Collectibles Displays

Entry posted by xccj December 6, 2014

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I've been working on some displays to spice up my apartment, specifically of some of my Bionicle / Lego collectibles. (Side note, I am clearly not a normal person.) I got two finished up and wanted to share pictures. Yay!

Kanohi-Collection by Xccj, on Flickr

This is a full set of the original 72 Kanohi, plus the gold and silver great masks. It doesn't include room for rare masks or misprints or Matoran masks or Rahi masks... I wanted the colors to match. I originally made a similar design and hung it up... and it lasted ten minutes before falling apart. I didn't know a way to reinforce it strength-wise without having to go through a lot of pieces, so instead I went a different route and used a bunch of points to hold it up, rather than just one. So yes, that is pretty much nailed to the wall. But so far it's held together!

Slizer-Disc-Collection by Xccj, on Flickr

These are all the Slizer collectible discs. This one took some more effort.

I know I've posted about collecting these before, but I'll reiterate a little bit. The bottom four rows (not counting the Millennial column to the far right) were never released in sets and only came in limited availability disk packs, an idea which they later improved upon with Bionicle. I ended up BrickLinking most of these in the last couple of months. It was mildly easy; the disks are overpriced like Kanohi masks, so they were relatively cheap to get, but some were only available internationally. I think I made four orders from Germany to complete my collection. (In fact, I bought all the ones I needed from one store, and a few days later he restocked with the last disc I needed, so I made a second purchase!)

But when I got them all, I had to figure out the best way to display them. The problem is, the disc design never really fit securely into anything. The best fit would be Kanoka disc launchers (and even they're not super secure because, really, their point was to launch the discs). But I didn't want to buy 48+ Kanoka launchers and attach them to some technic framework. So I experimented around and found a system approach.

The discs would fit about a 5x5 stud area. So I took a 7x7 stud area and put round bricks on the corners, and the discs fit snugly in the middle. Then, to keep them from falling out the top, I put grilles on the round bricks, and right corner was enough to keep it in. Granted, the discs can rotate, but they won't pop out. So then I started to build rows and columns. I didn't have a spare baseplate, so I used 16x16 light azure plates I had gotten in a draft to build it out. I even had some space for the Millennial discs on the far right, where I'm displaying 6 of the 7 they came out with.

It's not exactly the ideal set up. The light azure background isn't the best neutral color, but I guess it fits with all the trans light blue round bricks I used. (Those were the only color they had of that mold on the pick-a-brick wall). But I did go out of my way to make sure the grille colors matched. I might eventually move it to an actual baseplate. The design is currently 32x48, so I could theoretically transition it to a 48x48 baseplate, and have some more empty space. (I couldn't do two smaller baseplates next to each other because they couldn't connect on the back.) As is, a 6x6 display would fit perfectly on a 32x32, but there are more Slizer discs than that. Potentially, if I enlarge it, I might try to add the Bionicle Tonhunga disks as well. (Would need to collect some more of those too.) Not so much with the Kanoka; their collectability aspect isn't exactly the best for display.

Maybe eventually I'll do a krana one... despite giving away a sizable portion of my krana collection years ago, I'm starting to build it back up again, and I'm a little over half way there. (Not including the Krana Kal at this point.) Not even going to think about the kraana... just, no.

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