Bringing the UCS Falcon to life

I posted to Instagram a few months ago that I was finally building my UCS Millennium Falcon - set 75192. Then life and work got in the way and stopped me from finishing off that project with proper lights!

With Christmas around the corner I just had to go for it, and here we are.

I've taken the fab Light My Bricks lighting kit of course - and then made a few little tweaks.

Here's how it looked when I finished building the Falcon. Note that I built this on the brilliant Efferman Stand. This stand - presumably invented a chap called Efferman - is made of Technic beams. I think it was about £40 for parts, and the design is free.

Initially I fitted the lights exactly as shown in the instructions. The only exception is that I didn't fit the red lights to the cannon underneath the Falcon - because they could never been seen when displaying the model upright like this.

As I went I kept an eye out for where the expansion boards had room for more, or for changes I would like to make.

1) The Hyperdrive Generator

I like the use of flashing lights where appropriate - in this engine room scene there are two flashing green lights which add good ambience. But I want that engine to move a bit.

Here's the static view:

To change this around a bit I took the flashing bit light from the wall on the right and swapped it with the one in the Hyperdrive unit. Here's the result:

2) The cockpit

As standard the light kit looks pretty damn good. There's a white light at the front and two blue lights under the seating area to illuminate the cockpit.

But a lot of people like to customise the cockpit as the LEGO design had a few flaws. So can we also do the lights a bit better?

Let's look at how the cockpit looks in the movie - and the best photo I could find is a behind the scenes shot. My favourite - since I used to do special effects and sets for a living!

Credit : https://www.starwars.com/news/5-things-you-might-not-know-about-the-millennium-falcon

Looking at our model now the blue is a bit overpowering - so I took out the blue LEDs and moved the white down right below the cockpit seating module which gives a more subtle light.

The defining characteristic of the cockpit - and really any such set - is blinky lights. Lots of them. Thousands of buttons and switches and they all have lights on them.

To make something similar I took the two 2x1 slopes which are the control consoles in at the front and made a few teeny tiny holes in them. To fit a light I also removed the central pin underneath. (Sorry purists - I drilled holes in LEGO!). The effect is great and more in keeping with the movies.

To achieve this result I needed just the following extra parts:

• 2 x Custom 2x1 Wedges with Control Panel Prints (or just brutally damage your original pieces!)

Next steps : I think there's some spare ports on the expansion board near the cockpit. We could add a few more lights to the control panels at the back too!

This has to be The Big One.

I took the advice of a very fine fellow on Facebook to replace these with Blue Strip Lights. I think it looks fabulous in blue.

And this is the end result with the hull plating back in place.

But seeing the blue lights pulse on and off I was still not happy.

Remember these strip lights are connected in series - a daisy chain - so only require one port to power them. As such the Multi Effects Board with two outputs was great.

Here's how it looked:

Note that the White and Blue lights are right next to each other so the pulsing effecting is quite awesome. Next I'll add a strip of cardboard all around the rear, behind the blue pipes, and will try attaching the light strips in series along it. I think this could create some cool special effects.

To achieve this result I needed the following extra parts:

• 6 x Blue Strip Lights

• 7 x 5cm Connecting Cables

• 1 x Multi Effects Board

I will probably continue to look at ways to take this model a bit further - stay tuned!

Oliver