Posted 29 July 2014 - 04:34 AM

So let's look at my Beast Machines garden, now!!

The Beast Machines garden room has one of my favourite doors, because it took a tonne of work to really get it working properly. It's such a simple thing, but I had to build and rebuild it over and over to get it to work right.

First of all is the little gun emplacement. This was a really late, spur-of-the-moment addition which required a TONNE of work to get right. I'm happy with it. It's two sided. So there's guns on the outside if you don't want to open the door -- but also a separate, differently designed set of guns on the inside!

The door bulges out a lot because it was built around the fact that there's absolutely no room for anything to bulge INTO the room -- the garden room is far too full for that. But hey! Look! It hides Lockdown inside. You might notice there's also a little spot on the wall for Lockdown's gun to hang on! Neat! Lockdown can control the guns (I used blue bricks to make a link between the control panel and the guns to imply it's being controlled).

But the main show is that classic playset feature -- a ladder.

The ladder took freaking AGES AND AGES to build right.

The ladder uses Kre-O and LEGO parts. There's also the problems with making it sit in properly, and having the build the entire door around it. But I love the final effect -- I love the way it makes the whole playset feel more alive and connected. There will be more ladders and things.

But let's look at the inside of the room... it's the garden from Beast Machines as seen from the oracle bridge:

Neat, right?

I also build a break into the wall where a drill drone is breaking throguh!

The drill drone is designed to be able to spin his drill, no idea if it actually comes through in the photo, though, sorry if it doesn't:

The drill spinning gimmick was made using the drill spinning mechanism from the Devastator KRe-O set. I love this part and it's unfrotunate that KRe-O has become so downsized so I'll only ever own one of them. Need to see more of them used in later sets. (One of my other goals with this set is using as many of the large Kre-O feature pieces as possible. I love these parts and think they really need to be shown for what they can do.

Here's the button, on the exterior of the set:

And what the hell, here's the locking mechanism -- fitting it on was quite a challenge!

--Andrew S.