One of my favorite LEGO book series is The LEGO Built-It Book: Amazing Vehicles by Nathanael Kuipers and Mattia Zamboni. There are two books in the collection (see here and here), both taking the #5867 LEGO Creator Super Speedster 3-in-1 set released in 2010, and offering ten alternate instructions in each book for other type of vehicles built with the same pieces. That’s 23 alternate instructions in total for a single 278-piece LEGO set! You could stay busy for a long time, building and rebuilding that one set over and over again, and transforming the same pieces into all kinds of amazing vehicles! And the alternate models presented in the books are very good, not just some forced afterthoughts. That’s what I would call getting your money’s worth! I wrote a full review on the first book some years ago, which you can read here: The LEGO Build-It Book: Amazing Vehicles. 🙂
LEGO fan Dvd used to build LEGO models by simply following the instructions that came with the sets. However, after going through the Amazing Vehicles books, he got so inspired, that he created his own alternate models for another LEGO Creator 3-in-1 set; the #31034 LEGO Creator Future Flyers.
This set, released in 2015, includes instructions for three alternate models; a futuristic robot, a jet, and a sports car. Dvd built another ten models from the pieces, and titled the collection Amazing Animals (I guess we could also call them Future Animals). The collection includes a gorilla, a rabbit, a chameleon, an elephant, a kangaroo, a frog, a dog, a giraffe, a mouse and a goldfish (see larger images here).
They look awesome, aren’t they? Dvd shares that with these models he wanted to pay homage to the Amazing Vehicles books, as they were so influential in his own journey as a LEGO builder. And to help others experience the joy of alternate building, and to learn from his examples, Dvd also shared LEGO Digital Designer building instructions for all ten Amazing Animals. You can find links to the building instructions at Dvd’s flickr gallery here: LEGO AMAZING ANIMALS & LDD FILES
If you would like to experiment with alternate building, the LEGO Classic sets and the LEGO Creator 3-in-1 sets are excellent choices. The LEGO Classic sets come with lots of basic LEGO pieces for free-building, with only a few ideas and suggestions. See the current selection at the LEGO Classic section of the Online LEGO Shop.
The LEGO Creator 3-in-1 sets include instructions for three alternate models, and you can certainly use the pieces for building other models as well, as demonstrated by the Amazing Vehicles books, and by the Amazing Animals models. To see the current selection, visit the LEGO Creator section of the Online LEGO Shop.
What do you think? Have you built the models from the LEGO Built-It Book: Amazing Vehicles books? And what do you think of the Amazing Animals series? Are there any other LEGO sets that you like to use for alternate building? Feel free to share your thoughts and discuss in the comment section below! 😉
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Oh, these are great! Love it! No need to have a big collection, just creativity and patience. Nice that he also shares instructions. Will check them out.
That’s a nice project. I used to do this with the smaller Creator sets. But the larger 3-in-1 sets also make sense. I should get back to doing this.
Ahhh… this reminds me that I have a collection of all the old small Creator 3-in-1 sets in plastic boxes. They are great for alternate building! 😀
The containers? I remember that even the containers could be used for building.
Or, I might be thinking of the X-pods, I realize. Now I remember the Creator sets in canisters. I have a bunch of them, which I found cheaply on various thrift stores and outdoor sales…
Yes, they were available on clearance at a lot of places. I collected the series and have one of each. 🙂
I wish Lego would give us more alternate builds like these, or collect them in one place from different builders on their website for easy reference.
They do have some alternate builds on the LEGO Creator and LEGO Classic websites, although I agree with you that it would be nice to have a central place that lists them all. Also, take a look at the links at the end of the article, where I listed some other resources for alternate building instructions. 🙂
Those are pretty nice “mechanimals”. It’s just the elephant I feel could need some tweaking.
Alas, I neither have #31034, nor LDD, but perhaps I have enough of the parts to be able to wing it. I know I have all the parts for #5867, though, so perhaps it could be worth checking out the books.
Mechanimals… I like that! 😀
The books are very-very good. I have built all the models from them, and they are very impressive, sturdy, and distinctively different from each other. It is a great way to learn interesting building techniques with a small-ish selection of parts. When I first used the book, I didn’t have all the parts in the right colors, but it didn’t really matter. Later, I did get all the correct colors, just to make the models nicer, and I also got the original set manual for the sake of completeness. 😀
Thanks so much for the featuring!
@Håkan You are absolutely right! Elephant is the least satisfactory build in this collection for me as well. I build the head first, but after that I find that is way too big, and I don’t have enough brick to build the body. The scale is totally off and weird. 😀
Maybe you can make it into an elephant that’s under construction? By the way, it’s nice to have you over! 😀