'LEGO Creator
Expert' 10220 Volkswagen T1 Camper Van - build tips
and
photos
Aside from
providing some photos of
my build, as a novice 'LEGO Creator Expert' builder I wanted to share a
few tips, learned over the last couple of months.

This mini-site
has three pages: Tips/home - Build photos - Lighting
kit
photos
- Don't rush it. Yes, you hear of people who completed a Creator
Expert
kit in a weekend, but it's far better to give it 30 minutes or so a
day, enjoying it more and spinning out the anticipation of the
finishing line. I built mine over two months, though three weeks of
this was waiting for a missing part (see below).
- Creator Expert kits are supplied with pieces in unnumbered bags.
In
other words, you've no idea which bag any parts needed for each page
are in. I've seen some people advocate emptying everything into one
huge pile and then spending three or four hours sorting the pieces by
type, to make finding things easier. In fact, I strongly think you can
save yourself those hours by emptying each bag into its own little pile
around your central work space. The pieces in each pile seem random at
first, but there ARE links and you'll be surprised how often you look
for piece A and then find piece B, also needed for that page's step,
right beside it. Plus your memory will gradually remember where pieces
are, it'll become second nature to 'go for the second pile from the
left when you need "1x1x1 plain red"', and so on. Trust your eyes,
trust your brain, trust your fingers...
- When you suspect, numerous times during a build, that a brick or
part
is missing, note that in almost
every case, the part IS there, you just
have to find it. Which sounds a bit obvious, but it's true. Take a
walk, brush the parts over with your fingers, look from a different
angle - you will find it eventually (though see point 5 below!) And, of
course, the further you get with the build, the fewer parts there are
around the model, so the easier it becomes to find each piece!
- Make sure your build space is inaccessible to small children,
pets and
helpful cleaners! LEGO supplies the exact
number of parts* and on such a
complicated build you can't really afford to lose a single part.
- As a corollary to the tip above, if you do genuinely believe a
part or
two got lost (a four-wide window/wall piece was missing from my camper)
then LEGO offers a free brick replacement service. It takes a couple
of
weeks though, so this is a last resort! If you're in a hurry
and desperately need a part and it's not too
model-specific, then you can of course buy LEGO bricks in hundreds of
places. In fact, you may even have a box of assorted bricks and parts
around the house - raid your kid's toy box?(!)
*
in fact, due to the way the parts are packaged, you get a few random
parts you don't need left over. This is normal.
With all this
mind, my build went very smoothly, see the photos
here. I also bought
the third
party lighting kit, e.g. from Amazon UK here. Although this isn't
endorsed by LEGO, the way the van is designed makes fitting the loom of
LEDs reasonably easy (about an hour's extra work). See the
lighting kit photos here.
You can
contact me at [email protected]
and you can 'tip' me if these pages have proved helpful to you by using PayPal.
Thanks.