Assembly, Flow States, & Logs

Are emotions relative or absolute? Do you feel something more or less strongly in contrast to another previously felt emotion?

Black & White filter to minimise the reflections of the plastic bags

What does this have to do with model building? Its to understand the disappointment felt when opening my first Lego set. The unboxing was so sub-standard, so… ‘meh’ that I’m wondering if it was only noticed because of the juxtaposition of the delightful buying experience and the anticipation of building? Or if it was objectively bad.

I’d love to talk to Lego’s marketing team and pick their brains… But, this isn’t a post about product packaging¹

The Ornithopter is an approx. 1300 piece set that are divided into 10 packages. The instruction booklet started off with some background about Dune, the set designers’ brief, and the characters; and ended with a list of all the parts in the build.

• Using the disconnecter tool was the first set of instructions
• There was a progress bar at the bottom²
• The instructions were clear 99% of the time
• The colour coding is helpful³
• While there’s a lot of repetition in the build, the instructions do a good job of breaking up the monotony and tediousness across the build⁴

The immediately obvious lesson is on how much your workspace matters. I was using a coffee table initially as it was a decent size but it still wasn’t big enough and being low to the ground meant it was killer on my back. I switched to my work desk which was better for the back but meant little space, luckily by that point - I was mostly done.⁵

• Total Build time was ~16h over 2 days
• Day 1 was 6h and Day 2 was the remaining 10h.
• 1h in the initial unboxing, taking some notes, and photos
• While I only made a few mistakes (less than 5), 1 of them was early in the process that I didn’t catch till late in the process and had to spend 1h to disassemble.
• 8h to do the rebuild.

During the rebuild, I quickly fell into a comfortable workflow…

• All the unused parts are to one side, I initially separated the parts but that takes time and instead I started cataloging them as I found parts I needed for a step.
• The specific parts needed are pulled to the middle.
• The finished assemblies are to the right.
• The work-in-progress model is to the Top.
• The instruction book is to the bottom left.

This let me quickly notice if I was about to make my most common mistake, skip a part, and avoid it.

Going into this, I had some thoughts on how to make this a multi-stream project… Shoot a VLOG; Take behind-the-scenes photos; Photos of the finished product; Topology photos of parts; And a stop-motion assembly video…

I pretty quickly nixed these plans in favour of something much more desirable and important - maintaining a Flow State.

The least enjoyable part, other than the unboxing, of the entire build was that first hour. Where every 5m, I was interrupting myself to take photos, write down notes, and think about how to document the build. So I stopped and just let myself focus in on the task at hand and fully immersed myself into the build. Before I knew it, it was 6h later, my back was killing me, I was slightly dehydrated, and starving. Luckily, it was time for dinner.

Overall, this was a supremely satisfying process. I love the finished model. A couple of surprising things:

1. The big mistake, disassembly, and rebuild weren’t rage inducing. I‘m not someone who has a healthy relationship with making mistakes or failing at something. But I was almost serene in realising I made a mistake, deciding to disassemble the whole model, and do the rebuild. I’m tempted to say I even enjoyed it. Mistakes don’t have to be milestones or outcomes; they can just be part of the process.
2. There was a part missing. I just substituted it with one of the spares of a different piece. Instead of this itching at my perfectionist tendencies, it makes this Ornithopter, mine.

— Mohit

Spoiler: I‘ve already bought and built a second, unplanned Lego set (Of the iconic Concorde, a ~2000 piece set.). I think I might like model building, after all.