The Build
-
Local Purchase
I got to skip all the hassle of buying my Millennium Falcon and Efferman stand online as I found it on OfferUp from a guy who lived just five blocks away. Awesome! And I got it at a steal of a price too.
The first thing I did when I got it home was disassemble it in reverse order using the Lepin manual and placing all the pieces in bags as I went. The previous owner said it was complete. Yeah right. Don't they all?
When all was said and done I found there were 32 pieces I couldn't account for. Now whether the original buyer lost them, or they weren't included to begin with I don't know. I wrote them down as I went and tracked them all down on Bricklink and added them to a want list. $13.45 later and the parts were being shipped to me from one of the Lego resellers.
I came across about six pieces that the previous owner used super glue on. Ugh! If you have to glue at least use rubber cement since you can remove it. With my previous UCS Millennium Falcon (2007) the only parts that didn't fit well were two of the technic axles that held the landing gear in place. I just replaced the axles with authentic Lego pieces and the problem was solved.
I'm a horrible mix of a perfectionist (or as close as I can get) and a completionist so knowing I couldn't get the original Lepin packaging, I tracked down the original Lego boxes and manual on Bricklink. I'm still waiting on the Lego manual to arrive. Yeah I know I can just get the pdf from Lego, but I want that massive build manual they have. I also want to use that to build with.
I know some people wonder about the piece count differences. The Lepin box say 8,445 pieces, the Lego box 7,541. As soon as I find out why I'll update this, however I've heard that when building sub-assemblies that Lego will count the group of pieces in the sub-assembly as one piece. Lepin doesn't do this. In comparing the manuals the Lego goes to 485 numbered pages with 1379 steps, the Lepin 311 numbered pages with 1379 steps.
Click to enlarge the photos below.
