…and I’m sure you would. But am I going to take the time to fill out your online survey? Hmm.
As we’ve mentioned on several Break/Fix Drive Thru episodes including our latest Holiday Shopping Special, offerings from TheBlockZone have always intrigued me. Why wouldn’t they? It’s all the coolest LEGO sets you *wish* LEGO would actually create for vehicle enthusiasts like ourselves. I’ll admit that I’ve always appreciated what TheBlockZone has teased me with, but always from a safe and comfortable distance, saying “Don’t you put that evil on ME, Ricky Bobby!”
Lately, my daughters have been getting more deeply engrossed in the world of LEGO, building beautiful cityscapes and storefronts that are eventually relegated to doll houses for micro-sized inhabitants of “LEGO Town.” Building with them, brings back fond childhood memories of countless hours of digging through pieces trying to design my own cars using what was new tech at the time known as “LEGO Technic” sets. Taking a break from the blush, lavender, and turquoise shades of LEGO Town reconstruction, yet another email from TheBlockZone crossed my inbox in late January that I couldn’t resist opening.
With a cat-like grin on my face, my wife looked up at me and said “What’s up?” with a puzzled expression, while my littlest daughter retorted “he’s looking at some cars again.”
“No ma’am, not just ANY CAR, this is Mad Max’s Ford Falcon XB GT Interceptor! This isn’t just A CAR, this is AN ICON! … in LEGO!”
“…whatever, Dad.”
“Get it, if you want,” are the words we all desperately want to hear. Whether its something simple like this kit, redecorating the garage, or building a new race engine. These are the words that set armies into motion, sail ships across oceans, and it’s the green flag for many a rabbit hole excuse to procrastinate and have some childish fun.
“OK! Let’s #sendit.”
And so I did… And thus begins our story and “my feedback survey,” so please accept this as my official submission.
Step 1 – Ordering the Car
Like all eCommerce transactions these days, it’s all rather generic, click-click, next-next, enter some PayPal information and you should have your new gizmo, gadget, or toy on your doorstep in a matter of days. For those that don’t know, manufacturing of LEGO bricks occurs at several locations around the world including: Billund, Denmark; Nyíregyháza, Hungary; Monterrey, Mexico; and most recently in Jiaxing, China. I placed my order on Feb 1st and the rest is documented below. 21 days later, the package arrived from Shenzhen, China. This is where it all started to fall apart.
Step 2 – Unboxing Day
Mind you, I was expecting a cardboard box, and inside that box, another box with cool graphics and glamour shots of the Interceptor in full Mad Max glory, giving me the opportunity for one of those “unboxing videos” that people mindlessly watch on YouTube with frightening regularity. But instead, the entirety of the package was self-sealed in a plain, white, thick plastic bag, the same type of material Amazon would use if they sent you one t-shirt. How’d they get all that in there? You might ask. Inside that bag was another bag, which contained even smaller bags. Houston! We have a Russian doll of bags situation now on our hands. 1510-pieces in a bag, shoved into my mailbox.
By this point, I’d already realized that these weren’t LEGO branded parts, these are facsimiles of the real thing called “Moc Blocks.” Being familiar with modern LEGO sets, the multitude of bags didn’t bother me so much because the packaging is carefully separated into steps, each labeled with a number that corresponds with the directions. As I rummaged through this unending amount of clear ZipLock style bags, I kept thinking to myself… “something is missing” and as I reached the bottom, it dawned on me: “There are no directions… Did they not send them? What else is missing? This doesn’t seem like 1500 pieces! Maybe they emailed them to me…”
After searching through my inbox – thinking maybe the directions had been captured by a spam filter – checking my order updates and status reports, there was no sign of the directions anywhere. I returned to TheBlockZone website for answers. My receipt didn’t have a nice “click here to view your item on the website” link and I’d already deleted the newsletter with the ad for the Interceptor in it, which meant that one of the more frustrating things about TheBlockZone was about to rear it’s ugly head.
Searching is their website is extremely difficult because none of the model kits are officially licensed by any of the automotive brands represented and therefore they come up with clever names like “Ultimate Godzilla” for the Nissan Skyline GT-R34 or “Ultimate 10 Second Car” for the Toyota Supra Mk.4 and so on. Searching for “Ford – Falcon – XB – GT” turns up nothing but dirt, but thankfully they did use the word “Interceptor” in the name of the model. I quickly scanned the kit’s page and didn’t see any download links of any kind, and once I stopped skimming the page and actually read it, I stumbled across this disclaimer:
Excuse me? “Must be purchased directly from them…” WHOA! WAIT… WUT?
Step 3 – Feeling like a sucker…
I can’t say that I didn’t feel like a complete idiot by this point, I’d missed a crucial detail, but I was still determined to build this model. It wasn’t until I visited rebrickable.com and found the directions that I started to feel like a real sucker. I had a choice, give the $135 in parts to my kids to scavenge through, or add insult to injury and spend another $10 on a .PDF file.
What can I say? – I can be a little stubborn, but the fantasy I’d developed around this set was too good to just give up on. Honey! Where’s the credit card?
Step 4 – The Skeleton Dance
You remember that song in school when you were a kid? “…the thigh bone’s connected to the hip bone. The hip bone’s connected to the backbone…” and so on, and so on. That’s where my head was right now. All these bags and tiny black parts, this might as well have been a 1500 piece Ravensburger jig saw puzzle of the Beetles “White Album” and not LEGO. I started like any rational builder would do, find BAG #1 and start at STEP #1 and go from there. I quickly discovered that there was no rhyme or reason to the bag numbering and absolutely no correlation between the bags and the directions.
This meant searching from bag to bag in a superbly inefficient manner. Eventually I got fed up, and realizing I was building on a dark table with mostly black parts, I needed more contrast (and space). The best solution, albeit not for my hips, was to sit on the cold, hard, tile floor, and spread all the pieces out on a brightly colored yoga mat. The orange of the mat made the pieces really pop but frustrating to find. My youngest daughter watched me pouring out bags and spreading things apart looking for a piece here or there, trying to make sense of what didn’t seem like anything that would ever amount to an 18″ long vehicle. I still think something is missing. There must be more bags. My daughter in a moment of clearer reasoning than I was willing to put forth said, “Dad… why don’t I help you organize all these pieces into smaller piles of the same parts then you can quickly pull from your inventory.” Good thinking, kid!
Now that I’d spent hours just getting ready, it was time to tackle the build. It took some time to transfer the .PDF to my iPad and get it setup because there was no way I was going to print 288 color pages. Plus, the pinch-to-zoom feature of the tablet came in handy as parts of the build became increasingly more difficult throughout the process.
Chassis setup went relatively smoothly, but required lots of “counting” to make sure that mount points were accurate. The first half of the instructions focused heavily on the foundation of the model, whereas, later parts seemed to gloss over important details, leaving you to make assumptions. But as good as the LEGO-like CAD directions seemed, there are large sections that leave you scratching your head saying, “you want me to put what… where?”
My wife chuckled every time she heard me cry out “%$@#%$!! – There’s no way this is right!” and I’d find myself cursing under my breath scrolling backwards and often many steps ahead into the schematics to try and find a better angle to understand how a piece was mounted; and then ripping sections apart and trying again. I have to give credit to NikolayFX – the designer of this build – there are some very clever techniques used to pull off the realism of the model, very expert level ideas that aren’t for meant for your basic builders.
There were some really detailed parts of the chassis that I appreciated as a car enthusiast, like the “open differential” and “leaf springs” which are not noticeable until you pick up the model and turn it over. Again, the details are unique and very well thought out. Another large “gotcha” in the directions came into play when I hit the steps that were recommended for the “motorized version” of this kit.
The motorized version gives R/C car mobility, including steering. There’s no breaking point in the instructions that says, “If you don’t have this, skip to step 947, or do the following instead,” so you’re left once again, making large assertions into how pieces connect and reading ahead to determine how to possibly stitch it all together.
After a while I thought I’d gotten the hang of interpreting the instructions. I was in the zone, TheBlockZone! Once I got to the quarter panels and doors, which are put together as one giant wobbly piece of LEGO spaghetti using “soft axles” and other non-rigid pieces, I hit a major road block. Not only was it the most difficult section to put together, but breaking a critical pin (it looks like a plastic nail) that was designed to secure the door to the rocker panel, left me afraid that this build was done for. Unfortunately, the casting quality of the Moc Blocks plastic is not on par with LEGO in all cases, which means not all the pieces easily fit, lock, or slide together like one would expect. Oops!
Several unsuccessful attempts at building the sides of the vehicle later, I walked away realizing this wasn’t fun anymore, but was determined not to let this get the better of me, nor did I want to leave it unfinished. The next day, I just skipped over the entirety of the part of the build that left me stranded, and started to quickly eliminate pieces off my yoga mat by building larger sections like the hood and the motor. After a few days I returned to the sides of the car with a clear mind, some super glue, and a another mulligan.
With a renewed spirit and a bitterly cold day keeping me from doing something more productive outside, I plowed through the rest of the build. My wife and daughters were pretty impressed to come home from school and see the Interceptor completed and out on display. What they missed was all the late nights and cursing outlined above.
Step 5 – Would you like to take a survey?
..Sigh.. I’ve said many times before “It’s all about the journey, not the destination,” but in this case the journey makes you wonder, “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” Any LEGO purist will immediately shun this kit because it’s not made from 100% purely LEGO-branded parts. Despite what might seem like outright complaining, I’m sharing my thoughts with readers and hobbyists who might have also considered grabbing at set from TheBlockZone so that they look before they leap. Granted, “Your Mileage May Vary” (YMMV) but as I look back over the entire build process, it’s bittersweet, and I’ve got lots of mixed feelings on what comes next.
The morning after I put the Interceptor up on the mantle, my wife asked me, “Would you do it again?” That’s where I’m stuck with no good answer. I can’t in good conscience leave a review for this product on TheBlockZone’s review page, which is why I would rather express my feelings about it here so that it’s not left open to interpretation or curated directly to the digital waste bin because it wasn’t in complete praise of their offering.
I think I would like to try another kit and see if the experience would be different, but I’m afraid that this first impression has tainted my perception of what “might be.”
Overall, the final product isn’t perfect, but then again … it IS pretty cool!
