A few months ago, LEGO revealed a new set, a Pan Am Douglas DC-3 as part of its Icons category and set it to release in early April. I was immediately in need of it.

As someone who is extremely interested in planes, although particularly military ones, DC-3s are still extremely cool looking. Even though they’re extremely old now and hardly any fly anymore, the general design of them and the sound of their engines are really interesting.

So, in pretty much a single day, I build the entire set. I say “pretty much” as it arrived in the afternoon, and only got to the 5th bag, then the day after I started the 6th and finished it in one go. So if it weren’t for it arriving later in the day, I absolutely could have finished the near 2000 piece set in one day.

I took a picture of every other bag I finished. I initially was going to take a picture at the end of every bag, but I forgot to take one as I was already in the middle of the next bag, so I decided to keep it to every other bag, which ended nicely on bag 14.

However, there was one in particular step in the instructions that was a bit frustrating.

Somehow, you’re supposed to put the green piece inbetween 4 studs of the circular piece, which with the red part on top is near impossible with just your fingers, or just mine.

Here, I genuinely strugged for a good 10 minutes just trying to push these pieces in, until I eventually tried just putting them into the white socket from the step after, and then putting that on afterwards. Now that sort of worked, but then the 4 other pieces that go around the circular one do not fit underneath it, so with my tiny tiny nails I had to pull back on the piece with the socket while keeping the green and red piece in place, then put the 4 pieces back on, and then the socket piece.

And then I had to do that all again for the second engine!!

But, honestly, that was the only annoying part of the whole build, everything else went perfectly fine and went together great.

Now, after having finished the build, this thing is HUGE. I severely underestimated how big this thing’s size is, let alone the wingspan. I thought I could fit it on my desk, but my second monitor gets in the way, so for now I’ve put it on top of my PC which it barely fits onto length-wise.

I am extremely happy with it though! It’s very cool to have one of my favourite “non-military” planes built in my room! I say that in quotes as although it was used in the military, it wasn’t its primary use, unlike the A400M and C-130 for example, so it counts as not military!!!!!