pieces, and all spread out barely fit on our table:

Pintoo puzzles lack flat edge pieces so making the border is much more difficult than in other puzzles. In this case, sorting the pieces and making the border took me over 4 hours!

Finishing the entire puzzle took me 24.5 hours over ten days!! Here’s an animation of the puzzle after each work session:

Its a lovely puzzle and was a lot of fun to assemble. But I think it’ll be a while before I tackle one of this size again!

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Let’s Call It A Christmas Tree

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2020

I bought a multi pack of crystal tree growing kits recently and gave some of you one for Christmas. Who got one? I don’t remember! If it was you, here’s what you have to look forward to…

I believe all four kits were different colours, and we ended up with pink. It takes only moments to assemble it, and when you’re done be sure to put it somewhere it won’t be disturbed.

The above three shots are right after making it, then 1 and 2 hours later. You can see the tree saturates quickly, but the growth takes a while to begin.

Here we have 3, 4 and 5 hours after assembly. As you can see this is a high quality kit! I’ve blogged about these before and if you’re interested how they work go have a read.

And lastly we have 6 and 7 hours and then the final image is the next day (about 18 hours after assembly). What a lovely tree!

That’s a detailed shot of the crystals themselves. They’re very fragile so we keep it in a curio. In time they get stronger, but they will also fade as the food coloring evaporates. The white thing in the background of the photo is one we set up years ago.

If you get one from me for Christmas please set it up and send me a photo when it’s done. I’d like to see the colours 🙂

Posted in Crafts, Nature | Comments Closed

Castle Grayskull

Sunday, September 27th, 2020

Today I finished building this:

It’s a 3500 piece model of Castle Grayskull from Masters Of The Universe. It looks like LEGO but it’s actually ‘Mega Construx’, which is a LEGO ~~ripoff~~ competitor. The kit came out for $250 but I got it for quite a bit less on Amazon, both because I love the design and because the reviews were overwhelmingly positive.

The packaging is beautiful and opening the massive (and heavy!) box revealed lovely art and a fantastic manual. The 50+ bags of pieces are separated into four smaller boxes each with their own art, and the entire thing screamed quality.

The kit was built in five parts, each of which took 2-3 hours. It wasn’t a trivial build, but not as challenging as the more complex LEGO technic kits. However the mega construx pieces are slightly lower quality than LEGO and occasionally were difficult to actually push together! As a result it was physically more difficult to make this set than your average LEGO kit 🙂

There’s also the occasional bit of molding flash visible (as you can see above) and the manufacturing of the pieces isn’t as perfect as LEGO, but overall I was extremely impressed with how well the set was designed and went together. I had routinely dismissed LEGO competitors before making this kit, but now I’ll have to keep my eyes open in case anything else of this quality is released.

That’s the front of the finished castle…

And that is the back. Note the curved walls and roof, and the 100+ individual little brown pieces used for roof tiles. It’s a tall kit, very sturdy and heavy. I feel if I dropped it it would hardly break!

Of course it opens and has massive amounts of ‘play features’ including several doors, a jail cell (with creepy inhabitant), a moving throne, a cannon, ladder, moving lift etc. It came with six minifigs (and I bought a few extras myself) which are a good LEGO-scale equivalent of the original guys from the 1980s.

I’ve always loved LEGO castles and for many years have wished for a highly detailed and large kit (perhaps of Neuschwanstein) so when I saw this I bought it as much for it being a castle as the (cool!) MOTU origin.

It was great fun to build and looks wonderful up on my bookshelf. But there’s still a spot free if LEGO is inspired and finally releases a detailed castle of their own…

Posted in Crafts, Models, Retro, Toys | Comments Closed

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