Lego – M-13 Carbine

After noodling around with some blasters for a big mecha-robot I want to make, I refined some of those ideas to look a bit like a modern carbine.

It features all the usuals – muzzle brake, back up iron sights, adjustable stock, vertical fore grip, variable mode light, holographic sight.

Detachable holographic sight and box magazine.

The light is an all in one infared laser designator, infared light emitter, variable lumen and variable colour mode incandescent light.

Fun little project. Like all other Lego creations, I love walking that balance beam of trying to make something that is recognizable to someone as what I intended it to look like, what the parts as they exist allow me to do, what will function structurally, what I have available to me, what my imagination can come up with, etc. I may have said it before, but it’s just a great mental workout.

I kept trying to make the receiver as thin as possible. Lego has a 1x1 brick with an axle hole in it (part #6541), but being an axle hole it allows everything to spin. I wish they had a 1x1 with a keyhole in it (ie a hole that locks an axle element in place) but for whatever reason this doesn’t exist and I can’t really deduce a good reason why it doesn’t exist. There is however a 1x2 brick with a keyhole in it (part #32064), so I used it. Makes for a much wider receiver than I really wanted, but it did make for a very solid structure. All my efforts to keep it thin, meant a very weak structure. The stock is also much wider than I wanted, but once again the limitations of the pieces that exist, and that I had access to dictated the end result.