But good as some of these kits are, what lights us up is builders designing their own creations. It’s what LEGO is all about, and yet there hasn’t been a product allowing builders to easily light up their own vehicular designs. So we asked LEGO lighting specialists Lightailing to make one…
This is what they sent us, the Lightailing Light Starter Kit, containing a power source (USB or coin-cell batteries), two expansion boards, connecting cables, and two bright white LEDs, two red LEDs, and a white self-adhesive strip light, all neatly packaged using the components readily available from Lightailing’s other kits.
So is the Lightailing Light Starter Kit any good, and what creation did we light up? Read on to find out! Continue reading →
The LEGO Technic 42111 Fast & Furious Dom’s Dodge Charger set received a rather good review here at TLCB when we got our hands on it. Certainly a better one than movies did. But, like those awful awful movies, could there be sequel; one that’s even faster and furiouser?
Well no, neither of those adjectives. But we do have a 42111 sequel that’s more sparkly.
That’s because we’ve outfitted our 42111 Dom’s Dodge Charger set with an array of LED lights courtesy of suppliers Lightailing, who have a huge range of LEGO compatible light kits available for sets including Creator, Modular Buildings, Star Wars, Harry Potter, City, and – as here – Technic.
Our 42111-compatible kit is produced by BriksMax, and it came in a neat box containing an instructions booklet, a 1 Year warranty card, a remote control, a battery box, and an alarming number of resealable bags.
Said bags were numbered and described, corresponding to the relevant point in the instructions denoting when to open each one. Inside each was a well-coiled set of wires, tiny circuit boards, sticky pads, or a combination of these.
So is adding the BriksMax light kit to your 42111 Dom’s Dodge Charger set fun? Absolutely not. Fiddly – yes. Fun – no.
Despite the instructions being reasonable, the installation process is effectively threading needle around two hundred times. It makes us wonder if these LED lighting kit companies could design a little attachment that clips into Technic holes and holds the wire, removing the need to endlessly thread LEDs through Technic beams and making the instructions simpler to boot (you can have that recommendation for free Lighting People!)
The process is made harder by the wires being black and in this case the model being black too, although the BriksMax kit does sometimes differentiate between wire types via coloured band, plus each LED has the bag no. printed on its reverse, which is a thoughtful touch.
Only a few parts of the set need to be disassembled to install the LEDs, and only two pieces are replaced (the front indicator bricks switching from tiles to studs to give more room for the LED inside).
Overall though, the installation process is not fun one bit. However, the end result is, well… fantastic. Continue reading →
