You do not pick your kits. I do, and it is deliberately random, so “popular” on this blog cannot mean what it means in a shop. There is no queue to join and no list to get on.
What it means here is the boxes that come back with something attached. An email, a photo in the Facebook group, a note tucked in with the instructions. Six years of packing and unpacking is a reasonable sample, and the same handful of sets keep turning up in it.
So these are the five that get the biggest reaction when they land on somebody’s doormat, and what I think is actually going on with each of them.
Bugatti Chiron (42083)
It came out in 2018, it has been out of production for years, and it still gets more messages than anything else I send out. That has not shifted once.
The reason is the gearbox. Eight speeds, a paddle behind the wheel, and for a lot of builders it is the first time a LEGO mechanism has done something they can properly feel. You change gear, you look down into the engine bay, and the W16 pistons are suddenly running at a different rate. That one moment sells the whole hobby to people, and it is usually the moment they stop building to email me.
My advice, and I put it in the box every time this one goes out: change through all eight gears before the rear bodywork goes on. The gearbox is built early and then it is buried. Finding a badly seated gear afterwards means unpicking panels you have just spent an evening fitting.
It is also the one that makes the strongest case for the whole idea. A retired flagship costs silly money now, and nobody needs a permanent one on a shelf.
See the Chiron →
Ferrari SF-24 F1 Car (42207)
This one comes back quicker than anything else I send. It goes out, and more often than not it is on its way home inside a fortnight. At 1,361 pieces it is an evening and a half rather than a project, and the F1 members tend to knock it out around a race weekend.
What earns it a place is the engine. The turbo spins, the pistons move, and the push-rod suspension is the real arrangement rather than a suggestion of it. That is a serious amount of working Technic for a set this size, and it is the one I would hand to anybody who thinks you need three thousand pieces before a build gets interesting.
Where people slow down is the shell. Thin panels, a lot of decals, and no forgiveness at all if one goes on crooked. Do the stickers when you are fresh rather than at half eleven at night. I have peeled enough of them off to say that with feeling.
See the SF-24 →
Ferrari Daytona SP3 (42143)
More finished photographs come back from this one than any other set in the library. Not close, either. Something about the shape makes people want to put it on a windowsill and get a camera out, and I am not going to pretend I mind.
It is a patient build. The chassis is slow work and the red does not turn up until late, which catches people out. For the first two evenings you are looking at a grey skeleton wondering when it starts looking like a Ferrari. Then the body panels go on over about an hour and it changes completely.
Take your time on the scissor doors. They are the bit everybody photographs, and they are also the bit that goes wrong if you rush the hinge geometry.
See the Daytona SP3 →
BMW M 1000 RR (42130)
There are four motorbikes in the library, alongside the two Ducatis and the Yamaha, and this is the big one. At 1:5 scale and just under two thousand pieces it is comfortably the most detailed of the four.
It is also the set that generates the most surprised emails. People open the box expecting a novelty and get something that behaves nothing like the cars they are used to, and the ones who write to me about it are almost all car builders. That reaction is exactly why I keep buying bikes for the library.
A bike has nowhere to hide a mistake. There is no bodywork covering the frame, so a fork leg half a stud out is visible from across the room. Look down the front forks, wheel and rear swingarm from directly above before the fairing goes on, then roll it slowly along a flat surface and watch whether the wheels track in one line. If they do not, everything you need to reach is still exposed.
It comes with the paddock stand, and it needs it. A narrow two-wheeled model cannot look after itself on a shelf.
See the M 1000 RR →
McLaren P1 (42172)
The largest box in the library, and the one that produces the longest emails. People tend to write to me halfway through this one rather than at the end.
The gearbox gets the headlines, but the chassis is the part I find more interesting. It is a much newer design than the Chiron and it shows. The suspension geometry is tidier, the assembly order makes more sense, and the dihedral doors are a proper linkage rather than a hinge with ambitions.
If this one turns up on your doormat, clear a table you do not need back for a fortnight before you open the bags. Anyone who has tried it on a coffee table has emailed me about that too.
See the P1 →The set I get asked about more than any of the five above is not in the library. The Koenigsegg Sadair’s Spear is 4,104 pieces, and I have had more messages about it than any kit I have never owned, which is a strange position to be in.
I am not going to pretend otherwise. If it goes into the library, I will say so here first.
What the reaction actually changes
Since nobody chooses their own kit, none of this is a shopping guide. It is more useful than that, at least to me, because the reaction is the only real signal I get about what to buy next.
I try to separate curiosity from the kind of enthusiasm that lasts. A new release gets a busy first month because everybody wants to see it, and that tells me almost nothing. An older crane or off-roader that keeps producing photographs three years later is telling me something real, because the functions are different from everything around it. The second pattern is the one I buy against.
The other thing the reaction tells me is that the random part is doing its job. Left to choose, most members would work through the supercars and stop. Because they cannot, somebody who signed up for the Chiron opens a box with a forest machine in it, builds it anyway, and emails me a week later about a mechanism they would never have gone looking for. That happens often enough that I stopped treating it as a happy accident.
It also means a quiet set is not a failing set. Some of the best builds in the library produce almost no email at all, which usually means they went together without a fight.
What have you got on the table at the moment? Post it in the Brick Club Facebook group or send it to me at garreth@brickclub.uk. I look at all of them, and the ones that turn up here usually started as somebody’s photograph.
Six or twelve kits a year, and you never know which
Every box is a Technic set worth over 100 pounds, chosen at random, and you never get the same kit twice. Postage both ways, a pre-paid return label, a brick separator and the official instructions come with all of them.
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