Finished my vehicles for Home Alone Set

I finished my MOCs for new LEGO® Ideas Home Alone set 21330. My new vehicles are Harry and Marv Van, Airport Shuttle Bus, Pizza car and Police car.

Harry and Marv Van – Dodge Ram B Panel Van: This is the most important vehicle for this set, I wanted to have a realistic alternative for toy-like van included in official set. Design is very simple and easy, but color caused problems. Many parts I want to use are rare or expensive or does not exist in this color tone (sand blue). So my design is not optimal. But very close to be optimal. I found a solution for most problems. Few things that are not optimal are – rear taillights and rear shape around roof area. I wanted taillights to be 1 or 2 1×1 plates placed sideways, but couldn’t do that because I needed few 1×1 plates in body color (that turned out to be too rare and expensive), and my original design have sloped rear part with slopes 60481, but this part does not exist in this sand blue color.

Wheel arches are in dark bluish gray which is the only color that looks OK on this design, so I added bigger light bluish gray area on sides and also incorporated dark bluish gray line, so wheel arches better blend in my design. Luckily movie van have silver step bars on sides, so difference is not very big.

Also few differences in functionality from original LEGO van: My version only sits one minifigure in cabin (second figure can be placed in cargo compartment). Its not possible in principle to fit 2 minifigures side by side in 6 stud wide vehicle if it have doors. That’s why LEGO version looks like that. My version also don’t have any opening parts. And because of that the are no extra details in inside of cargo compartment.
About parts placed on roof – its not clear in movie what exactly is placed there, I couldn’t find any good high angle views. And it looks like parts changed between different scenes. So mostly everything I placed on roof is my improvisation.

Because of color and part issues, this design is very unpredictable in cost. Even parts that are used, are way less common than most LEGO parts, so this also cause issues with shipping, very few sellers have wide enough range of sand blue parts, so everything is scattered across many sellers. If standard color version (white, black, gray etc) in best case scenario can be bought from 1 or 2 sellers, in this case it looks it always need at least 3 – 4 sellers in this color. Having original set with original van will help to reduce costs a bit.
To avoid all this trouble, this van can be build in gray color, I think it would look almost as good, but then It can’t use LEGO stickers, since they are printed on sand blue color background.

 

Airport Shuttle Bus – Dodge Ram B 350 Maxi Van:  This van uses same design as Harry and Marv’s panel van, just stretched and converted as passenger van. Because its in blue and white color scheme it doesn’t have most limitations from previous design, but I want them to look the same side by side so it still uses same design as sand blue panel van. The only limitation I have on this design is lack of blue wheel arches 98282. So I again used same dark & light bluish gray areas on sides to fit dark bluish gray wheel arches, even though van used in movie does not have gray/silver colors in such areas.

For this model I also prepared text images that can be printed out as stickers. I don’t like that much how they look on vehicle, so little experimenting might be needed to find the best size and placement, I placed them in same areas as on real van, but somehow they don’t looks as good, not sure. But this model does not really require stickers.

 

Pizza Car – Plymouth Horizon: I already had this car done long time ago, so it was really easy to convert it to movie car spec. There were a few issues with rear end area because of color. Its mostly solved, although I’m thinking if that rear hatchback area can be done better with hinges. Right now the only thing I don’t like is how both slopes fit together. But hinges I would use are long discontinued parts (and I already used 2 of them for rear window), so probably better to keep such old parts as little as possible. Also had big issue with Pizza banners. I don’t have any good source for that, so I photoshopped something using screengrabs, quality is bad, but at this scale it should not be a big issues. And I wanted to include images for stickers for all design as option. If I can learn how to recreate that banner in higher quality, I will update my instructions with higher quality versions, but right now that’s not possible.
Also banner on roof is attached to car only on one stud. So its not fully fixed in place on both ends, and can be moved around if pushed by hand. I can’t find a better way, if I secure it more on all length, then it causes problems with free space above minifigures head.

 

Police car – Chevrolet Caprice 9C1: Very simple and straightforward design. At first it looked that Caprice at 6 stud wide scale would look to generic, but somehow I found a way to do this model so It actually looks like Caprice. Ideally white side line would be on sides, and blue color would not be visible that much on top of hood/trunk area, but its not possible to move that white line lower on my current design. Rear window would better work as 2×2 slope in trans-black color, but this color part is not very common, so I’m avoiding it in my designs for now.

Cars in McCallister family garage – Buick Le Sabre & Buick Electra Estate Wagon: My original plan was to also design garage with both cars but its cancelled. I’m not that great with buildings and have many problems with both cars, and because cars and garage appear only in once scene for few seconds its not worth continuing. Also it looked that garage would be very big (so it can have 2 cars inside), and it would not fit that great along house. Also I’m not sure if both cars can be finished, I attached my current work on progress versions. Le Sabre is bad, I think that front end can be only designed with slopes, and lights added as stickers. Nothing really works with real transparent parts. Electra Estate looks better, I think I just need to change front bumper, and maybe test out a few different ways to place headlights and it will be usable.