Svelte

And before that, it came in pearl silver in the 2006 Bionicle set Lava Chamber Gate I can't say this one does anything for me. The cab is a really sleek design, but that's three of those style of low flatbed trucks this year alone (one in City Construction Site, the red one in the windmill set, one here) as well as the police HQ from last year. I'd like to see the upcoming Agents helicopter try to land on this baby!

Now it is available again at $229.99 Wasn't that the July sale Kmart 'before' advertised price? Seems odd to update that now Maybe they're rereleasing it. EDIT: It also looks as if some of the new train PF stuff is filtering through. Rechargeable battery box is $99.99 Remote control $24.99 Still no track or train motor. Is anyone planning to motorise their 10194? I can't say I am tempted at this stage. At these prices I'm more likely to use the 'hand of God' and make choo-choo noises

Yes - often parents are the ones most likely to object. I always think you should give your kids 5 or 6 middle names so they can choose the one they like best when they get older

Yeah... I know how you feel I didn't think about my username either Woo! Only 7,950 to go! So we're allowed to call you Sieggy? Is that pronounced differently to Siggy? How about Sigs? Does this mean the whole 'everyone's a CopMike' thing was merely an elaborate ruse to sneak in a *real* name change while everyone was still confused? On a serious note... you could just change your name legally, you know. I did it in a back alley of Chinatown for $90 about a decade ago (that sounds dodgy, but it wasn't!). Once you change all the paperwork (licence, bank details, utilities bills etc) you'll probably soon forget that strange 'Andrew' person ever existed.

I saw that; I want one This has to be one of the nicest torso designs for City figs in recent years. Can someone please post a pic when they have one in the flesh (so to speak)?

Does anyone know why K10194 Emerald Night Collection and most of the new PF stuff isn't available to order in Australia/NZ? Is there some legal/ technical issue blocking sale here? It seems odd that the 10V transformer is for sale but nothing else, not even the track! Apologies if this has been answered upthread.

8637 Volcano Base is back at S@H for $49.99. It's an amazing parts pack for landscaping - especially at that price - so stock up while you can!

The poor, deluded gent has a fixation with Spongebob sets. He talks about them endlessly. He has a desire for blank yellow torsos, mainly to be found in the SB sets. In his Captain's Cabin entry, he included a sea snail relative of Gary's. He even started hallucinating that his name was Screambob Clonepants. He stated a desire for this to be his username and changed his location to reflect his search for spongiform ancestry. It was only a matter of time before his weak, clinically suggestible brain succumbed to the delusions and paranoia Luckily, his patient family is supporting him during this difficult time and with luck he will make a full recovery. I guess they just don't grow clones like they used to.

Along with the weird $13 increase in Town Plan, 9247 Community Workers has now jumped to $84.99 on S@H. It wasn't that long ago it jumped to $67.99 from the $56 price. Odd.

2 for Clonescream Icepants - very impressive shape and concept 2 for Erds - for continuing the Year of the Shirtless Minifig 2 for Guss - great shape and detail 1 for NeoKross - I like the studded, inwards-sloping walls These Pirate voting rules get ever more complicated. Will the next comp be done by voting in fractions?

Very cute! I never knew worms had an appetite for ABS... this could solve a lot of environmental problems

Yes, they can co-exist if put together properly. It's Lego, people! I've picked up a few of the older Classic Town houses and have been impressed by how well they stand-up, design wise. I think sets in this series are definitely suitable for the outskirts or suburb of a city. Cafe Corner and Green Grocer are clearly designed as dense, inner-city constructions at the heart of an urban centre so I don't really see a conflict. You wouldn't see the 2008 Beach House next to a Cafe Corner in real life, and for the same reason, you wouldn't see an old skool Holiday home either For a story a few months to show off the City construction sets, I wanted to add a streetscape so threw in a few modular-style buildings with the pre-assembled shop from 7635 Construction Site and I think the street turned out pretty well: I actually think the new 7641 City Corner will look fine amongst the modular buildings with a few small changes - moving the bus stop to the front and expanding the pizzeria, for example. Here's a third option: I actually think Classic Town sets often work better with the new modular sets than some of the new standalone contemporary City sets. I like the new Farm set, 7635, but the blocky, enormous buildings and barn don't really work with anything else style-wise. The 2005 Police HQ and 2006 Hospital, both built on mountainous baseplates, would also look more odd next to a Cafe Corner than something like the Classic Town bank: So, really, it's not the size of the building, it's what you do with it. My ideal is a dense urban city centre with a mix of modular buildings and the new multi-storey City buildings, with a suburban edge of Classic Town houses and cinema, garage and town hall from 10184 Town Plan - and out even further, room for the new Farm lines and some of the construction sets. I wish I had the space to set everything up the way I liked it to show waht I mean... one day....

They don't call me a 'negative nancy' for nothing Actually, I was disappointed too as I use a scale all the time and I really wanted something practical yet garish around the kitchen. I've also found the other Lego kitchen stuff quite good but this was a case of looks first, function second

Eek! The cake is gluten-free. It's all almond meal. See - this is why the keen scrutiny of the Reviewers Academy assessment is so important That isn't a Chrome Vader in the review, that's just an ordinary one. Just in case someone sends goons around to my house looking for it

I live in Elizabeth Bay - Bondi Junction is just my local Lego supplier I didn't make it in today, but maybe Screampants can tell us if the sale made it down south. Interesting that these 'spot' regional sales are popping up in different places this year. Bad news for the economy = heavy discounting. Bring on July!

Must be a Chatswood special I saw that battered old Hypersonic Aircraft a few weeks back...

Happy unbirthday, all you Alices! (And a happy birthday to the real one.)

This is an interesting interview, but it doesn't really address the burning questions. Like, when did Erds' interest in folk dancing start? Does he favour a particular region or style? When he performs, does he do it in full costume? Does he think his Deutsche heritage has contributed to his deep and all-consuming love for volk-dancing? Is a diet of strawberry icecream enough to sustain the physical effort involved in the strenuous routines as demonstrated on folkdancing.com?

Spongebob sets you fool! That's why I mentioned them in Erds' shirtless MOC. I'm not obsessed with Spongebob, I was trying to help These customs are great Really menacing and impressive. Good work!

170 degrees Celcius in a fan-forced oven, which is about 340 Farenheit. Ordinary ovens should use 190 degrees

The ice cube trays are great! Sinner has a very detailed review of the Belville one in the 'News & General Discussion' Forum. I eagerly await your classic space logo cap review The cake was brilliant - it always is

Theme: Gratuitous merchandising! Shop@Home Set Name: Kitchen Scale MF (I assume MF stands for Mini Fig and not Mother F#$#er) Set Number:#852534 Pieces: 2 Price: $AUD34.99, GBP17.59, EUR19.99 The Lego Group's merchandising section continues to invent new ways to plaster the company logo and smiling visage of a minifig face over every conceivable object in one's home. If bath towels, bags, T-shirts, watches and clocks aren't enough for you, the Lego Kitchen range is here to ensure your domestic compliance with the household gods of ABS is complete. Along with ice cube trays, melamine plates, storage sets, cake moulds and the vaguely adult-sounding 'Silicone Studs' (!) cutlery range, you can now prepare delicious recipes using the Kitchen Scale MF *and* drive your significant other to madness by colonising the previous safe-haven of the Lego-free kitchen with a giant, leering minifig face. Everybody wins! In the interests of thoroughly road-testing this scale, I baked a delicious cake to see how practical this thing was in action. Claudia Roden's Middle Eastern Orange Cake is a famous gluten-free dessert which had a revival and was especially popular in cafes and restaurants about a decade ago. It is easy to make and great to endear yourself to the previously mentioned significant others. To fully engage with this review, you will need: 2 large oranges, washed 6 eggs, beaten 250g ground almonds 250g sugar 1 teaspoon baking powder 1 Lego MF scale Full cooking instructions to follow. Let's begin with the review proper! Firstly, the box. I was amazed at how large it is. Having always used small, minimal, compact kitchen scales, I thought this thing would be about half the size it is: Box art, front. I hate to be the one to break it to that kid in the middle, but he is not biologically related to that woman or the other kid. Check out his non-ginger mop. That apple didn't fall from anywhere near that tree, if you know what I'm saying - *cough* Prince Harry *cough*. Here we also see this Danish family preparing the traditional delicacy of 'flour in a bowl'. Yum! The back of the box: The side of the box. Here we have some technical information. Maximum weight is 1kg, and the variance is 25g. I guess 2.5% error is OK, but I'm unused to scales advertising how *inaccurate* they are! Usually it's the other way round What happens if I'm only weighing 250g of sugar, as Claudia demands? Does this mean I'll be out by 10%? In the delicate art of cake-making, that's quite a large error Unboxing begins. The scale dish comes out first: Look how neatly the stud on the head pops through the protective cardboard box here! What clever and amazing packaging! If only Lego was so careful shipping things like, ooh, I don't know, $AUD400 giant S@H Exclusives. (Sorry! I am still sore about this ) Here is the head. The face is great, if a little stereotypical. Mamma Mia! Actually, it kind of reminds me from Erds for some reason, I can't imagine why. I hope that folkdancing career is going well, I haven't heard from him for a while. Anyhoo, I think Lego kind of missed a trick by not including a full-size white Chef's Hat to go with it And yes, the eyes do follow you around the room. Side view. I'm no design expert, but even I would question whether using a teensy red line against a black background was the best choice for clear and visible measuring. Also, the way you calibrate the measure to zero is by moving the whole of the clear plastic section up and down so that the white line 0 at the top measures up with the hard to see faint red line. What isn't obvious from the pic is that this clear section is a fair few mm in front of the measuring part, so there is significant parallax error depending from which angle and height you are judging the measuring line from. More on that later: Top view. They even have the 3D 'Lego' printing on the stud. So cute! Colour-monitor CP35670 will be pleased to note that the quality of yellow in this set is top-grade Some assembly is required: And here it is with a minifig to put the scale into scale (so to speak): The question on everybody's lips is, can this set be used to determine whether Chrome Vaders are hidden inside 2009 battle packs? (Unlike starstreak, I have not attempted to record a controversial video demonstrating this experiment while sitting in a car and rotating the scale and battle packs in my hand while being mocked for my lack of tonal excitement, nor have I recorded a follow-up and equally controversial video in which I find *two* Chrome Vaders in one pack ) Here is a battlepack in position. You can already see that the red measuring line is almost impossible to see against the black background: Since we're unlikely to see any Chrome Vaders in Australia (unless TRU gives them away to 5 year olds again, like last year's C3P0s ), I have taken the liberty of adding a Vader to the scale to note any change. The answer? Yes - a very slight one, which shows that the weight difference between the two is measurable. However, while adding Darth to the scale did make it move slightly, the difficulty of getting a clear reading of the weight before and after each battle pack was added means that comparing sealed packs to see if the weight of a fig made any difference is beyond the accuracy of this device Furthermore, the way the dish 'sticks' to the scale each time something was removed made re-calibration of the measure necessary between weighings, further undermining accuracy. In conclusion, I guess seekers of Chrome Vaders will have to get them the old-fashioned way - by hassling members of the Ambassador program with their inside connections Darth surveys his empire from his new balcony: While the scale was a failure in this respect, it still needed to be tested in the context for which it was designed, ie the kitchen. So, on to the recipe. Gather your artfully-strewn ingredients (and scale) and we will begin! Firstly, boil the oranges in a little water in a covered saucepan for 2 hours. Yes, 2 hours. You may need to add more water as the pan dries out. At the end they should be firm but soft to the touch. Allow to cool. Meanwhile, preheat oven to 190ºC (170 degrees fan-forced) and butter and flour a cake or springform tin. Cut open the oranges, and chop roughly (including the skin). If you bought oranges with pips, take those out now. Blend oranges and remaining ingredients thoroughly in a food processor. (My food processor was broken, so I just blended the oranges and mixed in the dry ingredients afterwards; it doesn't really matter.) Now we need to add the 250g of almond meal, 250g of sugar, baking powder and beaten eggs. Our first practical test - to measure the weight of almond meal: How easy was it to use the scale? Well, it was kind of annoying actually. Due to the parallax error, the line looked different every time I moved my head. I got a susbtantially different reading every time. In my kitchen, the red line against the black was hard to see. And the way that the dish stuck and I had to recalibrate every time I took ingredients out was aggravating, to be honest. I learned that to reduce reduce parallax error, I had to put the scale on something higher (like the microwave) so that my line of sight was more in tune with the measuring line. Once I did this, it was much easier to use the scale, but it still wasn't perfect by any means. Just out of curiosity, I weighed some of the eggs to see if it matched up with the weight on the carton. Again... they sort of did, but again the differences each time were noticeable. I guess they weren't lying on the box when they said 25g variance! Points for honesty, but not much else. Once you have thoroughly mixed the processed orange and other ingredients, pour the batter into prepared tin. Bake for 1 hour, turning the tin around half way through. If cake is still very wet, cook a little longer. Cool in tin before gently turning out. You can see mine is a teensy bit overbaked: You really don't need to dress this cake up much, as the taste is amazing by itself, but you can sprinkle a little icing sugar on top for decoration just prior to serving. Hurrah and yum! Since the scale was kind of not great for kitchen usage, I passed it on to a nice Jedi Master who was passing by. He said he needed something rough just to measure fertiliser for offloading to a local farmer. He also mentioned something about the Republic Army being funded by recycling, I'm not sure what he meant. (Now you know what happens to all the corpses of those expendable clones! ) To sum up: Item #852534, the Kitchen Scale MF, looks good but is largely useless for accurate measurement. It has several features which are poorly designed (hard to read measuring line and parallax error) and the dish tends to stick too hard to the head stud. Honestly, I couldn't recommend it to anyone serious about cooking . On the upside, it does look attractive in a kitschy, retro kind of way. Perhaps if you are a bad cook, like the red-headed mother on the box art making Danish flour-cake, I guess I would buy it purely so I could blame my culinary inadequacies on my useless illegitimate child: 'Jørn! You've put in too much flour! You've ruined my precious cake! No smørrebrød for you for a month!' Note: A week after I made this cake, I used the scale again, and probably because I had become accustomed to its idiosyncracies, I found it easier to handle. I guess you get used to its quirks. I'm torn because I think it looks great, but it is kind of, well, dysfunctional. As a product, it certainly doesn't inspire confidence in the Lego kitchen accessories range for future purchases. I kind of wish I'd bought a Belville ice cube tray instead Now, who's up for reviewing those 'Silicone Studs'?

The instructions aren't very helpful on this point. In fact, they're not helpful at all! I don't see they would have been faced with a deluge of complaints from people who expected an AT-TE in the box if they had one or two pics of this extra function in the manuals, so it's a bit annoying that there's no mention of it at all. I probably wouldn't have known what to do except somebody mentioned it in one of these threads. That said, I swung my AT-TE around for about 5 seconds before it span off and landed on the floor so maybe the AT-TE build isn't as stable as the AT-OT Other thoughts on having built it... too many stickers! It's terrible they can't even do those 2x2 round tiles with the printed Republic insignia as they used to. Sigh. It's also weird that in a set so obviously catering for AFOLs, the designers looked at the little storage space below the LAAT cockpit and thought 'I know! What people really want is 8 MORE flick-fire missiles!' At least the Gunship had the bacta tank and the cool little control thing. It's kind of annoying that you can't fill up the AT-OT with clones *and* use the lifting function at the same time. Is it just me or do the backsides of minifigs have less clutching power than they used to? The slightest bump and they're popping out all over the place! Anyway, I don't want to give the wrong impression, I thought this was an incredibly enjoyable build and both submodels are amazingly well-designed. I'd recommend it - on sale

Thanks for the instructions, whung. The Power Function motor looks kind of obtrusive

If KimT is 100% human, why is his sig-fig holding an albino koala bear? I've always wondered that... I got my title coz Belville ice cube trays suck! (There, I said it ) 'Batbirck' is actually kind of catchy.