Some Lego models of James Bond vehicles

In lieu of a post of more academic value, I thought I'd publish pictures of the models of James Bond vehicles I've built out of Lego over the past few weeks. I started one evening with Little Nellie, the autogyro from You Only Live Twice. My daughter's small collection of Lego bricks and pieces was still out after she had been playing with it, and, after catching sight of my framed – and autographed – postcard showing the inventor of Little Nellie, Ken Wallis, flying his creation, I wondered whether I could reconstruct the vehicle using the Lego. The result was not hugely accurate, but it was recognisably Little Nellie.

Pleased with my effort, I thought of other Bond vehicles that could be recreated in Lego using the limited resources I had available. The following week, I settled on 'Wet Nellie', the submersible Lotus Esprit that appears in The Spy Who Loved Me. This model was, I felt, more successful than Little Nellie, probably because the Lego shapes leant themselves to the sleek form of the car.

For my next model, I turned to the Q-Boat from The World Is Not Enough. I just about had enough suitable pieces to produce a reasonable representation, although the curved form of the canopy covering the driver's seat and the structure of the rear of the vehicle were challenging.

Encouraged by feedback from Twitter, I collected all the yellow pieces I could find in order to build a model of the Citroën 2CV from For Your Eyes Only. I discovered that the curves of the vehicle were very difficult to recreate, and the result, though just about recognisable as a 2CV, was not  particularly convincing.

Indeed, before I admitted via Twitter that the model was purporting to be the 2CV, some of my followers suggested that it was the tuk tuk from Octopussy. The tuk tuk, however, is more accurately recreated in Lego, as my model demonstrates.

  
I've had fun building these models. I don't pretend that they're very good, but I was pleased with what I had achieved. If there's a general lesson to learn from my model-building, apart from the fact that vehicles with curves cannot be recreated very well in Lego, it's that recognisable models of distinctive vehicles can be made using even a fairly basic set of pieces by focusing on key elements of the design, such as the rotor blades and yellow front end of Little Nellie, and the angles and fins of the Lotus Esprit.