"Nothing but the rain"
This next section of the bucket wheel excavator is the main conveyor belt from the body to the truck. This was about an hour to build. So far total build time is 5.75 hours. I think I’m over half way now.
I was really tempted to start the bucket wheel part of this but it was feeling late in the evening!
I think I’ll be sad once this has been finished. It really is quite therapeutic building this stuff.
This one marks a change as this is a model I bought from EBay from a charity. All money to good causes then. While I didn’t have all the pieces in this kit there was enough to make the orbiter.
And a view with the cargo doors / radiators shut:
This kit was released in 1993. It amazes me how basic it seems to be!
Now I have a working base unit for the Bucket Wheel Excavator it’s time to make the rotating base which serves as the connector for the conveyors and bucket wheel arm. This build took two hours. I had only really budgeted about ninety minutes of time and so I was feeling quite tired towards the end, but the result is gorgeous.
Here’s some detail of the build.
I’m about a third of the way through the instructions and not quite halfway through the separate bags!
Here’s the conveyor superstructure part way through the build:
This is the initial joining of the pieces but with more work still to do:
Another of the completed sections so far:
Caterpillar time! The big boy needs wheels (or similar). Build time for these was about an 45 minutes for both.
And here are the caterpillars attached to the base chassis.
This Lego model is being constructed in sections. These communications are in line with the numbered bags of legos in the kit. The first part of the kit was to make the dumper truck covered here, this took about an hour.
Here is my workspace:
I use pasta bowls to hold the pieces while I work. This saves them from dropping into the fireplace or bouncing under furniture on the floor.
This was the first main part of this part of the build:
More of the framework:
And this is the final part of this build. This section is the base unit with driver gears for the caterpillar tracks.
This took about an hour. So far, total time is two hours.
Another in this mni-Lego season. Here we have Qui-Gon fighting Darth Maul in the Naboo power station (?). Obi-Wan awaits to avenge what is about to happen!
You are being spoilt these days as we have another gallery for you!
It is a mini-Lego season here and so there’ll be a couple more models to show along the way.
This Lego is so lovely it needs its own gallery to show it off properly!
I took a birthday trip to see Kong: Skull Island at the Rochester Cineworld Cinema. If you don’t know me by now, then you’ll never, ever know that I rate my movies on the IMDB website, but there’s a catch. I explained my rating system here, but I think scores have been creeping recently so I may have to redefine the system. Watch this space. When I decide my score I tweet it, which leads to a quite nice embedded format:
I rated Kong: Skull Island (2017) 4/10 #IMDb https://t.co/Yx7DMF4s8n
— Ian Parish (@iparish) March 18, 2017
I had originally scored this as a 6, but upon reflection it didn’t deserve to be rated that highly, hence my change of mind.
Because, this film, was, shit.
SPOILERS ahead.
The script was appalling, lazy, stereotypical bullshit. Samuel L Jackson’s eyes got too much screen time. The film makers can’t count helicopters.
The monsters looked brilliant. I’m not really aware of the mythology around the Kong character but in this film he seemed to be more of an accidental benevolent monster type thing rather like Godzilla than all out terrible monster. I guess it’s OK because he fell in love with Brie Larson, who didn’t get smashed to death inside Kong’s hand while he ripped the brain out of a two legged lizard thing. It was irritating that Brie Larson seemed to spend all her time with a bag strap over her chest to enhance her breasts, this wasn’t needed, it seemed sexist to me.
The characters were terrible. War mad generals, smooth calm SAS member, crazy scientist with stupid theories, tribe who don’t speak. It was lazy terrible bullshit.
I can suspend my disbelief for gigantic monsters on an island surrounded by a perpetual storm. That bit was fine. The rest of this was bollocks.
It’s the little things. Little things that shouldn’t be things I have to write about. Like helicopters that materialise from nowhere. On the ship travelling to Skull Island there were, quite clearly, one Chinook, one Sea Stallion and four Hueys. All of a sudden when they take off to head to Skull Island the Hueys had babies and there were eight of them!! I have no idea where they came from. I also don’t know where the helos at the end of the film came from unless the US Navy had a task force nearby.
Oh, the Hueys had tape players and speakers. I can’t quite decide if this was an homage to Apocalypse Now! or just a plain bullshit rip off. The shots were almost exactly the same.
If you want a film with rebellious music, at least make the music decent. There was a ton of decent stuff around in the 1973 setting.
The two chaps who had crashed on Skull Island in the opening sequence made a boat out of aircraft parts. The team spent about a day turning this hulk of 29 year old metal into a working boat by turning some bolts and waggling some leavers. They made a metal thing work smoothly after 29 years in a humid environment. They must be geniuses. Oh and then, when they get the engine running it pops away smoothly and quietly in the background. Let me tell you that there are NO aero engines that run “quietly” in the background. That engine would have been producing in excess of 900bhp and no silencing. The makeshift boat would have torn itself apart.
According to the Wikipedia page I missed the post-credits scene where other monsters are revealed to the viewer. I don’t care.
If I wanted to be very extremely generous I could claim that the film was a complete metaphor for the USA’s battle against terrorism with Kong representing the terrorists. But I don’t want to be generous with this film.
Part two of the journey into the largest Technic Lego kit ever available. I made the dumper trump that comes with the bucket excavator. It’s a nice little kit with steering and a raising bed.
The bed raised:
And finally, a mean front view.
This is the output from my radar server. If you want a better view then you can ask me for the details.
Hmm, there are page formatting issues. Not sure I care enough to fix them.