Building a major MOC using LEGO - Part 5: The finishing touches

All of the sections are complete and the time has come to pull everything together. As with most major MOCs, I designed this to be pulled apart for transport. It's a great way to pack something like this up in a few boxes and minimize the space needed for moving. Of course, there's still a little bit of work that's needed to bring everything together and see how it looks before sending it off to the show.

Finishing up work on a major project leaves me with some mixed feelings. On the one hand, I'm extremely happy to be able to move on to something else and make new plans. On the other, it's been such a time consuming process, that it feels a little strange not to be working on this design anymore.

Oh well, let's wrap this up.

Building a major MOC using LEGO - Part 4: To the dome

In tackling this project, I knew that the dome was going to be a bit of a challenge. The very brickish nature of LEGO doesn't exactly lend itself very well to curved shapes. There are, of course, a few specialty pieces made by LEGO that create that curved effect on their own. However, they can look out of place if the proportions are off. In this case, given the size of this project, I could not find anything that would match the specific length and size I was looking for.

As I'm sure many people who MOC do, I looked to random image searches for a little bit of inspiration. Oddly enough, I ended up finding something close to what I was shooting for with this project from a post about spheres. This helped give me some insight in to how to get at least a portion of the effect I was looking for.

Building a major MOC using LEGO - Part 3: Raise it up

Most people who have built anything on a standard 10 inch baseplate have probably suffered through the frustration of parts popping off when you go to actually move your creation. While these large plates offer a great continuous surface to work with when building, they are a little flimsy. This is an issue I knew was gong to be a problem as soon as I started this project, mainly because I was going to be using a LOT of tiles on the base. Those 1x2 tiles have a habit of just coming off when you don't want them to, especially mounted on a baseplate.

You may have noticed that a lot of MOC builders often present their finished product on a raised display stand. This feature really serves two purposes. First of all, it offers a decorative flair to the area beneath the MOC. Second, it makes it easier to move large projects around after construction is complete, minimizing the risk of pieces coming loose when there's a change in the tension as the plate bows ever so slightly.

Building a major MOC using LEGO - Part 2: Planning

Building with LEGO can sometimes be an interesting process. For many builders, nothing beats sitting down with a bunch of parts and doing some free building, even if no goal is in mind. For others, painstaking preparations are made with the laying of every piece planned in advance.

Personally, I fall somewhere in the middle. I like to have an idea of what I'm getting into so I can order parts, but I'm very open about what the finished product should end up looking like when I'm building my own design. This partially comes from the fact that I really do not like the digital design tools that are out there right now. I've used LEGO Digital Designer on a few occasions and the interface, quite honestly, annoyed me to no end. Searching for specific elements can be a pain and my computer always seems too slow to keep up.

Building a major MOC using LEGO - Part 1

Halloween MOC from last year.

Like most LEGO fans, I often mess around with my spare bricks and make little scenes for my own amusement. It's a great way to kill some time and practice building techniques. I have never really done a large scale MOC (My Own Creation) before though. That's mainly because I lack a decent library of spare parts and I really am not a big fan of breaking down retail sets for the pieces. I have been a set collector for most of my life.

I feel that changing a little though. I am still a huge fan of many sets that LEGO is putting out and my want list of official releases is always growing. Some of those sets are purely about the minifigures though and less about the finished product of the build. Honestly, most of the sets with a RRP under $100 just don't excite me as much as they used to. I get a much bigger thrill diving in to a 1,000+ piece set that will take me a week to sit down and complete.

Getting in the Halloween spirit

Picking up the ghost and clock polybag set a few weeks ago got my holiday creative juices flowing. I just felt the little guy looked so lonely standing out in the open with nothing but a clock to keep him company. If I had my way, I would be adding the Haunted House to my collection this fall. I don't expect that to happen very soon though. The set is just a little too expensive and I would rather wait for some sort of a sale when it eventually hits Amazon down the road.

Thankfully, messing around on LEGO Digital Designer and some inventory surfing on Bricklink gave me a few fun ideas for a little scene featuring the clock and ghost.