January 11, 2021 - Recapitulation of year 2020
The year 2020 was... how to say it decently? - It was strange year full of never-ending "virus revue" that turned over our lives. And things got even worse when I twisted my ankle at the beginning of May and got my leg in plaster. On the other hand I've got a looot of time for building out of LEGO.
At the beginning of lock-down I rebuilt T. rex from set 75936 into life-size model of chicken that I call C. rex ("C" like Chicken). It was real fun to build it and write fake review for it. Finished model takes a lot from original Tyrannosaur especially legs are almost unchanged. The rest is more or less rebuilt to resemble contemporary successor of dinosaurs. So if you are tired of your T. rex you can give it one more chance by evolving it into C. rex. :-) At the same time I was also building my first ordinary car ever - pullback racer from set 42106. I built it for "Small Car Contest" organized by Eurobricks.com. Honestly I didn't participated in contest to win it (and I didn't) but it was good excuse for opening the ugliest Technic set of year 2020 (not counting Top Gear Rally Car) and start making something better out of its parts. It turned out later that set 42106 became my favorite set of 2020 (not for its original design but for its parts assortment). So back to my pullback racer - it is not ordinary pullback car because it also features steering and you can easily switch between pullback mode with disabled steering and steering mode with disabled pullback motor for better playability.
Then I twisted my ankle and had to stay at home. It should be no surprise that my first model, after this accident heppened, was wheelchair built out of motorcycle 42036 (yes, I am lover of black humor). :-) With more time at home more models began coming and most of them were various helicopters. I even built helicopter out of Friends hedgehog 40171 and give it name "Hedgecopter". Another noteworthy helicopter was from set 42075. It features custom pullback motor built out of shock absorber and gears.
When I was able to walk again I've finally made video presentation of my improved LuuMa 2.0 robot together with my Shark Mk II. Then I focused on two projects for The LEGO Group. The first was for our local LEGO Trading and was all about building small models out of polybags and few Classic sets to promote LEGO sets in Albert (Ahold) stores in Czech Republic during Christmas time. I've designed several models and made building instructions for all of them. You can find these building instructions at Albert website. Another one was for LEGO Lead User Lab and is still secret. Since both these projects were about building out of System bricks I've got fed up of them little bit. So when I wanted to build something just for fun I took Technic, specifically set 42106. And I built series of pullback vehicles. The first was race car I mentioned above. The second was plane with two propellers, the third was helicopter (another one), :-) the fourth was steam engine, the fifth was hovercraft and off-road buggy was the sixth. And it is not all. Currently, there is half-finished pullback truck lying on my desk.
Do you wanna know what you can expect in year 2021? We will celebrate the 10th aniversary of buildinst website! I plan to release building instructions for several old alternative models that I haven't published yet. I also plan to keep on building and releasing building instructions for alternative models from 2020 and 2021 sets.
