Restoring older LEGO sets is a wonderful hobby many adult LEGO fans enjoy. Perhaps you find a bulk lot on eBay or at a garage sale that is just too good to pass up, or you may rediscover your own childhood sets that have been stored away in the attic. If you don’t have the original instructions, you can find them online, and restore older sets to their full glory.
An interesting twist on restoring older sets is to use modern parts and building techniques. You may want to do this when older parts have been retired and hard to find, or when you simply want to refresh and update an older model.
The LEGO company themselves regularly refreshes some of their most popular sets. Think of all the LEGO City police and fire stations, LEGO Star Wars sets, LEGO trains, LEGO ships, etc. Some of these re-releases are complete makeovers, while others are very similar to the original design with only slight updates.
An excellent redesign I have recently run across on Facebook is by LEGO fan Jean-Marie Bellion. This is a completely reimagined and upgraded version #6364 LEGO Town Paramedic Unit from 1980. This modern take on an old set is a fitting tribute to all the world’s health workers battling the Coronavirus pandemic.
It’s interesting to compare the parts and techniques used forty years ago to those that are used today. Of course all the basic parts and techniques are going to be the same, but there are also some modern parts and techniques that were not available in the past. Overall, older sets look more blocky, while modern designs have more curvers. You can clearly see these differences in the old vs. new paramedic unit.
If you’re familiar with the #6364 LEGO Town Paramedic Unit set, and you would like to build the modern version of it, or you just want to add a small hospital to your LEGO city, Jean-Marie freely shares instructions and parts-list at the following link: LEGO Paramedic Unit Revisited Instructions.
Jean-Marie also has a reimagined LEGO Classic Castle project on LEGO Ideas that you may want to check out and support with your vote. You can find it here: Princess June’s Castle on LEGO Ideas
And if you are looking for currently available LEGO hospitals, ambulances, fire stations, and more, visit the LEGO City section of the Online LEGO Shop.
What do you think? Do you ever rebuild older sets? Do you prefer to build them as they were originally intended, or do you upgrade them with modern parts and techniques? And how do you like the updated version of the LEGO Paramedic Unit? Feel free to share and discuss in the comment section below!
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I love this! It demonstrates the difference between old and new style building techniques really well. Refreshing old sets could be a great activity. I will think about this some more.
This is really good. Like Jeff said, it’s a great example between modern and traiditional building styles. I like it quite a lot!
Wow! The castle is great! I wasn’t aware of that project. Voted!
This is a nice project for the kids. Thanks for sharing. We are starting to get serious cabin fever!
The old sets are charming. But that may be because that’s what I grew up with. I feel that the techniques in the newer sets are harder to grasp by kids and beginners. Instead of stacking only one way, you go in every direction, and that’s not easy to imitate when building on your own.
I like how they designed the sign. It’s very clever. Is the front porch light uses a minifig neck bracket? It’s a great design!
Yes, that’s a neck bracket. They used that technique in the brick bank, and other sets too.
Jean-Marie has done such a great job detailing his process that should get the gears turning for other builders as to what is possible. Such a great presentation and means of demonstrating that building in LEGO is all about improvising and using workarounds when the pieces you think you need are not available.
Training your mind that there are no dead ends – only obstacles to overcome is perhaps the most important skill any builder will use most often, regardless of skill level..
For anyone wanting to get into the hobby but feels shut out, due to the costs…
There are ways to quickly get your hands on a healthy backlog of parts with limited or no funds. One way I haven’t seen mentioned before is to join forces with someone who buys large lots of bricks and start building for them. It obviously requires a great deal of trust/transparency and may take time to find the right person you click with, but it worked great for me.
The guy I started building for I met on Craigslist or OfferUp.
I would visit his garage/workshop and buy several sets from him. He had more loose LEGO in tubs than I’d ever seen. Giant tubs stacked to the ceiling, several rows wide. After several trips, and good conversations, we became friends. He loved finding deals on large quantities and I suggested he get a friend or someone he trusted to help him build since there was no way one person could possibly handle the amount he had. At the time, I wasn’t considering myself to be a possible candidate.
A couple weeks later, I got a call from him asking if I wanted to help build. Neither of us knew how to go about such a thing, but he said he trusted me and we decided to try it out.
He loaded my car with several huge tubs and I took it home and built as many complete and near comp,ete sets as I could,. I took lots of photos and sent progress reports to include him in my process. It took me a couple weeks of cleaning, sorting, organizing, and figuring out a system but I was buried in LEGO, doing something I loved. I carefully bagged, wrapped, delivered my work to him and he seemed very happy with my results and told me just to keep whatever was left. He reloaded my car to capacity with fresh tubs, and that continued for several years until his main job had him move out of state.
Just putting it out there for someone else to use or build off to work for them. Good luck!
Thanks for sharing that! I have heard of similar arrangements before. It makes sense, as different people enjoy different parts of the hobby. So, you can each do what you like, and you make good friends in the process. 🙂