Lepin 15004 Not Lego Fire Brigade Set Review - Part One

The Lepin 15004 Fire Brigade is a knock-off of the Lego Fire Brigade modular building 10197. This will be my second modular building.  There's supposed to be 2313 pieces in this Lepin set. I didn't get the box that is displayed, just a lot of parts in over 40 plastic bags.  This set is about the same size as the Lepin 15002 Cafe Corner that I built and reviewed recently on http://its-not-lego.blogspot.com.

Day One.

There's enough bricks in this set to fill up this old Duplo tub.  The set comes with this multi-page instruction booklet.  As with the Cafe Corner, I will be building the Fire Brigade over the next few days.  I do about 10 steps at a time, and this takes me about 2 or 3 hours.

In the Cafe Corner build, I kept all of the parts in each of their respective bags (I counted 43 different bags).  It made the build a bit challenging when searching for the smaller pieces.  For the building of the Fire Brigade, I emptied the bags with smaller parts into little plastic fruit cocktail cups.

I skipped putting together the mini figures and the fire truck.  I will do those last.  The Fire Brigade comes with a base consisting of two 16 x 32 stud pieces.  I found that the big flat unstudded piece between the two yellow strips would not stay down, one end would always pop up.  I'm hoping that this will be resolved by the addition of more bricks onto the baseplates.  

So far, no missing parts after the first 10 steps.  The tiles have been installed onto the baseplates front and rear, and the outline of the fire house has been laid out.  There will be two main areas divided by the parking spot for the fire truck.  The giant white 3 indicates that this was the third set in the original Lego Modular series.

It leaves me wondering if I should have rotated the 2 baseplates by 90 degrees, so that the main middle piece was not on the joint line.  Another thing I might change is the side 4 connector bricks, from beige colour to black to conform with the building colour.   End of day one.

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Day Two.

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The lower walls are in place and the door and window frames are starting to take shape after step 20. The fire house facade with it's cappucino coloured tiles is starting to come along.  Installed accessories that have been installed include the tool rack with tools, storage box and garbage can.  A broom and shovel flank each side of the rear walls.

The base for the fireman's pole is done and a box with oxygen tanks is in place.  Last but not least is the changing area containing a bench and a rack of the three silver helmets and two fire extinguishers have been wall mounted.  The warpage from the base plates makes some of the tiles pop out and continues to annoy me, but thankfully no missing parts to report at the end of day two.

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Day Three.

The first floor of the fire house is about 80% complete as we finish step 30.  More progress on the front facade has been made.

More updates to the fire house include the rear entry door, and the bricks added to support the yet to be installed front roll-up door.

The Lepin stair case consists of two pieces, where I've read that the Lego stair case is one piece.

Last few pics for day three.   So far so good.  To be continued tomorrow.

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Day Four.

Today we finished building up to step 40.   Let's review the progress of the Lepin Fire Brigade so far. Front facade is almost complete, with doors and windows installed.  Light fixtures added.   Garage door panels have been joined together and inserted into the support rails (more on this later).

Inside view of front windows.

Back view.  The taller back window openings have yet to receive their windows.

That pesky centre plate just won't stay down.

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Ok, so there's this major flaw in the Fire Brigade set.  It's not the roll-up doors, but the overhead tracks that support them (the long white piece shown above).  The groove or channel in the brick is just too narrow to allow the pegs of the garage door panels to move freely.  In fact, they can't even move at all.

I tried to test fit the roll-up door panels into the groove, but they just wouldn't go in.  I didn't try to force it too much just in case I broke the pegs off.   Initially, I wasn't sure if the problem was the track itself or the door panel pegs.  If it was the pegs I was planning to simply sand each of them down.

I needed to confirm what the problem was. So, what to do?

I am lucky enough to have in my brick collection, the Kazi 8052 Fire Station.  In fact, I have two of them (I bought them for quite cheap if I remember correctly).

The roll-up garage doors on the Kazi fire station work quite well, so I decided to dis-assemble the garage door rails and see if they work with the Fire Brigade doors.  As it turned out, they were dark grey instead of white, but they worked perfectly with the Lepin door panels.   I then tried to use the Kazi door panels with the Lepin rails, but these would't go in either.  So definitely the problem was with the two overhead track pieces.

Here's a look at the roll-up garage door system with the two Kazi bricks in place.   It's just a bit tight going around the corner, but not too bad, I can move the doors up and down.

Well, that was the excitement for today's build.  The two offending pieces have been placed on the curb to be picked up as rubbish.   I'm not sure if the problem I encountered was an anomaly or not, but for my solution it was to substitute the two overhead track pieces.   I'm certainly curious to know if this is a common problem with all of the Lepin Fire Brigade sets.

Good news is that there are still no missing parts after step 40, day four.

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Part 2 of the Lepin 15004 Fire Brigade continued here.

Lepin 15004 Not Lego Fire Brigade Set Review - Part Two

I've split the original post of the Lepin 15004 Fire Brigade into two parts as it was getting quite long.

If you've just come here and missed the first part, you can find it here.

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Day Five.

Not much exciting happening on day five.  The roll-up door now has an apron and window above it.

Here's how the front of the building looks from inside.

Huge windows flank the rear entrance.

Second staircase has been added.

Roll-up door still works fine.

The least flattering side of the Fire Brigade fire house.

Day Five and step 50 finished.

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Day Six.

Finally finished the first floor of the Lepin Fire Brigade today, but not without making my first minor mistake.  I inadvertently placed the barn door pegs facing inwards.  When the barn doors didn't fit inside the arched opening, I quickly turned the pegs and now the doors open and close properly.

Here's the completed front facade but without all the detailed accessories, like the helmets and axes.

Put the roof extension in.

Finished the top perimeter bricks, ready to move onto the second floor.

Lamp post and tree added.

Not the shiny gold helmets that you get with the original Lego set.

Looks like Harley Quinn is trying to run off with the flag.

Step 60 and day 6 done.  I like the design so far, and the first floor is so tall.  

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Day Seven.

Construction on the second floor is underway.  

And look, the furniture has arrived.

Construction crew quit early today, so no more progress on the fire brigade after 70 steps and day 7.

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Day Eight

On day eight, most of the Fire Brigade's second floor has been furnished.  Finally, got the wall unit and sofa up the several flights of stairs. Whew.

Here's a good look at the fridge and ping pong table.  I think the fridge is just a bit too large.  Look how tall it is next to the floor to ceiling windows.

Second floor staircase installed.  This will give us access to the rooftop later.

And all the second floor walls are in.   Just waiting for the roof now.   End of Day 7.

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Day Eight.

We're into the home stretch now.  The roof construction is underway so the Lepin Fire Brigade is so close to completion.

The bell tower has a bat hidden inside way up in the rafters, so you can't really see it. Nice touch.

The instruction manual is a bit confusing regarding how to attach the bell to the bellfry.

There's supposed to be a special piece that has a stud on either end, but all I got was a string.

I later found two little pieces that look like locks. I think you're supposed to tie the string to each of those pieces and then clip them to the bell harness.  I got lazy and simply smooshed the string between a 1x1 stud.

Here's a few pics of the completed roof with water barrel attached.

This is the back side view.

Here's the side view with rooftop door access to the second floor.

The completed Lepin Fire Brigade modular!

Here's the Fire Brigade next to the Cafe Corner, both Lepin models.

End of day eight, but we're not finished yet!

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Day Nine.

I deliberately chose to focus on the building the modular building, so I didn't assemble the mini-figures or fire truck until the end.

You get two firemen, one fire woman, a dog and a lady with satchel bag.  There's three silver helmets on the first floor which they wear when they get called out.  The white pants on the lady are really dirty, hopefully I can get the stains off.

The vintage fire truck is a nice little build and something completely different than all the other Lego and non-Lego fire trucks I've seen.  The set comes with two silver hoses but in my set I got one that was shorter than the other.  Luckily it wasn't problematic for the build.

Here's a look at the passenger side.  I wish there was room in the fire truck for the dog.

Front view.

Rear view.

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Final Thoughts.

The Lepin Fire Brigade modular build seem to take longer than the Lepin Cafe Corner.  I wonder if it's because the Fire House is furnished whereas the Cafe Corner is not.   The Cafe Corner was a straight forward build despite the missing/wrong pieces.  While I didn't have any missing pieces on the Fire Brigade, there was that problem with the door rail track not being wide enough to accept the garage door panels.

I ran into a couple of problems during the build because the colours of some of the bricks in the manual caused me some confusion.  Some bricks are brown, some are dark red and some are red.

Here's one of the places where I messed up, it's the base of the cabinet.  I used the dark red bricks instead of brown.

In this spot I used the red bricks instead of dark red bricks.  I only discovered my mistakes when I tried to complete the fire truck and couldn't find the right pieces, but had some brown and dark red 1x2s leftover.

While I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of building the fire house, I think the set could still be improved.  The second floor living space could have used a kitchen table and a TV.  I'm planning on moving the ping pong table up to the roof to make room for the new furniture.

I also think the fridge is way too large.  If our minifigure was six feet tall in real life, the fridge would be almost ten or eleven feet tall.  The top two pics show the fridge as built to the instructions.

I rebuilt the fridge to make it smaller and gave it a top and bottom door.  Now it's only about 8 feet tall, lol.   My 20 year old fridge has the vents on the bottom, so I did the same thing.

Top door open, bottom door closed.

And let's close the top and open the bottom.

What do you think of the new smaller fridge?

Finally, I think that the main floor of the fire house is way too high and a lot of space is wasted.  It's hard to get my hands into the first floor to move things around.  I might, if possible, try to divide the height of the first floor in half, maybe add another mid floor level.  Will have to see how ambitious I feel in future.

Oh, before I forget, here's the extra/leftover parts I got after finishing the build of the Fire Brigade.

Ok, that's my extremely verbose and pic heavy build review of the Lepin 15004 Fire Brigade Modular, which is cloned from the Lego Fire Brigade model 10197 (issued in 2009 and retired in 2013).    This set was my second Lepin modular, after the Lepin 15002 Cafe Corner set, however not the last  as I've got the Lepin 15003 Town Hall, still in the box, waiting to be built next.   Look for that build to be reviewed next!