18 September 2019

2019 Parts Fest #1: Duncan Lindbo bugs out

Posted by Admin
After a break let's get back the last few contributions to our Parts Festival, where LEGO® builders use some of the newest parts to create inspiring ideas. Duncan Lindbo is back today, finding a place for the first creation he made for us.

Today we get to see where the TRT13 dropship was in such a rush to get to…

(Click image to enlarge)

The colony on planet LG-624 had gone silent, so a platoon of marines was dispatched to investigate. They start their search at the colony’s power plant complex. The massive reactor tower appears intact, but the shattered windows and flickering fires in the admin towers suggest some kind of struggle. More ominous still, the entire complex seems deserted: no sign of the colonists anywhere.

Before we find out what happened to the colonists, let’s take a look at today’s piece of inspiration: Pneumatic Connecting Piece, No. 1 in Black (6249327|41817). It’s shown up in a single City fire set, where a rubber squeeze bulb fits over the nozzle to provide air through a pneumatic tube to an extendable water jet piece. The pneumatic tube connection is the same as the one used on newer Technic pistons, so there could be some interesting applications there. I’ve only got the nozzles, so that exploration will have to wait for another time.

It’s pretty clear in trying to build with this part that it was only really intended to be connected through the Technic holes (which I did to provide some greebling on the “reactor tower”, and on the antennae on the admin towers).


However, the mouth of the nozzle is just wide enough to stick a 1x1 round piece in. I used this in the antennae details on one of the admin towers.

A word of warning though: this connection is extremely tight. You’re going to have trouble getting the part out once you’ve stuck them in, and it’s hard to push the part out because it sits directly over the pneumatic connector. I wouldn’t do it with any part I wasn’t ready to sacrifice.

One disappointing aspect of the nozzle is that while the gap between the nozzle and the Technic connection points looks like it’s a plate thick, it’s not quite. You can force a tile into this gap (LEGO tiles are microscopically thinner than plates) but doing this definitely stresses the parts.

I initially assumed it was wide enough to take a tile, and had planned to use this fact to conceal everything but the nozzles of the “heat exchanger” portion of the power plant, shown below.


Back to the mystery of  the missing colonists.

Upon investigating the core of the power plant, the marines discovered the cause of the colonists’ disappearance: spiders. GIANT SPACE SPIDERS.

With no sign of survivors, the marines beat a hasty retreat in their dropship to nuke the site from orbit.






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Products mentioned in this post were kindly supplied by the LEGO Group. All content represents the opinions of New Elementary authors and not the LEGO Group. All text and images are © New Elementary unless otherwise attributed.

4 comments:

  1. "I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit."

    Love the build and the use of the piece!

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  2. I was disappointed the part doesn't accommodate a tile in that way too, seems strange that and the cylinder connection aren't possible as Lego usually makes an effort to use common dimensions across all their parts.. Still a cool part none the less as evidenced by these builds!

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    Replies
    1. Yeah, usually something either obviously works or obviously doesn't, but that doesn't quite seem to be the case for this part.

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  3. You gotta love when an expert LEGO builder takes a few new parts and runs a marathon with 'em. Great work!

    ReplyDelete