Week 1 building the Hadrian's Wall in LEGO

 Come join me building my latest project: The Hadrian's Wall. Well. A little part of it. To be fair the project is to build a milecastle of the wall. They were little fortlets built every Roman mile and the Hadrian's Wall itself was a wall going from Wallsend on the river Tyne in the east to Bowness-on-Solway in the west. It protected the modern day England (more or less) from the northern territories where different tribes lived back then. Nowadays a good part of it still exists and the ruins are protected. The wall had 80 milecastles and 158 turrets. 

Here is what I plan to build:

Excuse me for my low Paint skills 

The past 10 days or so I built the base. It takes a lot of time doing it that way but I think it will look significantly better. With the stables and inside buildings I have some doubts. I need to figure out how to build the roofs and I wanna create my first brick built horses and avoid using the typical LEGO single part molded one. I think it could take the MOC result one step forward.

With the minifigures to use I still have to decide if I use my Roman minifigs I always use or to try to create Late Roman minifigs. It would take more time and I guess I wouldn't be able to create more than 6 of them. I will see. In any case they must be winter versions as you can see the scene built will be in winter. I think snow will add more mystery to the already mysterious idea I have in my mind of what it must have been to be in the edge of the northern frontier of the Roman Empire with the bad weather of that place and the curious tribes who lived north of the wall. Creepy. 

Now I will post some pictures of the progress I made. Feel free to copy the technic and build something you too! I hope I can upload a new chapter weekly or almost weekly showing you the updates of the project. Stay tuned!

This is just a simulation of how much space would use the structure of the milecastle

LEGO Set Review: Weapons Wagon from 1996

I present you today a new kind of post I'm very excited about! Here I will show you and review a LEGO set from 1996 from the Western line. All started years ago when I was in a second hand app and a post selling this set for 25€ appeared on my screen. It looked in an almost perfect condition so I had no doubts. Older LEGO sets have something special in my opinion. They look so simply and cool. They look awesome to display.

The kit itself has 59 parts and 1 minifig. The minifig has different accesories to use and the cannon shots 1x1 round bricks! It must have been an amazing set to play with as a kid. The cloth of the carriage still looks perfectly white 30 years later. 

The minifig still looks pretty good even the face has an eye that looks misprinted. The yellow head gives it a vintage feeling that makes it even better! Horse looks amazing too. Is the same mould LEGO still uses today but as the whole set it looks simply but amazing. I'm surprised because I didn't expect some parts of this set to already exist back then!

The instructions look simple too and they aren't as easy to follow as more recent sets because the new parts you build in each steps aren't showed above as usual. You look at the page and you have to find the parts added in this step to search for them and build them in your real build. The book is in a good shape too luckily.

Love the little scenes shown here

I don't have the original box but here I show you a picture of it.

Source: https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?S=6716-1#T=S&O={%22iconly%22:0}

Nowadays the prices are over 40€/40$ in Bricklink for used ones and well over 100€/$ for sealed ones. These prices in BrickLink. In second hand apps or wherever you can buy old/used stuff you might be lucky to find them cheaper.

I made a YouTube video for it where I recorded the building process. If you want to take a look you can do it here:

Many thanks for reading guys! Hope you liked it! Let me know what do you think! Next one might be a Ferrari F1 set I got as a kid which was my first LEGO set ever I would say! But first I have to find a place in my room for it! 

Thought it would be worth it to share the thumbnail too

Rif War Spanish minifig

 In this post I present you my latest minifig. The idea has been in my head for some time now and I'm happy how it turned out. It is a Rif War Spanish soldier. 

The Rif War was a series of conflicts happened in northern Morocco between native tribes and the French and Spanish rulers there. Led by Abd el-Krim the tribes fought mainly the Spanish troops and got some victories like Annual which here in Spain is known as the Annual Disaster that caused a political crisis in the country. The French were afraid the problems expanded to their part of Morocco and decided to help the Spanish government and both countries did operations together like the Disembark of Alhucemas were Spain made the first organized disembark mixing ground sea and air units. Abd el Krim surrendered in 1926 and since 1927 until 1956 when Morocco got it's independence from Spain there were no major problems. 

Talking now about the minifig itself I painted it ina couple days and I think it looks pretty decent. I will try to find a green color that fits better the LEGO Olive Green color. All is hand-painted by me. Torso is fake LEGO from AliExpress same as the hat. The torso is one of the 10 I got months ago and I find them specially useful for Spanish uniforms from the 1920s-1930s. Of course they are very useful too for Chinese troops from the Second Sino-Japanese War which is what they are/were sell for. The gear is from BrickWarriors and the Gewehr 98 rifle is from BrickArms and is hand-painted by me too. 

I'm thinking about doing a MOC in the future about this war. I would need to do some more minifigs of course. I will see in the future. Is one idea of many but Spain is my country and I'm proud of it and I want to show history of my country since even here in Spain they are barely known nowadays and it's a shame and sometimes a controversial topic here because nowadays the history of Spain is always used as a political argument from left and right political parties. 

Now using a side cap I made years ago.

Reference pictures:

Colourised picture with Francisco Franco in the middle. Source: https://www.abc.es/historia/abci-el-krim-franco-conquisto-espana-guarida-rifeno-desangro-ejercito-202103230108_noticia.html 

Source: zinnfigur.com

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Colorization/comments/nuehjo/corporal_of_the_spanish_army_in_the_early_1920s/

And finally a video I made of the minifig for social media.

I really hope you liked this post guys! Stay tuned because in a matter of days I plan to post a new one!