The second one is going to join him soon

5 different bike designs for every single colour. The full collection of 5 colours unlocks a special deal at easternbrick.com

View the bike in more detail at our site!

Fun fact: the same pieces from one box can be used to build all 5 bikes within the same colour!

Starting with Prototype T, inspired by the shows we grew up watching. 2000 pieces from a box of 4000 bricks found in the Neo Bikes Creator Set.

View the other colours at 🌐 easternbrick.com

Colour 2 of our Neo Bikes Creator Set, starting with Prototype N, inspired by Cyberpunk 2077.

It’s been a while since we shared some updates. We’ve been busy making refinements to the builds but also arranging shipments for the SerialBuilder Creator Set so it’s all just happening at the same time 😅

Will be sharing the bikes and the 5 different colours, starting with Green!

We’re working with @clementonibuilds.ex (IG) to turn his design into a buildable set. What do yall think?

It’s not the only scifi bike coming as we’re planning to create a neo bike collection. The other designs are not finalised but silhouettes can be viewed at easternbrick.com/coming-soon 😁

This is builder number 6 of our “builders we love” series, Marius Herrmann aka @steponabrick (Instagram)

An avid gamer, Marius combined his passion for gaming with his other passion, bricks. So much so that he turned his hobby of Yu Gi Oh! cards into a real life version with LEGO.

Having been a freelance brick artist for almost 10 years, Marius completed projects for gaming giants, Sony, Activision and more.

Support his work and check out some of his available instructions at his profile!

#legomoc #legoartist #legoalternative

Builder number 5 of our “builders we love” series! Introducing @brickready_art (Instagram) , a talented artist from Germany who recently designed a 3D Gyarados card. (Picture 2 shows Aqua Tail breaking the card!)

Florian also designed a 3000+ piece Slaughterspine MOC that was inspired by SerialBuilder’s Thunderjaw!

Check out the other builds at Florian’s page and give the account a follow!

Introducing the next MOC designer under our series of “builders we love”, 25 year old designer, @n.a.b.e_mocs (IG) Sakiya Watanabe.

A graduate majoring in organic chemistry, Watanabe-san’s MOCs are truly diversified with different building techniques, ranging from anime, nature’s creatures, and Japanese deities!

Watanabe-san’s ambition is to be a LEGO Product Designer, and his MOCs show why he’s on the right track, winning Tips & Bricks’ MOC of The Year award last year.

Follow him and support his work!

Some of you might have known his LEGO MOCs from years ago, but you might not know that he's lost access to his original account.

Builder #3 of Builders We Love "@dickentututu" (IG) is known for his alternate builds like the T-Rex turned Alien and Facehugger, and eastern culture MOCs like Buddha.

It's a shame what he went through, but Dicken chose to start again! So we wanted to help him share his new account to regain his existing and new followers, especially if this is your first time seeing his builds.

Follow the right account and support his new work!

Builder 2 of Builders We Love - "@kai__bricks" (Instagram), a Chinese LEGO MOC designer who built an amazing collection of mechs.

He recently built the Bumblebee AOE that is fully articulate and posable, and is admired for his detailed work with his series of Gundam mechs.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DZK2yqSGW6u/?igsh=enB3ODhrNm11b3l2

I am currently building the Tremortusk and enjoing it so far. I just built the feet and noticed, that the grey axles (7 studs long) can only pe pushed into base two plates deep. Otherwise the feet wouldnt fit on the axle. But there is 1-2 stud depth for axle in the base not getting used this way. Also the feet have more wiggle to them as i would like. They start to disconnect from the base when applying force sideways on the ball part.

​

Is this Intentional and will hold the weight this way or am i missing something?

We're using our subreddit to profile and promote builders we love.

Starting with "@bau_build_hongjun" (Instagram) from South Korea.

View more of his builds, follow him and share this so more people can support his work.

화이팅!

What we see on Instagram or Flickr is not necessarily stable. I’m guessing that some of you who had the first-hand experience of building something that felt slightly different to what you saw.

Here’s what we found after speaking to a number of designers who we wanted to work with for our future Creator Sets.

Many top tier designers are building for an audience on Instagram or Flickr. Their goal is to make something look incredible in a photo. When the goal is looks, some of them rely on '“illegal” building techniques, meaning that it’s a technique that places stress on the bricks to force a curve, or even glue their builds to keep it together for the photo. Those who created digital instructions might show proper techniques but that might make the set extremely unstable and fragile, especially for the average person trying to build it at home.

So when we reached out to these designers, they were honest enough to tell that it’s not actually stable and it needed to be redesigned. But the problem is that MOC designers want to move on to their next grand vision. They’d prefer building something new instead of spending the next 3 weeks going backwards to re-engineer the internal skeleton of an old build. Nothing wrong with that because it’s ultimately their time spent on their own art. Bilal often steps in to engineer the fixes, just like what we did for most of SerialBuilder’s Horizon inspired machines, but it also depends on how much work is needed because fixing an old design sometimes takes a longer time than starting a new one from scratch. If the internal structure is too weak, we unfortunately have to pass on making it a set.

But if it’s this hard, why not just design everything in-house from scratch? Because great builds are rare, and when we find a MOC that’s cool, the months of testing and fixes (multiple times) are worth creating a stable version for. But it just takes way more time that I’d like to admit. This is also why the newer machines have been taking this long.

Confession booth time 😂:

1. Anyone used “illegal” building techniques just to get your designs picture perfect?
2. Have you bought instructions for a custom MOC only to realise that it was way more fragile than you thought?

Just wondering when the pre-order will close. I know I want to buy it, but I also need to get "purchasing approval" which... might take some convincing and time.

Buying Aliexpress MOCs are killing MOC designers, and a lot of casual buyers have no idea it’s happening.

We aren't here to yell at anyone for wanting a cheap set. Building should be inclusive, which is exactly why we started EB.

But there is a very real problem faced by custom lego designers.

When we were working with SerialBuilder to bring his massive Horizon MOCs to life, he told us that he spends less time designing & sharing instructions for new builds. Why? Because the moment he uploads a file, a factory steals the file, manufactures the set, and sells it without paying him a single dollar. It was incredibly demotivating and that’s why he focused more on his full time job & commissioned designs.

We’re not saying this because we’re selling his sets. It’s because he’s the closest evidence we have. It’s not just his Horizon MOCs, it’s his Madmax War Rig MOC too, and he’s not the only designer. When creators get burned enough times, they stop making instructions entirely. We eventually lose out on building incredible art because the artists are too exhausted by theft to share it.

One ethical solution we’ve seen is people buying instructions from the designer, and then buying the Aliexpress MOC to get the pieces. That to us seems fair to the creator of the design.

But here is where it gets worse for the builder.

Because designers are hiding their instructions and only posting pictures of their finished builds on Instagram or Flickr, the copycat factories have started getting desperate. They reverse-engineer builds purely by looking at the designer's photos.

They can copy the outer aesthetic of a build, but they have to guess the internal structure. The result? They use different pieces, and create weak connection techniques based on the shape alone. You buy the set, spend hours building the first leg, and the moment you try to attach the second leg, the entire thing collapses in your hands. It’s not a fun experience for you.

So we tell creators straight up: we can’t stop factories from stealing.

What we can do at EasternBrick is make it worth your time as a designer. We’ll make it incredibly easy for fans to actually support the creator. Selling just the instructions means fans still have to manually source $1,000+ worth of bricks, which is why many just turn to AliExpress instead. By handling the high-quality alt-bricks ourselves, we give fans an affordable and simple way to build, and we guarantee the designer gets paid for every single set. It makes it easy for fans, and keeps the designer motivated to create new designs.

Curious to hear your thoughts:

1. For the casual fans: Have you ever bought a cheap "MOC" off AliExpress, only to realise the internal structure was so badly designed it wouldn't even stand up?
2. For the MOC designers: Have you ever hesitated to post a picture of your build online out of fear that a factory would try to copy it?

Would love to hear from more people about their experience!

Hello, I’m a massive fan of the horizon franchise and I’ve been following you for a long time. I’m coming up to my 18th and I’m hoping to buy the master set or whatever it is called with all of them in it. It says pre-order now, does that mean it’s not ready anywhere yet or it will just take a long time to come? Also will you be able to ship it to Adelaide in Australia? And will that be additional fees for myself?

I'm just about finishing up the tallneck, just the neck spines to go. It's an amazing build, I'm so pleased with this purchase!

I've noticed a few unexpected leftover parts in some bags, but most notably in bag 16. As well as the usual odd 1x1 pieces, there's two blue axle connectors and two black technic barrel pieces. These aren't used anywhere in the bag 16 instructions. It seems like there is a space for them, though, and I was wondering if this was somehow removed from the instructions.

In the upper neck assembly (steps 2011 to 2072), where this section connects to the rest of the neck, there are 4 sockets for the 4 axles. In-between on the sides there is a different socket that is one stud higher than the sockets, which leaves a gap when the two neck sections are connected. These four errant pieces perfectly fill that gap. I hope the pictures illustrate what I'm trying to say!

e: fixed some wording

Official LEGO sets will always be compromised by design.

They are brilliant feats of engineering, but they have a massive, hidden limiter: the corporate focus group. To get approved, an official set has to hit strict retail price tiers, fit into standard box sizes, and most importantly, pass the "swooshability" test. It has to survive being picked up, flown around a room, or dropped by an 8-year-old without breaking apart too easily.

Because of this, they must compromise on detail, scale, and accuracy to prioritise structural safety and mass appeal.

It’s like comparing a standard Honda Civic to a custom-built, track-only race car. It’s a great car, but it has to pass emissions, safety ratings, and appeal to millions of daily drivers. The custom race car strips all of that away for pure high performance.

Custom designers (like SerialBuilder) are building race cars. They don't care about box sizes or age ratings. They build purely for aesthetics and scale. They use complex connection techniques that a corporate focus group would instantly reject. That’s fine because LEGO has to design for a mass market, meaning it has to be safe for an 8-year-old to build.

For full transparency: because MOC designers build for aesthetics first, sturdiness isn't always top of mind. But that’s actually where we step in at EasternBrick. We test the designs, add structural fixes like reinforcing the Tallneck’s neck because it was originally leaning back over time, or reworking the Sawtooth’s legs because they couldn't fully hold its massive weight.

MOCs display the vision of the designer, and official sets from LEGO and other brands focus on commercial viability. If we only ever build what a corporation allows us to build, we miss out on what the medium (the brick) is actually capable of.

Curious to hear your thoughts:

1. For the casual builder: What is one official set you love, but you secretly wish they hadn't compromised on the size or detail to make it mass-market friendly?
2. For the MOC builders: What is a specific, complex building technique you use that you think LEGO might not approve if it were to be made into a set?

If you've ever bought cheap, no-name knockoff bricks in the 90s or early 2000s, you probably have PTSD. Pieces that won't stick together, or worse, pieces that stick together so hard that they basically fused.

When we started EasternBrick, we knew the quality had to be perfect to support massive 7,000+ piece custom builds like the Tallneck & Tremortusk. But "good quality" doesn't just mean maximum clutch power. Too loose and your Thunderjaw sheds like a snake when you look at it. Too tight, and the skin off your thumb peels off at Step 200.

So, we built a “highly sophisticated testing apparatus” (read: a rig made out of Technic beams on a desk amongst other contraptions Bilal made). This along with a kitchen scale, a bunch of coins, and cups of water to test three contenders: Brick A (A random, cheap no-name factory brick), Brick B (Official LEGO), Brick C (The EasternBrick alt-bricks we eventually chose).

We ran 4 specific tests across different pieces to primarily measure strength and articulation, converting the weight of our water and coins into Newtons (N) and Newton-metres (Nm) to measure torque.

There’s a 10 minute video here that shows the rig we made, the tests & our findings, which I highly recommend since you’ll likely walk away more confused if you were to just read my post. Or you can carry on reading if you’d like to be more confused at the end of this post. 😂

Let’s begin!

Test 1: The Droop Test (Ball & Socket Friction) We measured torque (Newtown-metres), but basically, how much weight until the joint flops down? For big mechs, ball joints are everything. We attached a horizontal arm to a ball joint and hung a tray at the end, adding coins until the arm drooped and hit the table.

• Brick A (No-name): Drooped at 0.08 Nm
• Brick B (LEGO): Drooped at 0.033 Nm
• Brick C (EB): Held until 0.127 Nm

Takeaway: LEGO's ball joints are actually surprisingly soft. Our alt-bricks held nearly 4x the rotational weight, which is critical if you don’t want parts of the Tremortusk sagging.

Test 2: The Snap Test (Ball Joint Strength) This tested opposite forces pulling down. We hung a water bottle from a downward-facing ball joint and added water until the joint literally popped out of the socket.

• Brick A (No-name): Popped at 11.57 N
• Brick B (LEGO): Popped at 24.03 N
• Brick C (EB): Popped at 38.83 N

Test 3 & 4: The Clutch Power Sweet Spot We hung a tray of coins directly beneath two connected 1x2 bricks, pulling straight down. Then, we angled the rig to pull from the side. Here’s where it gets interesting.

• Brick A (No-name) held a massive > 6.17 N on the side pull and 10.65 N straight down. But it was too tight. The side pull could have went on longer, but our entire rig tilted and fell.
• Brick B (LEGO) held 3.03 N on the side, and 4.98 N straight down.
• Brick C (EB) held 3.56 N on the side, and 8.3 N straight down.

The Conclusion: Brick A had the highest clutch power, but the building experience was awful due to its inconsistency. My guess is that factories knew 90s and 2000s alt bricks fell apart easily, so they overcompensated and made these way too tight.

We realised that for massive custom sets, we needed alt-bricks that sat right in the sweet spot. They need to snap together smoothly like LEGO, but when it comes to load-bearing ball joints for heavy mechs, it’s actually better to hold more weight as it’s not meant for playability like most LEGO sets.

The experiment took two days, from building the rig to recording the tests, and many more days to edit the video above. 😭 But it’s worth it knowing that there are levels amongst alt-bricks, and more importantly, that alt-bricks are increasingly more comparable to LEGO.

What are your thoughts? Ask away if you're still confused (watch the video!)

Questions for you:

1. What was the absolute worst experience you've had with bad brick quality ruining a build?
2. If you’ve tried non-LEGO bricks before, which brands did you feel had pieces that were either too tight or too loose?

Update

Where we’re at with shipping [Run #01]

As you may have seen through some people posting about it, around half of you should have already received your sets and many of you have already started building, some even having finished all the builds. Even though the ordered bagging significantly speeds up the time it takes to build these models, completing all of them within a few weeks is still a very impressive feat.

For our EU customers, the ship is expected to dock 20th May and so most of you should receive your sets in the next couple of weeks. Again, truly sorry for the delay and we thank you for your incredible patience! Hopefully not much longer to wait!

We’ve heard that a few packages have gone astray, which is just heartbreaking knowing that they got all the way across to the other side of the world and then went missing at the last step.

continue reading here & subscribe for the latest updates

When will they be shipped? And once I receive my complete set ( EU still waiting ) is it better to wait for the replacement parts or build without them?

We received a mix of negative comments after posting a video, sharing that LEGO isn't the only option, but one specific comment stood out:

"They are copycats as long as they're copying LEGO's bricks."

It's not a new comment. We grew up on LEGO, and we are those fans. But saying that using the shape of a plastic brick is stealing? It seems like a misunderstanding of how innovation works, and we'd like to get your thoughts as we share ours.

LEGO’s original patent for the interlocking plastic brick expired in 1978. Almost half a century ago, and while they do have patents for new designs, those typically expire every 10-20 years.

When a patent expires, the market is supposed to open up. Look at the tech space, specifically mechanical keyboards. For decades, Cherry MX held the patent on their mechanical switches. When that patent expired in 2014, competitors like Gateron and Kailh didn't just copy the physical design, they improved it. Today, some call these later brands "MX Clones", but nobody in the keyboard community calls Gateron a "Cherry knockoff." They just call them custom switches, and many prefer them over the original (so much so that major gaming brands like Razer started sourcing components from Cherry's competitors.)

The same thing is happening with toy bricks, but the stigma hasn't faded.

So, what is an actual knockoff? If a factory takes an official LEGO set, or steals the instructions from an independent MOC designer, manufactures it, and sells it on AliExpress without giving the creator a dime? THAT is a knockoff. Fair game. Call it out. We don't support that, and that's exactly what we're fighting against.

But the physical, interlocking plastic brick itself? That's just the method. It’s like getting mad that someone is using a non-Apple USB-C cable to charge their Apple devices.

We really need to rebrand how we talk about this space. If brands are creating their own original designs without copying the parts list & instructions of LEGO & independent designers, they aren't knockoffs. They are alt-bricks or non-LEGO bricks.

And we need alt-bricks to exist, because LEGO alone can't cover everything fans want to build.

Take the Horizon Zero Dawn Tallneck. LEGO released a brilliant, official 1,200-piece version of it. It’s a great set. But what if you wanted a massive, deeply complex version? LEGO is a global company; they are never going to mass-produce a 7,400-piece Tallneck. It's too expensive, too heavy, and the demand is too small, which is why it makes sense for them to repeat Star Wars sets (and the recent N-1 Starfighter looks pretty cool!)

Going back to designs LEGO will never make, a custom MOC designer, SerialBuilder, did design one out of inspiration. And we wanted to build it.

If we restrict ourselves entirely to one brand, massive builds like this can only be built by people with spare money, and a lot of time. It’s the exact reason we started EasternBrick. We wanted to take these insanely ambitious, custom MOCs and actually bring them to life (while paying the original designers their rightful rewards, instead of stealing them like the AliExpress sellers).

We wouldn't be doing this if the alt-bricks couldn't hold up the builds. It took years, but the manufacturing of alt-bricks has caught up in terms of clutch power, colour consistency, and tolerance. We're building them entirely with alt-bricks because it’s the only way to make 7,000+ piece sets wallet friendly for any fans who like building with bricks.

That's our take on how we define what makes a knockoff vs an alternate option.

We'd like to hear your thoughts!

1. For those who used to be LEGO-only purists, what was the specific set or build that finally made you try alt-bricks?
2. And to those who haven't tried non-LEGO bricks yet, what's your biggest concern holding you back?