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Subject: 
7153 Slave1 Review and Redesign
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.reviews, lugnet.starwars
Followup-To: 
lugnet.starwars
Date: 
Wed, 1 May 2002 20:34:19 GMT
Viewed: 
59 times
  
A buddy of mine, Bob, is a closet LEGO fan that has been kinda collecting
Star Wars LEGO. His meek collection has a few Space sets, the Original
Classic Trilogy sets and a couple of others. As a result, the newer colours
(like Sand Green) are as new to him as Dark Blue. So without further ado...



I built it Saturday night and way very disappointed with it.  Talk about
flimsy design.  I could barely move it without something falling apart and
as you already know I thought the colouring was terrible.  So after thinking
about it for a couple of days, last night I rebuilt the sucker.

Gone are all yellow pieces and as much white as I could remove.  I have
taken out the joint that allows for the bomb drop on the lower part of the
ship. Although I left the compartment for storage.  Thus the lower half of
the ship is much stronger structurally.  I have added a ramp to the rear
entrance way.  Lego should have included this, it's like less than 10 parts,
it make the ship look more like Empire and it closes of the back of the
ship.

I have closed off the ability to look right through the ship from the side
and added pieces underneath to improve the structure of the top half of the
ship.  When looking at the ship dead on in flight position I thought the 4x4
gaps underneath the foil arms between the blue pieces looked awful so I
filled in the space with light and dark gray slants.  The ship is now
completely even in it's lower half lines.

Finally after closing in the sides I removed the magnetic cell thus allowing
me to have a lower room,  below the cockpit, with access through the bottom.
So now while Jango pilots, adult Bobba controls weapon systems from down
below.

That's another thing, what's with little Bobba's legs?  They could have made
them bendy.

Overall I'm very impressed with it now.  There is still some room in the
cabin that I am going to try to utilize ( Maybe put in Carbonite Han).  My
next struggle will be to get rid of the cream coloured foils.  I was very
disappointed when I realized that the elbows were bent at a steeper angle
then on the first Slave 1.  I also want to find a way to prevent the
windshield from falling off but that is a minor problem and is nothing a
couple of flexible pieces can't fix.

While Lego has made a very nice model it felt to me like it was rushed or
that they were trying to cut corners on piece count.  Just a few 1x8s on the
bottom would have greatly improved the ships structure.  Anyway, with a few
modifications I am very happy with it now.

Bob
--

Hopefully some pictures will soon follow, I guess I have to bring my camera
to his place.

I think it is interesting that this has been seen as the better of the two
larger Ep.II models, yet a non-professed AFOL (he actually is a true AFOL,
he just doesn't know it yet <g>) sees the folly in this design.

I feel it lacks the design style of the Classic models. Hard to believe
--make that hard to accept-- but StarWars is becoming juniorized. And LEGO
had it right just a few short years ago. :-( The good news is both Bob and I
got 25% off as a result of the Zellers BOGO. The bad news is we paid 75% of
the price :-/

Jude



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