Mech Spotlight: ZIO Chao’s XM-2 Reginleif

Luigi Bombardiere’s Microscale Masterpieces

Building

Mech Spotlight Marco de Bon

Marco’s Hulkbuster shows its poseability.

My name is Marco De Bon and I am a LEGO MOC builder who loves to create mechs, robots, speedsters, microcities, and sci-fi related stuff. Since I was a kid, I’ve always watched Japanese Super Robots and Real Robots anime, and they are still in my heart. But I am also a big lover of more recent mecha designs. I think my building style is a mixture of all those influences.

Being a collector of many figures, models and chogokins, some years ago I tried to create some mechs with LEGO and I found it could work surprisingly well! So, now, this is my favorite hobby, and I like to make original creations as well as mechs inspired by animation or films.

Hulkbuster moc

After making a micro LEGO Iron Man, it came natural to me to think about the Hulkbuster project. Once I got the Hulkbuster 76105 set, I started immediately to work on it, so it heavily changed: now it is 280 mm tall, fully articulated and with the micro Iron Man as the pilot (100 mm). A good 70% of the bricks comes from the set, but this Hulkbuster is a completely new mech, not a modded set. Some detail inspiration for the chest, the back and upper legs come from other cool toys like Hot Toys and Threezero figures. The new torso is empty, as it is a real cockpit, so I had to work around it to create good stability. But the key joints are the waist and ankles, and I used a system of multiple ball joints and pistons to support the weight and to have a good range of movement at the same time. Pistons in the knees, instead, have only an aesthetic purpose, as the Technic joint disk (parts 44224-44225) works well alone.

My intention was to create a heavy, brutal Hulkbuster with a dynamic touch in his poses.

Building

Didier’s mech: Ruby.

Didier Dambrin: Gol Plays with LEGO!

Article and Photography by Didier Dambrin

Hello, I’m from Belgium, my name is Didier Dambrin, aka Gol. Now retired from programming, I used to be the main programmer behind a sequencer famous among e-musicians. I of course had my LEGO Dark Ages (timed perfectly to miss LEGO’s worst times), but for years I had been keeping an eye on MOC pictures, thinking I would one day return to LEGO to MOC, which I eventually did at around 40. And yeah, I’m old enough that for me LEGO means Castles and Classic Space. My inspirations include, well, other people’s MOCs obviously, but also anything I like. Sci-fi vehicles, cartoons—I build various stuff, from Brickheadz to mini modulars; anything but Technic and very large stuff. Another big inspiration is parts. Special parts, new parts, I spot them in announcements—and I quickly see what I could do with them.

Nearly all of my MOCs are designed in 3D, still in my beloved LDD (and I really thank the community for maintaining it). I then gather the parts when it’s done, and when required I build prototypes while designing. A small amount of my MOCs never leave the 3D world—generally when they’ve been designed for contests, so that I don’t have to limit my color palette. I rarely do oversized MOCs, so they rarely take more than a few days to a few weeks to design. But of course, since as an adult I don’t find acceptable to “do with what I have” (as a kid I didn’t have the choice), my MOCs generally have to wait for orders to arrive, and end up being constructed months after the design. It’s always hard to wait. But I also revisit older MOCs, when I think they’re still good and could benefit from updates, especially when new parts are released. So my longest build would be, by far, my pet project, a minifig-scaled AT-ST from Star Wars. I’ve been “updating” it since 2015, and it’s safe to say that the current version, after thousands of updates and a release nearly each year, has nothing to do with its original incarnation.

Yet, that AT-ST hasn’t been my hardest build. That would go to another Star Wars MOC of mine, nanofigure-scaled Millennium Falcon. 3000 parts have a weight, and the structure was a nightmare, but the worst was the assembly, because I had designed it for myself only, and “forgot” that adding the last parts in a closed structure would become very hard, with no more access to the interior. While I’m happy with the result, the assembly gave me nightmares. I will one day revisit that MOC though.