Invisible Hand Construction Journal: Entry 7: A LEGO® creation by Mark Kelso : MOCpages.com

The idea with this page is to keep something of a journal for the construction of my first large scale MOC, General Grievous' Invisible Hand. Looking at others' creations, I often find myself wondering how long it took, how difficult it might have actually been, and the steps involved. So I thought it might be fun to post some "progress reports" as this lengthy, and expensive creation trudges along...we'll see if I survive the process! (Also, there's always the hope that it may serve as a personal reminder to me never to attempt something so ludicrisly elaborate and difficult ever again. Although I tend not to listen to myself when stirred by some creative delusion of grandure!

So anyway, here goes a bold attempt at what may amount to nothin'. But then again, as Ferris Bueller said..."Only the meek get pinched. The bold survive!"

December 4, 2007

Welcome back to "Who's MOC Is It Anyway." The show where everything's made up (of Legos) and the Smileys don't matter. Yep, the smileys are like your Mom calling you to dinner when you're trying to put in that one last brick!

So we left off in the last entry with our hero (that'd be me) standing perilously on the precipice of disaster, staring with steely-eyed defiance into the face of hopeless oblivion! Okay, perhaps a smidge overly-dramatic...translation: I was about to hang this sucker and see if it was really going to work out or not. Not working out being defined as "the whole ship collapsing under its weight and smashing into a google-zillion pieces on the ground."

So is this entry's theme "You can fly, you can fly, you can fly," or "Under the circumstances, I'd say the ability to pilot this thing is irrelevant?" Well, as the teaser pic above would indicate, she's swingin' more than a desperate housewife. And now here are all of the gruesome details about the hanging, and what follows after (those of you with weak constitutions, might want to look away!)...

So before the big moment, I wanted to finish as much of the hull as possible. Here the remaining panels went on and, to my surprise, snapped VERY cleanly into place. Not so much due to good engineering on my part, but more thanks to a sizable helping of sheer dumb luck...but hey, I'll take it!

The ship is actually extremely light for its length. At exactly six feet long it currently weighs 23 pounds. The underside won't add too much more weight, and this allowed me to use fairly thin picture hanging wire. There are two wires coming from the very center of the ship's width at the locations indicated by the arrows.

The wires are four feet in length, and attach to a bar above the ship. This "hanging bar," in turn, has eyelets on the top and can be hung from chains that drop down from the ceiling. Moving the ship is just a matter of removing the bar from the chains, and carrying the whole thing by the hanging bar. Boy am I glad now that I kept the stupid thing hollow...(grunt)"It's a good thing (groan)you're not a big fat guy, or this'd be rrreaally difficult!!!"

The moment of truth. One word: YESSSSSSS!!!!

So after the paramedics arrived and got my heart pumping once again, it was time to make a quick sacrificial offering of thanks to the Lego Gods (which I did by chucking one of the neighborhood kids into a live vocano we have in our back yard), and then it was back to work. So here the hanging height was adjusted for better reach, and then a new design for attaching the ventral section was put into effect...you know...cause the old one, like...SUCKED!!!!

The original idea was to create a spine of bricks that would attatch to the underside of the ship, and the ventral panels would attach to that...but that immediately collapsed (insert explicatives!) and it was back to the drawing board to come up with this method (which seems to be working). I attached bricks to the underside of the ship, then attached Technic bricks to the very bottom, sort of like a segmented spine...

...Technic bricks were also attached to the panels, the Technic brick's holes were matched up, then axles run through the holes to hold things in place, and...

Viola! The front section of the ship's ventral portion fell into place. Okay...actually it didn't quite "fall" into place...it was more like...brutally forced into place, kicking and screaming, adamantly refusing to cooperate in any way, shape, or form. (Honestly it was a royal pain to get everything lined up and held there without it falling apart, while simultaneously trying to run those axles through holes I could barely reach, and definitely couldn't see!! Nevertheless, it finally came together.)

So now you're up to speed with where things stand at the moment. I'm currently messing around with prototypes for the last few sections while waiting on the appropriate parts from yet ANOTHER Bricklink order. This is a portion of the dome that attaches to the ventral section near the front of the ship. It will eventually be dark greys and dark bluish greys...

...and this is a design for the primary and secondary rear thrusters.

Well troops, that about does it for the journal entries. The next post, barring any unforseen catastrophes (and yes, there's always still time to screw it up!!), should be the finished MOC, complete with ship details, proper lighting, lots of pics (without the hideous basement background), my usual one or two photoshop-enhanced images, and a partridge in a pair tree.

Many thanks once more to those of you who've followed these entries and put up with my senseless babble. Look for the finished MOC sometime soon, and then in 2008...I don't know...maybe I'll try something big next time. Joking!! I'm Joking!!

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