LEGO® Reverse-Engineering Challenge: Days 2-5

On the weekend we mentioned Ryan Howerter is running an advanced daily building challenge and showed you the first one. They appear on their Instagram at 11am Mountain Time every day but we know not everyone uses Instagram, so we've started publishing them on New Elementary's Twitter and now here are a bunch of them for those of you who are yet to catch up! We will try to keep this up but if not, there's always Ryan's Instagram!

Welcome back to the Reverse-Engineering Challenge, or REC for short. Simply look at these small LEGO builds, and try to figure out how they are built. Always assume the hidden side is identical. The colours are irrelevant. No rubber bands and no flex tubing allowed! It's not a contest, there are no prizes – think of it more like a daily crossword puzzle. Solve as many as you like, at your own pace. Solutions are posted every Sunday at https://linktr.ee/rhowerter.

REC5 by Ryan Howerter

LEGO® Creator Expert review: 10272 Old Trafford - Manchester United

Today Ben Davies plays with a set the size of a football field! LEGO® Creator Expert 10272 Old Trafford - Manchester United clearly has a target audience of certain football fans, but will certain LEGO fans appreciate it for its techniques and many parts, including new moulds? The set is priced £249.99 / $299.99 / 269.99€.

With the exception of the occasional LEGO® Friends set, the last time LEGO tackled the subject of football (or for our American readers, soccer) was in 2006 for the LEGO Sports theme. That changes with 10272 Old Trafford - Manchester United, introduced in February to the LEGO Creator Expert line.

Old Trafford stadium was first opened in 1910 in Greater Manchester, England, and since then has served as the home stadium of the famous Manchester United Football Club. It is currently celebrating its 110th anniversary, which LEGO is capitalizing on with the release of this set.

LEGO® Reverse-Engineering Challenge: Day 1

If you’re looking for some fun and good LEGO® building challenges and ideas, we can help! Today there’s a piece of great news for advanced LEGO builders: our friend and contributor Ryan Howerter is launching a daily building challenge on their Instagram. It will give your LEGO brain a good workout and definitely teach you new techniques.

It’s called the Reverse-Engineering Challenge, or REC for short, and you may be familiar with the concept already as four of these have been run on Flickr in the past. Here’s how it works.

Ryan posts a small LEGO build, and you try to figure out how it is built.

LEGO® Xtra: Inthert uses 40376 Botanical Accessories as seed parts

You may recall we recently challenged Inthert to get creative with a couple of polybags from the LEGO® Xtra range. We already published his creations based upon 40375 Sports Accessories and today comes the other bag: 40376 Botanical Accessories which has 32 pieces and is priced £3.99 / $3.99 / 3.99€.

 

For the green-fingered among you, there is 40376 Botanical Accessories (not to be confused with 2018’s 40310 Botanical Accessories).

LEGO® Ideas review: 21322 Pirates of Barracuda Bay - the new pieces & minifigures

Jonas Kramm already took a look at the construction of the new LEGO® Ideas set 21322 Pirates of Barracuda Bay and saw that it can change from a pirate hideout into a complete ship, but there was so much to say he didn’t get around to taking a detailed look at all the new pieces and minifigures included. So we do that today!

LEGO® Ideas try their best to work without creating any new moulds, so we don’t get any in 21322 Pirates of Barracuda Bay. That statement turns out to be not completely true however, as you will see later.

Recoloured LEGO® pieces in 21322 Pirates of Barracuda Bay

Most interesting are the recolours – existing elements changed to new colours – and there are more in this set than I thought.

The first surprise while building was the colour of the palm leaves used in this set. From the picture on the box I would have bet that they are the usual Dark Green/ Green (shown top right), but all 16 are actually Bright Green (6299808|10884, shown lower right).

21322 Pirates of Barracuda Bay: Designer interview with Milan Madge & Austin William Carlson

The next LEGO® Ideas set, 21322 Pirates of Barracuda Bay, seems to be dividing opinion in the community. Regardless, you will be interested to hear what its designers, Milan Madge (set) and Austin William Carlson (graphics and minifigures) have to say about their adaptation of Pablo Jiménez's original design. And for this exclusive interview they've also shared the seven prototypes showing the model's development!

The first thing many people will say is that the final product diverges significantly from the original fan model. How did you come to the decision to make these changes, and was there much input from the fan designer?

Milan: The first step was building the fan designer Pablo’s model, but it became obvious early on that I was missing a lot of elements. Many of the pieces have been out of production for some time, so we had to get creative. The biggest hurdle was the raised baseplate, which meant a total redesign of the structure of the model, but even tiny changes such as the new boat hulls being wider than the ones in Pablo’s submission meant that all the proportions needed altering – a real headache!

LEGO® Ideas review: 21322 Pirates of Barracuda Bay - the build

Just revealed, 21322 Pirates of Barracuda Bay is the next LEGO® Ideas set and we have not one but three articles about it for you this week! Later we have a fascinating interview with the designers Milan Madge and Austin William Carlson, but first up Jonas Kramm reviews the set across two articles: today he looks at the ship, bay and Easter eggs and next will be the new parts and the minifigures.

Ahoy sailor! Did you ever wonder what happened to Redbeard and his beloved vessel, the Black Seas Barracuda? Then come closer and I will tell you the tale of the Pirates of Barracuda Bay: the newest LEGO® Ideas set.

Pitched by Pablo Jiménez (Bricky_Brick) as “The Pirate Bay” in 2019, the submission that took only 25 days to reach the required 10,000 supporters has now been turned into an official set and will be available from 1 April 2020. It contains 2,545 pieces and the price point is US$199.99/ CA$259.99/ €199.99/ £179.99/ 1599DKK.

LEGO® DOTS review: 41908 Extra Dots - Series 1

A range of new sets from LEGO® DOTS hit the market earlier this month, and one set that looked interesting to me was 41908 Extra Dots - Series 1. These little packs are advertised as containing 109 colourful tiles, with "10 surprise charms included" so we thought we would open some up to see what we got.

Each pack is priced at  £3.99 / US$3.99 / 3.99€ which works out at 3.7 pence/cents per tile, although it works out slightly less than this due to the inclusion of spare pieces.

Old Elementary: LEGO® technique and geometry articles, part 1

Stuck inside much? Here at New Elementary we have been discussing ways to keep you entertained... and we have lots of ideas coming up!

First off we thought you might like to read some specially chosen articles from New Elementary's back catalogue. To start with we went to the beginning; 2013! See if any of these LEGO® articles take your fancy.

LEGO® Xtra: Inthert tackles 40375 Sports Accessories

Sometimes The LEGO Group offer us polybags from the LEGO® Xtra range to review, and although these don't contain completely new elements or recolours we still love the challenge of figuring out what to do with them! In the past Tim Goddard has taken on the challenge but this time we've asked another UK Spacer, Inthert, to get creative with them. 

Unless you’re willing to purchase multiple sets or rummage in the build-a-minifigure section in store, obtaining a good selection of themed parts direct from LEGO® can be tricky. At least that was the case before the LEGO Xtra polybags hit shelves. Each bag typically consists of a handful of accessories along with a few basic bricks that can be used to make a suggested small build or two. Today we’ll be focusing on 40375 Sports Accessories; we’ll look over the parts included, then dive into some MOCs I made using the bag’s contents as seed elements.