Building Walker Assault - Part 1: The Base

After several months of redesign, it felt great to be able to sit down and build Walker Assault for the first time. Walker Assault essentially contains two large sections, the Walker and the Base. The way that the model is designed, it’s best to build the base first so you can stand the Walker up right away after building it. Of course, you could choose to build the base second without any issues, but you’d have to have your Walker sitting around without its legs attached while you build the base.

The Parts

One thing I did, which I HIGHLY recommend, is to separate the bricks for the base from the bricks for the Walker. If you can, do this while you are first counting the bricks or processing orders. I had waited to do this until after I had all parts for both the base and the Walker in one big pile, and it took a while to go through and separate the base parts from the Walker parts. The best way to about separating the bricks is to use the parts list labeled just for the base and matching the bricks you have to that list. It’s also worth noting that in the parts list for the base, a lot of the bricks have their color listed as “Not Applicable”, meaning the bricks are all unseen once the base is complete, and can consist of any color you want. In the manual itself most of these bricks appear as red, but they don’t actually have to be red.

After several hours of sorting, I had the 2,000+ bricks all ready to go and sorted them out on my table. What’s great about these parts is that despite the quantity being over 2,000 bricks, the amount of unique bricks is rather low. This leaves you with larger piles of the same brick, which certainly makes for a speedier build than say, 2,000 bricks with a large amount of unique bricks.

The Build

Right off the bat the size of the base starts to come to fruition as the first few steps consist of laying down the baseplates that will make up the foundation of the base. Fortunately, I was building on a big enough table to have it all set up while keeping my parts on the same table, but you may find yourself running out of room on your building surface. The instructions are styled in a specific way that makes placing all of the interior support bricks very easy. The instructions present a bird’s eye view of the base, and partially fade out bricks that you’ve already build. This makes it incredibly easy to figure out where to place your bricks on such a large base area that gets quite crowded after just a few steps.

Once all of the black parts of the base were complete, the snow-covered rocks were the next thing to get done. The order of the build goes: small rock first, medium rock second, large rock third. The rocks thereby started with the quickest build, and wrapped up with the longest, most complex build of the three. If you’re building this model yourself, you’ll notice that each rock has a technic axle sticking out from the bottom. This axle gets inserted into holes in the base, and rather than pressing the rock down and locking it in place, all three of the rocks can be rotated into a position you like them at for your display.

The last little part of the base is a display stand for the sticker sheet. The sticker itself is available from Ultimate Collector Stickers and can be found here. On it is just some facts about the model as well as an image of the model in a form similar to the display stickers of an official set.

With the base complete, it’s time to get started with the centerpiece of this model, the Walker itself.