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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. Otherwise if you want suffering and sore thumbs but at a low cost, keep reading…

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. The two metal looking panels at the lower centre I don’t think match the official model, explained later.
Everyone wishes they could have a legendary Mecaren P1 in their garage, 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. You’ll need a hard surface to push these in with great force many times, and sometimes push the ends in in creative ways.
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.
The little red and grey ball joints are too large, they need sanding down slightly to allow everything to click and move smoothly. Without sanding they actually split the connecting rod. And don’t forget to sand the red ones holding the wheel hub in so it turns easier.
The transmission system showing the electric & petrol setup on a Mclaren P1 Technic set, represented by two red levers.
Another area where the slightly different tolerances cause a bit of resistance in the axels.

This is a good example of where the tolerances change it a little. Some of these gears are held in by the light coloured “snap-in” axel pieces. These don’t spin as easily as they probably should, which makes this whole area a little different to the official version.

And while we’re here I spent a bit of time trying to work out what the two levers do – specifically the left one as it never seems to end up connecting to anything that I can see.

The right hand lever switches between v8 (left position/forwards), neutral (centre as shown), and electric (the motor represented by the big grey circles at the right hand side of the image).

The left hand lever (at the front of the car) when angled to the left (forwards), allows the electric motor to be engaged regardless of what the other lever is doing – but it’s meant to allow you to engage the electric at the same time as the v8 to represent a hybrid drivetrain.

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
  • A small flat screwdriver
  • 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.

Step 669

Here’s one that had me looking for pieces for a while. The two black “wing” looking pieces weren’t in the packets for this step, but I did have two mesh printed ones in the special parts. This isn’t clear in the manual, and the official manual (and photos of the set) aren’t obvious either as it’s very faint whereas mine are brightly printed. Hope this helps someone!

Here’s how it looks with the pieces in place. Far different to the official set. Also you can see the small piece inbetween the large wings looks different also.
This is a screenshot from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-K4oXV1-Vo , a build video of the official set at around the 16 minute mark showing it’s correct.
Here’s the official manual, you can see how faint it is.