Side project

For my birthday I decided to splurge and buy a Lego McLaren P1. For those not familiar it's a giant Lego car set. I had seen versions of these giant Lego sets at Max's friend's houses and of course the Lego stores over the years and fantasized about building one at some point but it was really easy to say it was just a crazy expensive whim then move on. Besides what would one do with it after the fun of building it. Well after all our holiday purchases I had a bunch of Amazon points left on my credit card and decided to burn them on the crazy expensive whim as a gift to myself. I have to say I underestimated how big of a project it would be. The kit had something like 4000 pieces. I started it back in February and just completed it tonight. Granted I didn't work on it every night and it may have sat untouched on the dinning room table for a few weeks here and there. I will say it was a fun project. 

The kit itself is quite impressive. Not only does the steering, hood, trunk, and doors work. The engine's also work. As part of the kit I got to build a working V8 engine with moving pistons and a 7 speed gear box with paddle shifters that work and actually shifts when the wheels move. Additionally as the real car uses electric propulsion to get off the line they included a separate simulated electric motor that one can shift the car into using if desired. The level of detail is quite impressive. Frankly Lego's and their building techniques have really evolved since I was a kid. The fact that this somewhat working car is completely built out of Legos does not cease to amaze me nor does their ability to break it down into such a simple build process. Ok so maybe not simple the manuals were well over 1000 pages but somehow it was not cumbersome or overly complicated process. I think it had 24 bags of parts each taking me 30-45 minutes to assemble.

Of course now that it's done I now need to figure out what to do with it? I have seen some wall mounts for picture frames allowing folks to hang them displayed on a wall or something. While the project was fun I don't know that I'm in love with it enough to want to look at it every day. Maybe I can find a kid that wants it or perhaps sell it on eBay? At this point I don't know what I'm actually going to do with it but I'm sure eventually I'll need to get it off the dinning room table to make room for the next project or maybe even eat there one day :)