Happy Chinese New Year!

Here's wishing all my Chinese readers a very Happy Chinese New Year! May the coming year bring you all the best in health and wealth, and lots of nanoblock too! =D

nanoblock Pokemons + Dragon + Kawaii-Series PreOrder

Round 2 of Preorder for the items below have started. Please order by Feb 6. Click here for more details. SHIPS WORLDWIDE.

Stock from Round 1 of Preorder

nanoblock MegaSALE Stock Just Arrived

Good News! The stock for the Chinese New Year nanoblock MegaSale just arrived =) ... Will start shipping them out from Jan 27-29. Thank you so much for all your support! It is much appreciated =)

This is what 320+ nanoblock sets look like

nanoblock Dunkin Donuts

Yesterday, you saw my nanoblock McDonald's restaurant. Today, I bring you a nanoblock Dunkin Donuts store =) ...

Video Tour

nanoblock McDonald's Restaurant

My nanoblock city is starting to grow. I just created a nanoblock McDonald's restaurant. It is based on photos of actual McDonald's standalone outlets. 

Video Tour

My Modern nanoblock Starbucks Cafe

A few days ago, you saw the vintage Starbucks store I created by modifying Starbucks' design. Today, I present to you the nanoblock modern Starbucks cafe that is completely my own design. It uses the latest Starbucks colour scheme and logo. I used photos of an actual Starbucks to create this.

Video Tour

nanoblock Kangaroo Review

Difficulty: Level 2
Time to Complete: 20 minutes
No of Blocks: 110+
Item Code: NBC-092

The kangaroo is a marsupial from the family Macropodidae (macropods, meaning 'large foot'). In common use the term is used to describe the largest species from this family, especially those of the genus Macropus, red kangaroo, antilopine kangaroo, eastern grey kangaroo and western grey kangaroo. Kangaroos are endemic to Australia. More info on Wikipedia.

This nanoblock Kangaroo is quite obviously a red kangaroo. It comes in a small zip-lock bag containing 110+ bricks and an instruction sheet. Most of the bricks are a shade of medium-brown similar to the fox. 

Building this nanoblock set is fairly straight forward given its difficulty level of 2. Here are some photos of the build process.

Extra bricks included with this set

Here are more photos of the completed kangaroo. It is a nice looking kangaroo carrying a baby in her pouch. 

This nanoblock set is available from Amazon.

nanoblock Starbucks Cafe

This morning, I saw someone posted on Instagram, what looked like a nanoblock Starbucks cafe. Turns out, it's actually a different brand micro-brick. Anyway, it made me want to build one myself, so created my own nanoblock Starbucks cafe. It's based on their design, but I modified it and added some interesting details =) ... BTW, this is based on the more vintage Starbucks store, not the modern ones.

Here's a video of the cafe

nanoblock Vintage Toy Robot Build Instructions

Click here for the nanoblock Vintage Toy Robot Build Instructions.

My nanoblock Rilakkuma

Some of you would have seen the official Rilakkuma nanoblock sets. Personally, I find their designs to be kinda flat, so I decided to create my own design. Using the bricks from 2 Fox and 1 Kangaroo nanoblock sets, here is the result =) ... It used up most of the bricks because Rilakkuma has a big head ... Hahaha ... If you order 2 Fox + 1 Kangaroo during the current sale, I will give you the instructions to make this for free =)

Here's a video

nanoblock Empire State Building Review

Difficulty: Level 3
Time to Complete: 80 minutes
No of Blocks: 740+ Pieces
Item Code: NBM-004
Price: RM99.90

Front of the box

Back of the box

The Empire State Building is a 103-story skyscraper located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. It has a roof height of 1,250 feet (381 meters), and with its antenna spire included, it stands a total of 1,454 ft (443.2 m) high. It stood as the world's tallest building for nearly 40 years, from its completion in early 1931. More info on Wikipedia.

This nanoblock version is nano-scale model of the real thing. It comes in a medium sized box with 740+ pieces of bricks and a large sheet of instruction. 

Contents of this set

All the bricks in this set are either clear blue or light grey. This is not surprising given that this building is mostly just grey with glass windows. For custom builders, if you need a lot of small light grey bricks for your own project, this set is perfect.

Types of bricks in this set

The difficulty rating for this set is 3, but I will probably rate it as a 2. It is more tedious than difficult, with a lot of repetition. Other than the need to keep count of the number of times you have repeated certain steps, there is nothing tricky about this build. Here are some photos taken during the build process.

Extra bricks included with set

It took 80 minutes to complete this building and it stands at 21cm tall. The design is quite nice for a tall grey building. You can view the finished photos below.

Considering that they designed this building with lots of blue clear brick windows, one would think they would make it LED base "compatible", but no, they used a green base plate. 

Well, that is not going to stop us from lighting it up, is it? I pretty much just plucked the building off the green based plate and moved it on top of the LED base plate. Only the first bottom layer is stuck on the green base plate and needs to be manually transferred brick by brick. After that, you need to make some slight modifications on layers where bricks are blocking the light from travelling up. Only a few layers need to be modified and they are quite simple to do. The end result is very nice.

This nanoblock set is available from Plamoya and Amazon.