A friend from the London AFOLs was selling some old Star Wars sets, and I decided to pick up a couple from her at the meetup on Monday. I chose the Sith Infiltrator (7151) and Imperial AT-ST (7127). They are older sets from 1999 and 2001 respectively. I haven’t built any sets from this era before, so I thought it would be interesting.

Luckily they both came with instructions, and I set about building the Sith Infiltrator first.

I actually found building this quite hard. Instructions have come a long way since 1999 – for starters, they didn’t give you the little list of parts you need for each stage, which I find is very helpful for checking you have done everything for that step. With modern instructions, I’m quite careful to gather the pile I need for each bit before starting to put them together. But here you had to play “spot the difference” with the previous picture to see what you were supposed to be placing where, and it was much easier to miss little bits which you then had to go back to.

In the end there was only one piece missing – a corner 2×2 slope. But I wasn’t too bothered as I don’t plan to keep the model built. I’m much more likely to use the parts for my own purposes. It was also interesting to see how build techniques have changed. It ended up with a lot of studs showing, which isn’t so common now. Plus each wing assembly was held on with one Technic pin into a rather chunky piece known as a Light Gray Slope, Inverted 65 6 x 6 x 2 Quad with Cutouts (30373), which proved to be rather wobbly when swooshing the ship about.

In the end I decided not to put the AT-ST together, but just sorted the parts into my inventory for future use.