Wha-wha

I just returned from vacation with the happy sight of my August part order for the Falcon waiting for me!

I happily tore into the package only to find that in my haste to place the order before I left, I signed up for the wrong color...for this little cone I needed 56 of...UG!

More Bricks Arrive!

It's been a awhile since I last ordered parts for the Falcon, mainly because of the way I was going about putting together the orders.

Previously I was looking at the next few steps and ordering just what I needed to complete those steps. However, what I noticed is that as I ran out of certain common parts, every month I was ordering 5 or 6 '1 x 4 Light Gray Plates'.

So I changed my strategy a bit: instead of ordering just the parts I need to complete the next steps, I'm taking a few months and ordering only the parts that need the most of and selecting from sellers that have the best price on those parts.

Yeah!

The happy sight!

This means that I made an absolutely huge (for me) order of 1133 parts from hefBricks with about 200 of those 2x3 Light Gray Plates. His prices were fantastic and even offered discounts of lots larger than 20, 50 or 200. AND he included package tracking so I could indulge in my obsessive package tracking tendencies!

An evening of good beer and
inventorying LEGO. It doesn't get
much better!

The only problem with the order. Still
that's only a 0.08% error rate, pretty
darned good!

If my numbers are right (big 'if' there) this brings me up to 3290 of the 5192 parts that I need. Over half way!

Now I have my August order on deck with another 343 parts, they should be waiting for me when I get back from vacation!

On Radar Dishes...

This is LEGO part that serves as the UCS Millennium Falcon's radar dish. Specifically, is is LEGO Design ID 50990 (a 10x10 dish) colored in medium stone gray. You can find it in Bricklink  as part 50990pb03 or Peeron as 50990pb3 (the pb03 or pb3 meaning the 3rd pattern variation for that design).

Since the UCS Millennium Falcon is the only set to ever have this part, this means its expensive. Very expensive. Current prices on Bricklink are between $120-$340.

They were a bit cheaper a before the teaser video of the new Star Wars movies. I think there was some hope that Lego would do a new Falcon using this part. The teaser's Falcon sporting a new dish design ended that (makes sense, the old dish is still in the debris of the Death Star II after all)!

This is a standard 50990 10x10 medium stone gray dish that you can get for about $10-$20 on Bricklink. Still pricey as they were only in 2 sets, both high dollar that had it (and somewhat ironically, set 10188: Death Star and set 10143: Death Star II).

The design is actually a sticker from a German seller on eBay that offers both the sticker loose or already applied to a 50990.

I've been mulling over getting a "real" 50990pb03 VS a stickered version of a 50990 since I saw folks selling decals for the 50990 (and in one case actually etching the pattern onto them somehow).

This morning I pulled the trigger. The price of the 50990pb03 are climbing without any real hope of coming down. And though I've spent a lot of money on rare parts in the past, if this 50990 with a decal looks just like a 50990pb03 unless your are right on top of it, I think I can handle not being 100% accurate.

Especially if that means I have an extra $100+ dollars to spend on all the other parts I still need!

It's good to have friends!

If you've ever had any LEGO space sets, you probably run across these lever / antenna looking things. According the info that I can find, LEGO has been making them since at least 1985 and they are pretty much a stable of space sets since that time.

Which makes perfect sense for them to be included in the Ultimate Collector's Series Millennium Falcon. The trouble for me are that the "light stone grey tops on light stone grey base" version of this part is comparatively rare and that the largest source of them is the UCS Millennium Falcon itself. It has 60 of the little buggers.

They are currently selling for ~$3.50 on Bricklink.  Even the old gray color from pre-2004 are averaging about $1 apiece. Since they are rare and I need so many, this one part is quickly becoming one of the more expensive line items on the rebuild.

Happily, a few folks that know what I am up to have offered a helping hand. Above are a trio that +Sean Dilda traded me for the comparatively more common "black tops on light stone grey base" version. This is the second batch of these that he's found for me making a total of 7.  That's over 10 percent of the way there (and about $25 cheaper of build)!

Brickficiency

I've started putting together the May order for the Falcon. My hope is to get enough parts to complete steps 54-60, which will mean that I have to pick-up 528 LEGO (roughly 1/10th of the set).

On orders this large, it is nearly impossible for a human to figure out a the cheapest way to order that parts. I use Bricklink for my orders (it's like a LEGO only eBay), but there are literally thousands of sellers with millions of bricks there, sorting through that to find a cost effective way to order is painful and slow.

Bricklink has some tools to help, for example you can enter a wantlist and then search for sellers that have all the bricks you want. The problem here is that they cab be huge difference in what various sellers want for a particular part. For example, my May order, there are 2 sellers that have all the parts I want, the total price for the lot are listed as $480 for one and $420 for the other.

Reading through both sellers offerings, I see cases where Seller A wants $3 for a brick while Seller B wants $0.30, and the reverse where Seller B wants way more of a different brick than Seller A. If I could only get the cheap bricks from each, then I could save a ton of money.

But how to to this? There are two sellers that have everything, but there are thousands that have a partial list. I have the go through them all, figure out what they have, and compare the prices.

Enter Brickficiency. Download the app, run it, give it your Bricklink account info (or a LDD file from Lego Digital Designer) and let it go.

It will scourer Bricklink for you, searching all the Sellers for your parts. You can control how many Sellers it will spread the order over trying to find the cheapest solution. It does default to stop as soon as it finds a solution (usually all the bricks in 1 store) but you can set it to continue past that point. Note: this can take a long time: if the status bar is any indication, it's going to take a few hours to find all the 3 Seller combinations for my order. Easily worth it if it saves a few hundred bucks!

Building Optimus Prime: Head

Here is the first of the "How To" vids I started to work on that detail how I made my LEGO Optimus Prime. 

This shows the parts you need for the head and how they all go together.

I only have a handful of these vids done, so I will post what I have. After that it may take some time to record the rest.

After watching the video again, I realize why I never published it! I promised there would be a part list attached at the end of the video and I guess I never got around to it. Some to add to the "To Do" list...

April Order is Here (and full of Fail!)

Fail

This month, I ordered all the LEGO I needed to complete steps 48 to 53 of the Falcon.

Well, I thought I did at least.

I tore into the box from AFOL Supply and quickly verified my order (thanks guys!) and set to work on completing the steps. The very first part of the very step was a 4x8 light bluish gray plate that somehow I managed to order a 4x10 instead.

Bah! I came really close to breaking out the hacksaw.

Currently my step 48 and 49 are rocking a temporary 4x8 black until I make next months order. Other than that things went pretty well:

Steps 48 and 49

Steps 50 and 51

Steps 52 and 53