Big Ben

Lego Big Ben–Night Five

Tonight we finished Lego Big Ben!

We started with section six:

Have I mentioned how much I love the instruction book? Like the Lego Architecture series,  in addition to directions for building, this book contains information about the landmark being built, and I learned a few things along the way!

We’ll just call section six “The Addition of Fancies.” I especially love the tree out front!

Looking good, and even without the clock, it’s totally recognizable!

We weren’t done, though. On to section seven!

We built the clock face:

And “Big Ben,” the largest of the five bells in the tower:

And then we put them together:

And added the top of the tower:

And Queen Elizabeth Tower, housing Big Ben, as well as part of the Palace of Westminster, was complete!

Now we have big Big Ben, and baby Big Ben…I love how the Lego Architecture set looks against the bigger landmark:

And they may not be to scale, but the double-decker bus I built last year looks great with the new set!

Next up is the upcoming larger scale London bus, which I hope to build later this month. We’ll have all the big Lego London landmarks, then…I can’t help but wonder if there’s anything left that they want to build!

Lego Big Ben–Night Four

On to section five of Lego Big Ben! The instructions for today’s portion of the build seemed really short, especially given how many pieces we had out!

We built this:

And then added side panels to make it look like this:

And then we did that whole thing again, which explains why it looked like a shorter building process than it was! We stacked both of the cubes on the existing tower, which is now getting quite tall:

Only two sections left…this build is going much faster than I expected!

Lego Big Ben–Night Three

Tonight we built the fourth section of Lego Big Ben!

This part of the build was different from sections two and three, which made it much less repetitive. I love how the bell tower is coming together, and I also love how the top of the opposite side looks!

Still three sections left to go, but it’s really taking shape!

Lego Big Ben–Night Two

Today we built two sections of Big Ben, which I thought was kind of ironic on the Fourth of July!

We started with the bags labeled “2.”

I love how microfigs are used to represent the statues on the outside of the building. It’s still weird to see sections of bricks turned at an angle, though!

Even with just the first two sections completed, the building was already starting to feel substantial:

We then moved on to section three:

Much of this part of the build was similar to section two. We have already started to work on the mechanism that will turn the clock, though!

Taller, but not looking too different!

There have been parts of the build that have been pretty repetitive, but it’s been a fun set so far…I’m looking forward to seeing what we’ll build next!

Lego Big Ben–Night One

We’ve had the Lego Creator Expert Big Ben in our possession for about a year now, but it’s a huge set, and we haven’t had time to sit down and build it yet. Until today. The bags are labeled 1-7, so we eased in with just the bags labeled “1” tonight, but I think we may double up some of them in the future.

After so many years of making sure all the Lego bricks in any given set were squared up nicely, it felt very wrong to intentionally set some in at an angle:

And then we had to put bricks on top of those that were straight!

It doesn’t look like too much yet, but there are already some nice details:

I can’t wait to see how the next section comes together!