Okay, I fail at photoblogging. I didn’t get last Sunday’s work posted in a timely fashion, and then this weekend I did a bit of poking at it on Saturday and more on Sunday, and, um, now it’s done.

So you get the rest of the photos all in a bunch, I’m afraid.

Remembering me complaining before about the little slope-y bitlets? Yeah, um, this is what I meant:

On the left you see one of the “skinny” examples, where it’s just those bits on a stick. The middle shows a “wide” example under construction, with two rows of bits on either side of a central reinforcement. The right shows one of those, finished. Now look at the tower, with the second story done:

Those sort of octagonal corners? Are made up of the little bits. Wide pieces on the side facing you; the narrow ones go against the tower walls. Five hundred fifty-six of those bloody things, yo. And I’m not even done with them, at this stage.

Mind you, I think I prefer those to these:

If you remember my other complaint, about my fingers hurting, that’s because of these. Those four discs to the right, and the four pipes in front of them, combine into the stacks you see in back; left is one in progress. It’s getting the long pipes from the one side and the short pipes from the other to fit into the opposing circles all at once that’s a pain. (And no, it doesn’t work to put all four pipes in one side.) Thank god I only had to do that for two stories.

Here’s the third floor in progress:

You can see the studs along the sides there; those are what the facing bits snap onto.

And there’s the third floor completed, with the facings attached. No more little barrel bits, thank god; now we start setting things up for the walkway, which involves a great deal of very fiddly shifting of stud placement — lots of those 2x1s that only have one stud on top, then things laid atop them to be slightly offset from the pieces below. (I have no idea if that description makes sense to anybody other than Lego enthusiasts. And maybe not even them. My vocabulary, it is made up on the spot.)

So that’s Day Two. The next day, I only did a little work. I got that floor to the point where it’s ready for the walkways:

And here you can see the openings where the walkways will join in.

But at this point, you lot made trouble for me. See, some of you were very keen on seeing me stage that scene from Sherlock Holmes on the unfinished structure — you know, the fight at the end. Well, I popped in the movie to take a look, and discovered that to make it look right, I would have to start doing things out of order, and pray that jumping around didn’t make me miss a step.

The things I do for you people.

Accordingly, I went and built the roadways for either side of the towers:

They look a lot like the one from the beginning of Day One, except these aren’t hinged. After that, we build squid tentacles:

By which I mean suspension cables. About eight thousand white hinges and blue sticks got used up in very short order. Sadly, I don’t have a specific shot of them being attached to the towers; you’ll have to look for that in the later photos.

At this point, I diverged substantially from the instructions, deliberately half-building the walkways in the wrong order so as to get the right visual for the fight scene. But I think I’ll leave those pictures until last, and give you Day Four first.

These are the walkways in question:

Forgot to turn on the extra light, so it’s a bit dim. But thanks to there being two of them, you can see both the front and back sides. (And in the fight shots, you’ll be able to see some of the interior structure.) The detail around the shields is particularly nice.

The tops of the towers look like bitty little houses:

Little Norwegian houses, maybe, with the pitch of those roofs. With very elaborate gold chimneys. The corner sub-towers, on the other hand, look like space capsules from the Apollo era:

Stick the tops and sub-towers on, and . . . .

Voila!

Yes, it comes with adorable little vehicles. One cab, one personal car, one lorry (into which I put a couple of extra pipes), and one double-decker bus (of course). And now you can see the squid tentacles suspension cables in place.

From another angle, you get a better view of the tunnels through the towers:

Also of the knight who is our set of fireplace equipment. Yes, his halberd is a poker. It was a gift from my sister-in-law, who is fabulous.

And now, what at least some of you have been waiting for. I give you the Lego Re-Enactment of Sherlock Holmes‘ Climactic Scene:

The part of Sherlock Holmes is being played by Prince Philip. The part of Lord Blackwood is being played by Maleficent. The part of Irene Adler is being played by Merryweather. The ships below are being played by pieces from the Pirates of the Spanish Main game.

Look, they were the only figs I had that were even close to the right size.

And here’s Blackwood/Maleficent coming to a sticky end:

I never thought I’d announce to the living room, “I just hanged Maleficent by the neck!”

Finally, just for gollumgollum:

Shinomori Aoshi and Lego Santa duking it out. They have to do so on the road, because no way in hell do they fit on the walkway. (And since leaving the walkway deliberately incomplete also left it structurally unsound; any more weight on it would have sent things tumbling downward.)

So there you have it. Five days’ work, counting the “Day Zero” of sorting; I’d estimate it at maybe fifteen or twenty hours. Not that long, really. In fact, part of me is saying it wasn’t nearly long enough, and clearly what I need is another giant Lego model to work on.

I don’t. I really, really don’t. But this one was very fun. Much love to kniedzw, for knowing what kinds of presents his wife will love.