Rabbit rabbit! September sucks!
Around our anniversary, WM bought me 2 LEGO kits I’d been low-key wanting: the Polaroid OneStep camera (#21345) and the Retro Radio (#10334). They were for rainy summer Fridays and this summer certainly did deliver with its non-beachy Fridays.
I built the camera first because I was more excited about that than the radio.
This punky build was so frustrating I had to put it down and finish it the next day.
Part of the charm of the build is that you can insert a “photo” into the bottom slot, it will remain in the camera, and the red button ejects it. The inside mechanism is a bit tricky to put together. There are reddit questions and youtube videos dedicated to troubleshooting the build, but in the end I ended up putting one piece in the wrong spot. Unfortunately, I had to pull almost the entire build apart to fix it.
I’ve completed enough builds to confidently say that this LEGO project was structurally shoddier than what I’m used to. Mechanics aside, the 3 back panels and front white panel are only attached to the camera by clips. It feels fragile when I hold it. But it looks fantastic on a shelf.
On the next rainy Friday, I tackled the radio.
In this house we believe:
- Black lives matter
- Women’s rights are human rights
- Science is real
- Love is love
- Lego should be sorted by color before assembly.
The build progressed nicely but wasn’t very fun. This has been our experience lately with these builds: they’re smartly designed and it’s nice seeing everything come together in the end but getting there is tedious. Both the radio and the camera were this way, as was the Disney 100 movie camera that WM built earlier this year.
Here’s where this build won me over and became my favorite of the two: I really appreciated the detail on the panel that recreated the round speaker behind the white panel.It’s perfect! It comes with a sound box which nestles into the build. The on/off and tuner knobs both work. If the power is “off” and you turn the tuner knob, the tuner bar moves across the display but nothing happens. But if the power is “on” and you turn the tuner knob, the mechanism inside triggers the sound box and one of about a dozen sounds plays. Two of the sounds are static, the rest are an assortment of music and news clips. I frigging love this thing and its new home is on the shelves above my desk.
I can’t upload the video file here to show you (too large) and Firefox won’t support embedded Imgur files, so click here to see it!
This is the last LEGO build for me for a while, because we’ve run out of space.
