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LEGO is great.
Sites like Rebrickable can help you find and purchase the individual parts you need from sellers around the world.
But there’s a downside: price.
But buying a massive custom project, piece by piece, can really rack up that price.
Suddenly that massive, beautiful robot costs more than 30 cents a piece!
LEGO can get expensive, but even the most ardent collector might balk at those prices.
And then I cheated.
What Have I Done?
DHL said it would be up to six weeks before I’d get my pieces.
I got them in just two, which is pretty great for shipping from China to Texas.
It was just like a “real” LEGO set, minus the branding!
That meant that I had nearly 5,000 loose pieces of not-LEGO.
But the Helicarrier is basically a big boat with a few gears added on.
It took me about 16 hours.
Even at this early stage, I could tell this was going to take a massive amount of time.
Doing Right by the Designer
Finally, I was able to start.
I loaded up the PDF instructions file on myLenovo Chromebook Duet, an extremely handy companion for this build.
But when I did, I noticed that the file lacked any mention of designer Nicola Stocchi.
I got to the point that I was setting aside particularly hard-to-find pieces on their own.
The instructions didn’t help with the speed.
There are a lot of unconventional interesting decisions in the main build.
There’s an amazing amount of engineering and creativity on display here.
Stochi’s instructions were to build the main skeleton and body first, complete with the legs.
Putting this together took about three weeks, putting in hours after work and on the weekends.
The Result
I’m going to need a bigger shelf.
Setting aside the headache of actually building this thing, the end result is glorious.
(LEGO even hasan “official” Jurassic World robot T-rex!)
But it’s definitely the most impressive piece I’ve ever personally worked on.
I just dread having to move the damn thing ever again.
But there are other factors that come into play that make a large MOC design more difficult.
First of all, the Thunderjaw is incredibly fragile, even compared to the most complex LEGO designs.
It’s definitely a display piece model, not a toy.
The ball joint of the tail is almost constantly loose.
I’ve made a few smaller MOCs and built my own, so I was prepared for that.
On a small build, this isn’t really a big deal.
On a build of this size and complexity, the problems of loose and/or tight pieces start multiplying.
On a couple of occasions, I had to use pliers to get pieces apart from one another.
Yeah, there are compromises.
Also, the set was missing about a dozen pieces.
(There are about six authentic LEGO pieces in there somewhere.)
One of the Thunderjaw’s big white mandibles had very visible scratches on it right out of the bag.
Was It Worth It?
The finished product speaks for itself.
And yeah, the time.
My advice: Start with something much, much smaller.
