Anyone bought any Decool sets ? I know lepin and Alex also do knock offs but the Decool seem to be better quality. I have the lego Porsche and it’s mint. I’d love the Bugatti but £320 is hard to justify at the moment.

I’m tempted at £96 the images/comparisons online look good as does finish.

DECOOL / JISI 3388 A/B/C The Bugatti Chiron

Watching with interest…

“Warning: can not eat”

really? but, but it looks so tasty….

They’re all over AliExpress too FWIW, good buyer protection, TopCashBack etc. Seem to be about the same price, either £55 + 40 shipping or £95 base price and free shipping.

You can get the Porsche too, plus a Ferrari F1 car etc.

Clips on YouTube comparing sets with lego and bar some finishing and sticker quality I couldn’t tell the difference ? Come bagged with what looks like a colour copy of the lego instructions.

My original lego boxes are gathering dust in attic so not needed anyway !

Ok I’ve took a punt and ordered.. I’ll update once it arrives 🙂

Arrived today 🙂

Spent 30 mins doing first few pages all going together nicely.

Blimey that looks amazingly like Lego. How does the build compare??

I built the lego Porsche and this(copy) lego is identical and so far clicking together easily 🙂

hhmm, did you pay £96 in the end then?

let me know if you want to sell it on when you’re done building.

Some of these are so tempting, but I’m supposed to be being sensible at the moment (plus I’ve just bought a new phone). Maybe for Christmas… I’ll start dropping hints now, I think.

It’s tough to complain that they are blatantly copying and therefore deserve no business but Lego are taking the michael with their prices…

Pretty sure the “Lego System” patent has expired anyway (not that it matters to the Chinese mind you)

But, I still wouldn’t buy these knock off sets.

There is a decent market s/h for most of the bigger Lego sets, especially things like Technic which always have a fairly limited run.

Best way to buy Lego is find a set you like wait until its reduced (generally about a year after release) and then keep it or sell it on once its been retired and you stand a good chance of making your money back.

Lego are taking the michael with their prices…

AFAIK, if you account for inflation then Lego’s per-brick prices aren’t much different now from how they were decades ago.  Lego has always been pricey, it’s high-quality precision stuff.  What we are seeing is larger sets with thousands of bricks, which of course pushes up a set’s price.

but Lego are taking the michael with their prices…

no, as pointed out above the cost is in line (in fact I’d say sets are better value now than they’ve ever been). It’s just that they’re producing MASSIVE sets now aimed at adults – which is exactly what we want. Obviously they are going to be extremely expensive, and obviously companies like Decool can make them a lot cheaper if they aren’t made to the same standard (don’t kid yourself), they aren’t paying anyone to design & market them and presumably no fee to Bugatti.

I believe (no link for this so I could have imagined it) that LEGO is made much more ethically too; clearly you don’t get that (or the quality control) from the Chinese versions.

also is it not fair to consider that some of the lego cost is in the R&D? It must take a good few man-years to end-to-end design the veyron, ripping off that IP is pretty much the same as downloading illegal software/albums in my opinion..

ripping off that IP is pretty much the same as downloading illegal software/albums in my opinion..

I don’t see how there’s any other way of looking at it! Depends how cool you are with that I suppose.

I’ve had a couple of the Chinese kits.

The Caterham I have is pretty good quality.

The Millennium Falcon (the £165 Lego job) which so far isn’t too bad (stopped building when we moved house), only issue was one of the figures has dodgy legs, which is easily solved by getting another individual Lego figure.

Although on the other hand we got the Lego Harry Potter Hogwarts Castle (small version) and Fantastic Beasts suitcase the other day for the kids. You can definitely notice the difference in quality.

I don’t mind the Chinese stuff as all it does is sits on the shelf in my office at home once it’s built.

Yes £96 to my door. I’ve got original lego Campervan- Mini and the Porsche. Building this I’m struggling to find any difference to original lego. I love my lego but I’m not made of money 🙁

No selling on sorry it will take pride of place alongside the rest .

Another 2hrs today it’s a joy 🙂

I think it I was (and when I will be) buying for MiniMonkey I would definitely go for real LEGO, if I was buying for me I might go for the cheaper stuff (but I’ll probably never get round to it). There’s no real logic to that, but there you go.

Copy lego hurts my soul tbh. It’s not the block copying, it’s the designs- basically, the love- that feels like they’re a bit sacred. Which is weird really since all our bricks spent most of the time being other random things. And half the reason i recoil at the cost is that I only want licenced stuff and that has extra costs.

When we were on our last riding trip there was some sort of spontaneous lego nerd-out, and just to be cheap I bought some Blox from Wilco- they’re lego-compatible but not lego designs, and the instructions are really pleasingly like 80s lego in style and feel. I got an excellent little fire engine for £3 (the minifigs are a bit horrifying mind).

https://www.wilko.com/en-uk/wilko-blox-fire-engine-medium-set/p/0456557

So, I guess I approve more of that. Do lepin etc make original designs?

Not sure if this helps anyone, but the LEGO Technic Porsche 911 GT3 RS is £129 on Argos today.

Also, Rally Car 42077) for £50 on Amazon.

These suggest they do have some designs.

Look what I found on AliExpress
http://s.aliexpress.com/ZRjU77RN

I’m all for spending money on pointless stuff, and loved lego as a kid. But don’t get the appeal of these large kits at all. That porsche for example, it looks absolutely crap. As does the bugatti.

I really enjoyed building the Porsche. I’ve got ikea shelf on wall with led lighting behind them 🙂

also is it not fair to consider that some of the lego cost is in the R&D?

As I understand it – Lego sort of spreads its R&D cost across all its components – if they didn’t basic kits/ bricks would be really cheap but the tooling/development costs one-off elements that are unique to a certain kit would make those kits extremely expensive.

The patent for the idea of Lego – the way the blocks work – has expired but they’ve got hundreds of other patents relating to specific elements – so other companies are OK selling interlocking bricks (so long as they don’t pass them off as made by Lego) but they can easily start to infringe patents if they copy particular kits or components..

Surprisingly-  despite there now being more mini-figs on the planet than humans –  Lego is also still a private owned family-run company.

Surprisingly-  despite there now being more mini-figs on the planet than humans –  Lego is also still a private owned family-run company.

My favourite bit of Lego trivia is that in terms of units sold, Lego is the largest manufacturer of tyres in the world.

despite there now being more mini-figs on the planet than humans

At the risk of going full STW – have you got a source for that?  The last figure I can find is from 2006, 4 billion, about half the world’s population, though it seems to be increasing rapidly.  Not being an arse, genuinely curious.

Astonishingly exactly like lego 🙂

At the risk of going full STW – have you got a source for that? 

it was in the news a few years back – around about that time my nephew put 3 random minifig bits together and made one that looked exactly like my dad. There must now be a minifig clone of each of us plus a few spares presumably clones of people who haven’t even been born yet

There are a billion Lego stormtroopers

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35170829

Maybe Lego need to bring their prices down?

I love lego and have a lot in mums loft from when I was a kid but the prices are just getting silly.

Although I guess these branded kits have royalties attached to them.

The cars in the Aliexpress link above a bit rubbish and I doubt the prancing horse logo on the first F1 car is not endorsed by Ferrari.

Maybe Lego need to bring their prices down?

Price per part hasn’t changed all that much, it’s just the kits are much bigger/complex now.

Price per part hasn’t changed all that much, it’s just the kits are much bigger/complex now.

And fhe the target market also seems to be middle aged men 🙂

One for the Technic Porsche 911 builders:

Guess it never scored highly in ncap test 😉

I was expecting some minor fit issues but not a jot.

It’s going together like lego 🙂