Resurrecting the Skull's Eye Part 5: Completion

Well it is done; and I could not be more pleased!  A few painted pieces, 4 glorious hours of building and I have a gorgeous Skull's Eye Schooner added to my fleet. 

Ok the big question I know you all are asking is: did he pull it off?  Did he do the project for less than the original MSRP?  I am happy to announce the answer is yes.  Including shipping the grand total for the project was $116.53 in 2011 dollars.  The really cool part is that if you account for inflation the MSRP for the Skull's Eye today would be in the $190s so I really did get a deal. 

Two quick notes, however, on the cost in case you are considering doing this yourself.  As I mentioned earlier I had about 30% of the parts I needed already and the cost for those pieces is not included in this total (my guess is it would have added about $20 to the project).  Additionally I had extra minifigs lying around that I used as well as all the different parts/alterations I have described.  If you went for pure authenticity (all the correct minifigures and no alternate or modified pieces including the sails) I do not think this would end up being any cheaper than buying a complete model on eBay or Bricklink.  If, however, you are of a similar mind to me and bending the rules of purism does not bother you the Skull's Eye can be yours for much cheaper than any other option.

In addition to the actual model I also took a little bit of creative liberty and added walkways on either side of the cannons creating a cannon well along with a way for figures to traverse from the front to the back of the ship.  This is a feature included on 6285 Black Seas Barracuda and I felt it was sorely lacking on the Skull's Eye. 

In the wake of this success I have decided to up the ante and try to resurrect the remaining 5 ships that I still don't have in my fleet in one fell swoop.  I have already sorted out the parts I have for each one and will make the big purchase when my budget recovers from this project.  Once complete I will have every ship produced by Lego!

For those of you actually interested in trying this I will be posting a detailed walk through of how to make your own Lego sails soon (I am about 50% done with that entry) as well as PDFs of my tracings.

Feel free to email me with any questions.  A few pictures of the final product: 

The green flags are painted.  You would never have known if I had not told you!  You can also see the railing and walkway I added.  

I painted the latticed window and the blue lantern bases.  The Jolly Roger is a sticker applied to a standard panel.

Resurrecting The Skull's Eye Part 4: Making The Sails

As I alluded to earlier if I had needed to buy the sails that would have been a deal breaker for this project. Whether on eBay or Bricklink the price for sails is obscene.  Painful as it is this makes perfect sense as sails are the ultimate exclusive part; each one is unique to its particular set alone.  Some shapes and sizes a shared but the design is particular to each ship.  With such a limited supply the cost is bound to be high. 

On most things I am a purist.  You will not find a single Megablock, Tyco or other cheap imitation piece in my collection.  However, as I mentioned earlier I am not opposed to changing the color of an official Lego piece (and am doing so on this project) and I am also not opposed to creating my own custom parts when I can do it at the same level of quality as Lego.  With the sails and flags I am in a unique position in that I have a fashion designer as a wife which gives me access to some expert knowledge and work as an engineer which gives me access to some fairly high end software, both of which I will put to good use.  I am certain I can make top quality replicas.

My first stop is http://www.classic-pirates.com/ and their excellent library of 1:1 scans of all the Lego sails from every ship Lego has produced.  After downloading those I import them into a computer aided drafting (CAD) program that I use for work.  I then painstakingly trace them down to the smallest detail saving the final product as a PDF.

Screen shot of sail tracing

Ok now for the material.  This is where my wife and her textile training comes in.  What is that mysterious not quite paper but not quite fabric material Lego sails are made of? The answer?   Artist's canvas.  Yes that material is the same stuff as those large canvases you see hanging in museums with all manner of wet media spread across them.  A quick stop at my local hobby shop and I have a pad of artist's canvas with more than enough sheets. 

I insert those sheets into my home printer and must confess that even I am taken aback by the perfection of the result.  Out of the machine come a set of sails indistinguishable from the originals for my soon to be constructed schooner.  Some quick work with my beloved bride's extra sharp scissors and I have a full set of sails for under $8.00!

For those of you interested in trying something like this project yourself I will post, in a later entry, detailed step by step instructions for how to make your own Lego sails from scratch as there are some particulars and pitfalls you should be aware of. 

The parts are here and after a little painting I have before me the final product, I will post final pictures, including the few modifications I did, as well as the final costs in my next entry. 

Resurrecting the Skull's Eye Part 2: Dealing With The Exclusive Pieces

Alright, I have reached the first major challenge of all resurrection projects: how to deal with the exclusive pieces. 

In terms of figuring out how to deal with exclusive pieces You have the following options:

1. Bite the bullet and pay the arm and a leg it will take to get them (that is going to be rough for me as I am trying to do this for less than the original MSRP and am cheap as it is).
2. Omit them (this sacrifices authenticity but can be a good option if the part is not essential).
3. Substitue another piece (this can be a great option if you are willing to sacrifice authenticity and the piece is "buried" within the set).  
4. Modify a less rare piece (this can be done by modifying the color, creating stickers, etc.).
5. Make your own (this is a great option if you have the skills and equipment on parts like sails and ropes).

In my case I am trying to be as accurate as possible but have already made the decision to go with option 1 on the minifigures and just not get them (I have plenty of extra pirates) so I am not going to be perfectly authentic as it is.  After checking prices on Bricklink and eBay I come to the following conclusions.

On the Hull and the Masts (two exclusive pieces I forgot to mention in my last post) I have no choice but to do option 1 and bite the bullet, there is no way to do this project without them. 

For the Compass I am going to do a combination of option 3 and 4.  My plan is to get get a Round 2 x 2 Tile and create my own sticker which will mimick the look of the compass.  

For the Printed Panel I am going to do option 4 by making a skull and cross bones sticker and applying it to a plain White 4 x 3 Panel.  I will trace the skull and cross bones from a picture of the actual piece so I should be able to make it indistinguishable.   

For the Green Flags and the Blue Palm Tree Pieces I am undecided.  There are some reasonable prices out there for both of these, but all the stores they were in for cheap don't have a lot of the other parts I need which means I will be paying shipping for only a few parts which may prove to be too expensive.  I am going to play this one by ear as I go and either buy them or get each of those parts in a more standard color and paint them (i.e. option 4).   

Finally on the Sails and Ropes I am fortunate enough to have married my amazing wife who coveniently graduated with a degree in textile production management from one of the top fashion schools in the world.  She has assurred me she can help me make perfect replica sails so I will be able to do option 5 on these.  Thank goodness because the price for sails on both Bricklink and eBay is outrageous! 

With those decisions made it is time to start shopping!!!

Ressurecting The Skull's Eye Part 1: Developing The Parts List

A key aspect of any resurrection project is understanding the different categories that a set's parts fall into.  There are three categories which, in my mind, describe each of the pieces in a set. 

The Basic Pieces
The Mid-Range Pieces
The Exclusive Pieces

The basic pieces are those that are common in both type and color.  A prime example of these are bricks and plates, the foundations of any set. 

These will be availible in almost any Bricklink store or lot of loose pieces on eBay.  On a resurrection project they are the parts you won't have to worry about finding or paying an arm and a leg for.   

The mid-range pieces are a little more difficult to find than the basic ones but are still fundamental to the set.  A great example of these types of parts are hinges.  Most Bricklink stores will have hinges, but there are so many differnt types and colors that the exact combination you need is often a bit harder to find and may not exist in a single store.  

The final category is the exclusive parts.  These are the ones that, whether in type, color or both, only came with a few sets and therfore there are less of them floating around.  Due to the limited supply the price for these parts goes up accordingly.  An example from the Skull's Eye is the compass. 

 
My approach to shopping for parts (which I will describe in detail in a later post when I get to that point) is to figure out where I am going to get all the exclusive parts and see how many of the pieces in the other 2 categories I can get from those stores.  Most of the time it is 95% of them or more depending on how many exclusive parts there are.  For now I need to figure out which parts are in which category.   

In the case of the Skull's Eye I identify the following pieces as being exclusive and for the following reasons:

1. The compass shown above (only availible in Pirate themed sets).
2. The printed 4x3 panel on the back of the ship (the piece is common but the printed skull and crossbones is exlusive to this set alone... already dreading the price on that one).
3. The green flags wich cover the cannon ports on the sides (a common piece but very rare in this color).
4. The blue palm tree top pieces that make up the bottom of the lanterns (I only know of one other set that these came with in that blue color: 6271 Imperial Flagship from 1992, my guess is they were included here because they had been overproduced for that earlier set).

It's a Go!

After having looked into it I have determined that trying to ressurrect the Skull's Eye is a reasonable project and am giving the project the green light!  I am in fact a little behind as I have already made the first purchase: the hull.

I knew going into this that the hull was going to be the most expensive part of the project.  Whenever I have a piece (or pieces) like that which are essential and exclusive to the set, I always check both Bricklink and eBay.  In this case it turned out that eBay won.  I found a seller offering the complete hull in excellent condition with free shipping for less than any of the stores on Bricklink.  As the hulls would have added substantially to the shipping cost of any Bricklink purchase this was a no brainer for me.  $35.00 later and I am off and running (or sailing as the case may be)!

The hull from the eBay purchase.

After getting the hull (which along with being essential commmits me to the project) my next stop was Peeron for the set inventory.  This past weekend I went through all of my spare parts to see what I had and develop the shopping list which will guide my decisions on how to get the pieces I need and form the basis of the future Bricklink purchases.  I was pleasantly suprised by how many of the parts I already had.  This is the beauty of some of these older sets, as Lego did not have as large a pool of pieces to draw from they had to make do by using the ones they had in creative ways.  This translates to sets containing a lot more of the basic pieces which are easy to come by.  I was delighted to find that I had about 30% of the pieces already spread throughout my bags and bins of "spare parts". 

With the hull on order and the shopping list in hand I am ready to tackle the next challenge: figuring out how I am going to get the pieces I need.    

My Next Project?

I was 9 years old in 1993, and like most I don't have a lot of clear memories from that long ago.  Among the few that I do have is one that happened in the long defunct K-Mart store that used to be on the west side of the Indiana town I grew up in.  Not sure what brought us to that store as my mom almost never shopped there (the town’s Target was much closer to where we lived) but for whatever reason I ended up in the Lego aisle that day and can distinctly remember, with photographic clarity, holding 6286 Skull's Eye Schooner in my hands. 

At $126.50 in 1993 (which is equivalent to just shy of $200 today in 2011) this set was well beyond even the most remote chance of ever being added to my collection.  I dreamed of owning it there in the store and then put it from my mind to instead focus on the plethora of sets which were within the realm of possibility.  But as attested to by my razor sharp memory of holding that box, the Skull’s Eye lodged itself in my consciousness.   

Through the years I have kept an eye out for it.  I remember looking at auctions in the early days of eBay, and have also checked bricklink.com for it through the years.  After over a decade of this searching I can say with certainty that I am not the only one who has been haunted by that set as I have never, even if the model was incomplete, seen it sell for less than $200.00.  Still sealed I have seen it go for over $1000.  Its rarity is further demonstrated by the fact that I have never seen it assembled in person.  Whether in Lego stores, the Mall of America, store displays or friend's houses there a very few sets that I have not seen in person at least once, but the Skull’s Eye is one of them. 

The other day I was contemplating different Lego projects I could do.  Having recently scored some excellent eBay purchases which have added to the already fairly large stash of extra pieces from past Bricklink orders I have been feeling the itch to start a project.  As different options came to mind I suddenly had the thought "I wonder if it would be possible to resurrect the Skull's Eye?".  For those of you unfamiliar with the lingo to resurrect a set means that you purchase the raw pieces and assemble the needed collection of parts yourself rather than buying the set whole.  I have done this previously and found that, depending on which set you do this with, it is possible to sometimes obtain an old set for less than its original MSRP and it is almost always possible to do it for cheaper than buying the whole thing from eBay or Bricklink provided the set is more than about 10 years old and does not have too many specialty parts.

The Imperial Trading Post was a past set I have resurrected

I am going to look into this and I will let you know if I think it can be done.  If it is possible and I decide to do this I will blog in detail about the process to serve as a rough guide to anyone who would like to try and resurrect a set themselves, the Skulls Eye or other.