One of my favourite things to do is turn an official Lego Set into something that it was never really intended to be, and todays build is a classic example of this. I bought the James Bond Aston Martin Lego set about 6 months ago and since then I've rebuilt about 4 times, and my partner has even had a couple of builds.
Rebrickable is the place I find all of these alternative build designs - for a set like the Aston martin there are around 25 alternative builds - of varying quality - this one was one of the better ones.
Check out this 'finished' pics before I show you how we got there.
I think it's the colour - light grey which makes most of these alternative designs - I mean this thing looks like it could exist in the real world.
The portions are just perfect - pretty impressive given you can't change the size of the wheels and this started life as a low slung sports car.
This truck is so life like it even has a tilt cab so you can get to the engine.
But enough of the finished product - how did we get here.
Well months ago these pieces we assembled in a ways that made an Aston Martin - here's what that looked like
So the first step is disassembling - everything starts as a pile of pieces on the table
Most vehicles start the same way a chassis - normally black recentagles with various pins coming out of the them and then the build starts on top of that - it's often hard to get a sense of what you are actually building at this phase - maybe it was the tripped back nature but this one started to look like a truck pretty early.
Little hard to tell from this angle but those are the headlights at the bottom of the pic
Then any good vehicle model will start building an engine - this one is similar to the engine design of the original Aston martin. Often these are hidden in the final outcome so it is nice that this one has the tilt cab so I can look at this detail whenever I want
The next core step is generally when you get to the wheel arches, you have a good sense of proportion at this stage
What is a little unusual with this one is that you are building the cab separately, and of course it's pretty tall so it feel like a three part build, the chassis, the engine and the cab. Also I'm so impressed with this door design, the swoop is not how that piece was intended to be used, but it works so well and is so true to life.
And then you bring the three parts together and you have your an very cool truck to play with