Tuesday, December 20, 2016

Lepin 15008 Not Lego Green Grocer Set Review - Part Three



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Hello, if you've just joined us, this post is about building the third floor of the Lego knockoff Lepin 15008 Green Grocer modular building.  I take pictures of the sets as I build them, so you can see what the Lepin build and brick quality is like.  In the above picture, I have just finished the third floor base.

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The Green Grocer third floor walls and windows are now in place.  I like the neat hot water radiator design under the rear window.  I also put in the railings for the staircase.

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This is the rear view and you can see there's the makings of the fire escape exit.

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Just pointing out the nice pendulum clock.  That and the rug is all the furnishings you get on the third floor.  Pretty sparse layout.

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I put the staircase in and the upper window elements.  The front facade is starting to match the design scheme of the second floor now.

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Here's the completed front with bay window.

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A final look at the third floor interior.

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I've attached the sloping roof tiles now.

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This is how the structures look from the inside.

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And with that, I have positioned the third floor onto the rest of the Green Grocer building.

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Just some views.  Front corner elevation.

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Rear corner elevation.

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This is the back of the Green Grocer building.  As I mentioned in my previous post, the black windows are my own substitution, and the garbage bin is an addition from the Lepin Parisian Restaurant set.

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This picture gives you a good look at the fire escape and how it all fits together between the second and third floors.

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The Rooftop


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This is the formation of the Green Grocer rooftop.

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Another view of it.

its-not-lego.blogspot.com, lepin 15008 green grocer modular
Here's how the rooftop looks as per the original design.  It has doorway into the third floor staircase and it opens up onto a small terrace.  Take a good look at this picture now, because then you will see what is to come later.

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This is the front of the roof top.

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The completed rooftop with all the embellishments including railings and chimney stack.


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Here is the rooftop with the furnished terrace.  There's what appears to be a BBQ with open lid, and a small seating area with chairs and umbrella.  The terrace is adorned with flowers boxes also.  At this point, the rooftop is still the original design, but if you know me, I never leave things alone.


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Do you notice anything different between this picture and the previous one?  I mean besides the presence of the minifigure.

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Not sure?  Ok, how about this side view, maybe now you will notice the change.  It's all very subtle but it was a challenge to do.


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Ok, if you still don't know, I raised the height of the roofline by several bricks and added a canopy over the door opening.

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What I like about the taller roofline is that it gives a better visual appearance, especially the proper sense of scale when a minifigure is present.


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The bay window turret required that I turn the rear angle plates around to accommodate the new slope of the rooftop.

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The Lepin Green Grocer with rooftop modification is all done.

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Just one more picture before we go.

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Finally, here's the Lepin Green Grocer in it's new home next to the Lepin Town Hall.

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That's it, bye and thanks for looking!

Oh wait,  in case you were wondering whatever happened with my Aliexpress dispute regarding the missing baseplate and other bricks I talked about in my first Green Grocer post, Aliexpress ruled in my favour and I got a refund of 50% back. Woohoo!

If you want to see my previous posts about the Lepin Green Grocer you can find them here and here.

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Saturday, December 10, 2016

Lepin Not Lego Iconic Buildings Set List - 2016

I think Lepin has copied every one of the iconic buildings that are part of the Lego Creator series. I have found five sets in the Lepin Buildings theme.   I would love to have every one of these sets except that I don't have enough room in my house for all of them.



Set  DescriptionPieces   Lego Set and Status  
17001Agra India -  Taj Mahal595210189 - Retired
17002Paris France -  Eiffel Tower 347810181 - Retired
17003Sydney Australia - Sydney Opera House  298910222
17004London Great Britain - Tower Bridge429510214
17005London Great Britain - Big Ben416310253







Pictures below.


Lepin 17001 Taj Mahal




Lepin 17002 Eiffel Tower


Lepin 17003 Sydney Opera House


Lepin 17004 Tower Bridge


Lepin 17005 Big Ben



All of these sets are absolutely huge with the smallest being the Sydney Opera House at 2989 pieces and the largest is the Taj Mahal with 5952 pieces.  I don't think you could just buy one of these sets.  You'd have to buy all of them and then build a really nice display to show them off next to each other.  How awesome would that be?

Thursday, December 1, 2016

Lepin 05038 Not Lego Star Wars UCS Sandcrawler Set Review - Part One

Welcome back to Its Not Lego!  Back in September 2016, I told you how I was really excited to learn that Lepin was cloning the Lego Star Wars UCS Sandcrawler 75059.  Well, after Christmas I found the Lepin 05038 version of this set on Aliexpress at a good price.  And now my package has arrived.

As always, I don't get the box delivered to me, just the bricks in a nondescript bag.  The Sandcrawler set is my largest bootleg brick set so far with 3346 pieces.  The Lepin instruction manual comes in a thick glossy booklet, but you don't get the two page pictorial introduction that you get in the Lego version of the manual.

The pages of the manual are decent quality and there aren't any missing instruction pages that I can see.

This is the back cover of the Lepin UCS Sandcrawler manual.


I tried to inventory each of the bags as I have done with other large Lepin sets, however most of the cellophane bags didn't come with any numbers.  I counted 65 individual bags.


The bag containing the yellow bricks was torn open in two places, so hopefully I won't have any missing parts.  I also found two bags of parts which appear to be identical, not sure if it's supposed to be that way or not.


The parts for the minifigures and droids look to be spread out amongst three separate bags.


Here's the minifigure parts as provided.

And here's all of the minifigures and most of the droids assembled.  You get the following minifigs and droids:  Luke Skywalker, Uncle Owen, C3P0, R2D2, a Green R2 unit, R5-D4.  You also get 4 Jawas, and some have different torso designs.

Here's how the minifigs look from the back.  I understand that there's a few other droids that come with the set, but I haven't gone through all the parts yet, so I'll look at those ones later.

Time to sift through the parts!  In my next blog post I'll start building the Lepin UCS Sandcrawler so be sure to come back in a few days to check on the progress.