LEGO® Chinese New Year review: 80104 Lion Dance

Ben Davies returns today to examine the next in our collection of 2020 LEGO® sets introduced for the Asian market; 80104 Lion Dance

We recently examined the new parts introduced in 80105 Chinese New Year Temple Fair, which we found to contain a wealth of recolored parts and new prints. Excitingly, there are even more new elements (and interesting techniques) to discover in the Temple Fair’s smaller counterpart, 80104 Lion Dance.

LEGO® Monkie Kid review & alt build: 80009 Pigsy’s Food Truck

Today we welcome back super-Spacer and co-creator of Lego Space: Building the Future (Amazon USA: affiliate link), Tim Goddard (on Instagram) for the first of our examinations of sets from LEGO® Monkie Kid. If you need an overview of this exciting new Asian theme check out our article, otherwise read on and see what new parts Tim found in 80009 Pigsy’s Food Truck – and enjoy his original creation, made from parts in the set!

Monkie Kid. It’s not just Ninjago with a lockdown haircut, apparently. Let’s see, shall we…

Pigsy’s food truck is a massive lump of a 10 module-wide food wagon. The scale is well off anything in the LEGO City range but you might get away with it put next to the new scale of Speed Champion sets. You will not get away with it next to a minifigure.

LEGO® Art: the new mosaic theme

A key new product line arising from the LEGO Group’s newly-enhanced focus on adult builders has just been announced: LEGO® Art. In short: mosaics packaged with a soundtrack, but if that concept or the selected subjects hold zero interest for you, keep reading anyway because there are a few new moulds of great interest to all builders, and fantastically useful recolours. Here is our rundown, gleaned from the press release as well as an online exclusive reveal event with creative lead Samuel Johnson that happened in May as part of Fan Media Days.

Coming 1 August 2020 (1 September in the US) the range comprises of four products each priced US$119.99/ CA $149.99/ £114.99/ DK 1099DKK/ €119.99 (Euro pricing varies by country). Sound pricey? Well, each contains on average 3,200 parts; about 3.75 US cents per piece. “A bargain, I tell ya!”, says Sam. Obviously the vast majority of the pieces are round 1x1s, including new and rare colours, but there’s also a new kind of 16x16 baseplate, a Technic element used for hanging the art and a new, wider brick separator!

LEGO® 40411 Creative Fun 12-in-1: Professor's One Set MOCs

Today we welcome the Professor (on Instagram) for an altogether different kind of LEGO® review! He's a French engineer who loves LEGO Star Wars and Creator – especially the 3-in-1 sets, as he loves to create his own alternate models – which made him ideal to take on the new set 40411 Creative Fun 12-in-1. This is a gift-with-purchase in many parts of the world from July 1 to 26 with qualifying purchases over $85 / €85 / £85.  He added so many of his own builds, it's now a 50-in-1! 

According to me, LEGO is synonymous with infinite play. I love making several creations from just the parts of one set – what I call One Set MOC. This is the very essence of LEGO. Only limited by your imagination!

LEGO® Element Design: Interview with Karsten Juel Bunch, Part 2 – fans' questions

Yesterday we published our in-depth interview with LEGO® Design Director of the Element Design Platform, Karsten Juel Bunch, who explained the special role his team take and ran through an example: the redevelopment of the large shooter element and arrow. Today we just round off the chat with a few questions that were posed by the New Elementary team and our supporters on Patreon.

©2020 The LEGO Group

LEGO® Element Design: Interview with Karsten Juel Bunch, Part 1 – the new shooter

In May we spoke with Karsten Juel Bunch who joined the LEGO Group in 2001 as an Element Designer and rose to become Design Director of the Element Design Team in 2016. He told us about the design process for complex elements, in particular the brand new shooter elements Brick 2X6X1 1/3 W/ Shooter (Element ID 6296378|Design ID 49743) and Arrow W/ 3.2 Shaft (6307940|46537).
This transcript has been edited for clarity, readability and narrative flow.

Join the New Elementary team

We are looking to expand the team at New Elementary! We pride ourselves on creating the finest original longform content celebrating LEGO® parts, techniques and sets. As time goes by, more and more people are enjoying our work but contributors occasionally move on, to focus on other aspects of their life (or to start working for TLG in a couple of cases!) and while lockdown has allowed us more time to dedicate to the site, it is proving a strain overall – which is a very nice problem to have!

Tipper Ends: Eero Okkonen's Aurora Sievert & Hurricane III

Yesterday, Eero Okkonen examined in great detail the history and geometry of the 'Tipper End Family' of LEGO® pieces, especially Vehicle, Tipper End Flat with Pins (Design ID 3145) and Vehicle, Tipper End Sloped (3436). Today he reveals this never-before-published model he built in February using tipper ends, but first he takes us through earlier models where he utilised these unusual parts that were introduced five decades ago.  

Previous Builds

A more mathematical approach to tipper ends is a new and exciting world to me, but I’ve used them few times before, mostly as armour shells or clothing, something akin to Constraction shells.

Old Elementary: Odds & Tipper Ends

We take another trip into LEGO® part history today to discover a kind of piece introduced 51 years ago that is still found in sets in 2020; 'tipper ends'. They're a passion for Finnish LEGO builder Eero Okkonen and today he delves deep into their geometry and reveals building techniques utilising them.

As we all very well know, adults complain 64% of the time that everything was better when they were kids; the only LEGO® bricks were basic angular blocks (and lost behind the radiator probably) and you could build everything based on your own imagination and didn’t have to follow the instructions and it made you a better person in the end. I don’t think like that, and one of the biggest joys depicted here on New Elementary and in contests like Iron Builder (and hopefully in my own work) is finding new, fresh uses to odd and curious parts, no matter what their original use in the sets was.

This article is about what I will call the Tipper End Family; today I’ll introduce the parts and their history, then go through their dimensions with a series of tablescraps and explanatory pictures, then tomorrow show some older builds of mine using these pieces and close with an unpublished build.

LEGO® Star Wars review & original builds: 75272 Sith Tie Fighter

Inthert (on Instagram & Flickr) returns today not only to review LEGO® Star Wars 75272 Sith Tie Fighter but to also use its parts, along with his own collection, to create his own fantastic original Star Wars models! The set has 470 elements, three minifigures and is available now priced at £64.99 / US$79.99 / 69.99€.

The Parts

Upon its release at the start of 2020, the Sith Tie Fighter was one of two sets to feature some new wedge plates (alongside Speed Champions 76898 Formula E Panasonic Jaguar Racing GEN2 Car & Jaguar I-PACE eTROPHY, which Duncan Lindbo previously reviewed).