DanNeely

While that drew blood, it was less painful than stepping on any old regular brick; never mind the various caltrop pieces other people have shared.

I did get a call from a LEGO Customer Service (Support?) Supervisor yesterday. In addition to a replacement brick, they'll be sending a prepaid envelope for the brick with the wire in it (so sorry to anyone who may have been hoping to buy a dangerous brick from me for their collection). They also credited my VIP account with 1950 points ($15 worth of discounts); option B here would've been a random small set. I'd rather have a discount on something of my choice. The manufacturing code someone upthread said I should save my packaging for was printed on one of the pieces of tape I cut to open the box and then pealed off it, so their traceability was limited to whatever they could get from my order number. The delayed response hurt them here, if they'd called 2 days sooner I could've dumped the small trashcan next to my desk and probably found it; but I emptied it for collection Wednesday night.

It's been 10 business days (16 calendar days), the number of days wait listed when I sent my message; I finished my build - other than the defective brick - last night; still no word from Lego. They're only claiming a 7 day backlog in email now though, which has me half-wondering if it was escalated above front line customer service and they're trying to decide how to officially respond.

If it's a systemic problem - ie affecting multiple batches of plastic - it's probably not limited to just tan. Base plastic beads are normally uncolored/white; with the manufacturer mixing colored beads in as needed to get the desired color. A company I worked for 16 years ago did their color mixing in 55 gallon drums (I suspect Lego would make larger batches). Not getting the colored beads mixed in well enough results in the sort of variable color problems we occasionally see.

it was at the injection port, but the back of the brick is unblemished so it didn't hit the back of the mold. It probably stopped where it did because it started in as the mold was being completely filled.

It looks clean, it is, and I did before posting here. Message sent but: Fortunately it's a common part in the set, so I should be able to find one that's easily accessible to leave missing for however long it takes them to get back. If don't want it, I'll try extracting the wire with a pair of vice grips. I think I should have just enough to hold onto for a good yoink.

I was building my Colosseum and when I went to press a brick into place felt a sharp pain on my fingertip. It didn't feel like a normal pinch, and where I was working one shouldn't've been possible. Taking a closer look I saw a piece of wire sticking up from one of the studs, and it had drawn blood. The wire itself is short enough not to have came out the back side of the brick. Because of it's stiffness my guess would be that it's a fragment from a wire brush/etc. Does anyone know how I can contact LEGO about this? I've put photos of the brick in an Imgur gallery because my attempts to attach directly are failing. https://imgur.com/a/2SOhIJ9

I haven't. I'll admit I'm mildly surprised I haven't heard of any enterprising designers using the time since the lander was announced to have on designed and ready for release day.

Practical or not, there is at least one minifig scale Saturn V and LUT in existence. At least as of last year it was short a few service arms though

If I'm building with a white tank, what should I leave in its original color and what should be replaced with white? All the orange/beige/brown parts get whited out I assume, but what about the gray panels at the top or the yellow/etc fiddly bits at the bottom?

A bit of an old comment, but I'm revisiting it because it's part of the ongoing headache I'm having with the crew access arm. After the previous go around I've got all of my decks within a plate or so of the correct 110:1 height; and the bottom 6 arms are all where they're supposed to be relative to the rocket. Based on that I'm assuming the S-IC and S-II stages are both about the right height. Arm 7 is at the right height on the LUT but about 1 brick high relative to the black ring at the top of the S-IVb. I'm not critically concerned there, although I might lower it a plate or so. Trying to tweak the height of the rocket stage is more complex than I care to think about doing anyway. The bigger problem is arms 8 and 9. The full impact of the 2 brick too tall launch escape system is weighing in here. Arm 8 should centered halfway between the two decks to reach the service module, and the bottom of arm 9 should be slightly below line with it's deck. But what I actually have is arm 8 aligned with the bottom of its deck, and arm 9 aligned with its top in at deck height. I'd been semi-aware of this for a while, but until I started trying to build the scaffolding to access the arms it hadn't really mattered. At this point I don't see a good way to make it work without adding 2 bricks to the upper part of the rocket and redoing the launch escape system to be shorter. As I commented earlier, adding an extra brick of height to the S-IVb stage is way more work That leaves the payload fairing, service module and command module as places to add additional height. The easiest spot to do so would be the bottom of the fairing by adding 2 more rows of macaroni bricks (and with the black ring at the top of the S-IVb a brick low, probably at least half the height adjustment should be done here). I'm going to hold off doing that until I can hunt down heights for the manned parts of the rocket because if I can justify it, I'd rather add it to the manned section instead. My current LUT (complete with backing around the arm pivot). Apollo 13

I started building up the outside walkways to the arms, went to test how arm9 would swing to see where the limit needed to be and disaster struck. In it's fully built up state it won't pivot past 90 degrees. And stripped fully bare and with the access way removed it still won't fold flat. I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do, Reasonable options seem to be moving the axle a stud farther out, or reworking the arm so the pivot point is on the interior side not the exterior.

I was able to work another round of tapering into the back of the white room. It ended up working better than I expected and allowed a closer alignment with the command module than I had before.

9th arm is done along with an initial version of the white room. I'm probably going to keep tinkering with the latter; I'd like to try and get the taper on the rearmost segment to be symmetric.

8th arm is done too. Really wish I had some better images for how to color this one though, but the 9th arm was always in the way.