A Small, Blocky Stegosaurus

Earlier, for reasons unknown, a small plastic bag appeared on my desk. I have no idea where it came from or when we bought it, and it was certainly not anything I’d ordinarily buy. The package contained tiny weeny building blocks and some instructions on how to build a stegosaurus. So I opened the package up and decided to have some fun.

I think fun is not the best word to describe what happened next.

It wasn’t fun.

I normally love putting Lego things together. There are three massive boxes in my room all filled with the stuff. But this tiny thing wasn’t official. I have no idea what it actually was since the instructions were mostly in a language I can’t read. And the pieces were INSANELY tiny. I was putting this together at my desk and it was so easy to accidentally knock pieces away. The parts themselves were also a pain in the ass. Some pieces snapped together a little too well, making them hard to pull apart. But at the same time, some pieces would not connect at all.

Didn’t help that the instructions, even the pictures, were… not great. Each part was split into three sections, but each layer was nothing but a flat line of bricks, making it hard to see where the parts were supposed to connect together.

Eventually though, I ended up with this:

A very flimsy model

The finished model was insanely delicate. The second I tried picking it up, its legs fell off. As did one of its plates. Repeatedly. The only sturdy part was the head, and that was attached by a small ball socket and stuck out really far. The tail constantly snapped off, and the scales on its back moved around a bit too much. Compared to the rest of the body, the head and legs seemed a little too simple, but thankfully the head remained in one piece. The legs really were causing problems, and were also oddly short. However, the body was somewhat solid, but that was because the majority of the parts were used in making the body.

The worst parts were the scales on the tail end of the Stegosaurus. They were held in place with only one pin, and knocking them off was very easy to do.

On the plus side, it does actually look a bit like a Stegosaurus. So that’s not too bad.

Upgrade time

At the end of the day, what I had wasn’t cool or impressive in the slightest. So I used the handful of spare parts to make some adjustments. One bonus was that at least there were plenty of spare parts. Normally, you get almost no spare parts at all. In order to improve it, I made the Stegosaurus’s legs a tad longer, and tried to make it overall less fall-y-apart-y. It still looked shit though.

I suppose, at least I improved on it. After all, what’s the point of a thagomizer (the pointy bits) on your tail if you can’t move said tail?

Overall though, I didn’t enjoy building the Stegosaurus. It was just far too finicky for my liking.