UCS Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

This was an exciting day - my shiny parts in chrome gold arrived! These parts are real LEGO pieces that have been chromed by 3rd-party vendors on Bricklink and Brick Owl. As mentioned in a previous update, they're not cheap but I wanted my version of Chitty to look as good as she possibly could!

I immediately set about building some of the brass components of the car (the metal in real life would be brass on the car, but the chromed LEGO colour is called gold).

Here are the running lights...

and the headlights...

Unfortunately the rims of the headlights are rubber, so it's not possible to chrome those. But I was amazed to find 'pearl gold' versions of these (what are basically rubber tyres) on BrickLink!

This is building up the inside of the engine bay with whatever coloured pieces I had. You can see that the walls of the bay are offset by a half-stud where they meet the chassis. That's because the bonnet is 7 studs wide, whereas the chassis is 8. The bonnet needs to be an odd number wide to get the special shape at the front, which you can see from the main pics (e.g. in image 6/12 above).

You can see the gaps that need to be left for the exhaust pipes coming from the engine (turns out I built those wrong - they were supposed to be 2 bricks tall!).

The hinged connectors on the top were intented to be for the opening bonnet, but with only one stud they turned out to be too weak and kept popping off. I ended up redesigning those, which you'll see in a later update.

This part of the build includes the grille, which I eventually changed from the solid black tiles you can see below to a slotted grille.

What's nice is that the whole bonnet piece comes off the chassis in one piece, so can be built separately and plugged on afterwards.

If you are observant you'll have noticed that the images of Chitty on the main project page are not real - they're photo-realistic renderings from the excellent stud.io program.

Chitty didn't really exist at all, she's always just been a 3D model in Lego Digital Designer and Studio. Until now, that is.

I'm going to post a series of updates here chronicling my attempt to make Chitty real. I'm aware that some of the pieces I chose to make the car are not actually available, because LEGO have never made them in the required colours. However LEGO does mention in the Ideas guidelines that new colours of existing pieces are OK, so to this end I have decided that these pieces will simply be painted for my build! (gasp)

Another deviance from regular LEGO you'll have noticed is Chitty's heavy use of shiny brass and metal parts. Since I want this to be a great version of the actual Chitty car (I'm going to keep it as a display model regardless of what happens) I decided to go with 3rd-party chromed parts. I wouldn't expect LEGO to do this as it's quite expensive, although they have produced chromed parts before.

So armed with the digital version on a laptop I put together the basic chassis. I started out substituting yellow for what would later be gold chrome, and during the build I found a number of improvements (for strength) that are hard to design into a digital model.

These wheels are painted with red enamel gloss, and thankfully they look OK. They started out as 2 grey and 2 transparent!

The chassis is mainly built with traditional Technic studded bricks, with a small amount of Technic studless beams. This is mainly in the steering mechanism and front wheel mountings.

I'm not 100% happy with the steering, as it has a bit of slop in it. I might go back to that at the end to see if I can tighten things up a bit but for now it'll do.