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I’ve been getting in to less-than-genuine lego-style sets lately which while they scratch that itch for much less cost, they do have some areas that require a little more effort. I’m documenting what I discover as I go here so that you can be aware.

Buy official sets.

If you want top quality, a pleasant and trouble-free building experience, branded/licensed items, and knowing that so much time has been put in to making sure everything works and runs, just buy the official set.

So why buy non-genuine sets?

Price is the main one. A normally $650 set can be found for around $50. Motorised sets reduce the gap a little. And if you’re in it for the construction and not necessarily 100% functionality, you still get the build experience, a nice model at the end, and hopefully it’ll all work good enough too!

Do your research though. If a set has sold 1000 of them, pretty good chance it’s fine. Pneumatics aren’t leak-proof so be aware of that with some sets. Licensed products are renamed or colours are changed just enough. What I find great is you can sometimes get long discontinued sets again if you missed out on it 10 years ago.

Printed parts, not stickers
Everyone wishes they could own a legendary Mecaren P1, but sometimes a model will have to do.
Full printed manual, very similar to a typical official manual but if you look up the original for this you can see someone has photoshopped all the steps to fit in a more compact space.

Everything is very slightly off

While the pieces all look fantastic just like the real thing, the tolerances are just not quite right. It’s impressive and for the beams and such it isn’t noticeable. But when you get to the axles, gears, and connectors it starts to show.

In genuine sets these are fully assembled, get ready to assemble them yourself!
These little black connectors that are used everywhere will hurt your thumbs. They are sometimes difficult to get in, and they’re very very fractionally too short or off centre so they don’t always click in both pieces. You’ll get in to a habit of putting them in at a slight angle, and pushing them back out just a smidge once they’re clicked so things work smoothly.
These are just difficult. Same story as the black connectors above.
The red gears (3 in the centre and right of this image) that spin freely on an axis are too tall/long – the sides need sanding down to allow them to not press against the beams.
The crankshaft had a slight sticking click when turned, which was solved by pushing the right hand black connectors back through just a tiny bit.

This makes assembly less “easy” and more of a problem solving exercise, with the unfortunate addition of sore thumbs.

Make sure you have these in your toolkit and you can solve most of the issues.

  • Pliers
  • Stanley knife
  • Silicon Grease/Oil
  • Very fine (wet/dry) sandpaper
  • Superglue

When things are very wrong

With this set I couldn’t get the orange arrows lined up 100% correctly but close, then wondered why they put a grey one in at all – why not just use 3 yellows. Then it clicked why I couldn’t get the large orange wheels to line up to where the instructions wanted them. Officially different colours are sometimes used to indicate slight changes. Some identical connectors are different colours to indicate whether they are looser or tighter. In this case the two knobby gear things are meant to have different axle orientations. The grey is meant to be 45 degrees different.

You can see I’m not the only one to discover this.

https://www.reddit.com/r/lepin/s/c9VFU6wWSL

My guess is that they used the same mould for both parts thinking it’s just a colour change.

This is the official part (5405) shows the correct axle placement, and can be swapped in.

https://www.brickowl.com/au/catalog/lego-gear-with-4-knobs-5405

My solution is to make this work by drilling out the middle and glue it assembled to the red stopper & axle.

Drilled out the incorrect axle placement.
The new superglued assembly with the axle in the correct position.
In place, aligned as instructed.

All works as intended, and not an issue as this isn’t planned to be taken apart again – although it still can just a slightly different way.