Lepin 02012 - Deep Sea Exploration

By the end of December my son asked to browse through AliExpress, I showed him how to look for the best deals from reliable sellers. It didn't take him too long to find the Deep Sea Exploration set from Lepin (Lepin 02012), based on the Lego Deep Sea Exploration 60095, he has been saving money for a while, and tries to get the most value for his pocket. He paid 51 CAD$, shipped via ePacket, the package arrived three weeks later to the mailbox.

Here's the original listing from AliExpress: Lepin 02012 - Deep Sea Exploration

I was gladly surprised with the seller, everything was properly packaged and protected inside a box.

The build was long but simple, the bags were numbered, so it was easy to follow the instructions, however there were some parts spread in other bags. There were no missing, or damaged parts. Transparent pieces came in separate, and sealed bags, no scratchs.

Lepin minifigs arms and hands had to be assembled to the torso. These are the first Lepin minifures I have had in my hands, I am gladly surprised with the quality and detail. I have an original Lego captain, below is a picture of both minifigures (Lepin at left, Lego at right).

The finished build...

I am almost certain that I will buy more Lepin sets in the future, the quality is far above what I have seen on other brands (Bela, Enlighten, Kazi). In fact there are some in my wish list for soon.

DIY - Lego play table

As a kid I never had a dedicated space to play with Lego, usually I used my desk, with the disadvantage that I had to clear everything at the end of the day or earlier.

I introduced my kids to Lego at a young age, almost three years old, at first they used an old Ikea center table, but quickly it became clear that they needed a bigger platform:

It was time to build a table, the main idea was to have a place where they could build and play, but also be able to let everything in place so they could continue at any time (the same day or any other day). They were young and I didn’t want to deal with bricks all over the floor, or at least minimize the quantity of bricks laying around, so the table had to have raised borders to stop the parts from falling.

I had a chipboard panel with white melamine, 26”x66”, and some ½”x2” pine for the borders, so I started with that. It went directly over the Ikea table:

After a couple of years my son was in need of some storage space, he had grown up too, it was time to raise the table and include a drawer. I integrated the drawer in a way that the outside panel would be raised and be at the same level the platform borders were, this way it would be easy to push all the bricks from the platform to the drawer without making anything fall to the floor:

Since then the table and bricks moved to the basement, and just last week a friend gave them a big industrial desktop, 35"x75", the cargo train is no longer on the floor.

Mixed harbour

For a long time I have been dealing with the idea of building a Lego harbour (port) layout, last weekend I took some time to start with.

Whenever I can I recycle material, this time it was not an exception. I had some chipboard wood panels with white melamine stored, and a textured acrylic panel, so I quickly built up something in my “play room”. 

The idea is having two levels:

• Sea level
• Port/harbour level

I measured everything in order to have baseplates on the raised level that would be exactly at two bricks height compared with the sea level:

I forgot that the raised baseplates from the 90's had the road a bit higher, I should have planned a height of 2 1/3. I will need to adjust this next weekend.

Anyway, here are some views of the first mockup:

The last two pictures were taken after adding a blue colored paper and a transparent textured acrylic, to create the water effect.

Mostly Lego, but also the Enlighten Rescue Center (copy of Lego set 6479), some MegaBlocks base plates and a BlockTech 20x20 blue base plate that I bought at Walmart some days ago (see « Bricks And Figures » blog).