Building the Lego Creator Land Rover Defender Set

I’ve always admired the industrial simplicity of the classic Land Rover Defender that had an amazing production run stretching from 1983 to 2016 and built on the heritage of the original “Series” Land Rovers.

Lego make a couple of classic Defender sets: there’s one in the “Icons” range that has amazing detail but is quite expensive (check it out) and a simpler version in the “Creator” range that’s probably aimed at younger builders but is much more affordable. I recently bought the Creator version direct from Lego’s online store for a pretty reasonable £13.49 (it’s more expensive at other online retailers!) and decided to record myself building it.

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The chunky nature of the Defender’s design lends itself well to Lego, and doesn’t require a lot of decals or other “one off” bricks to make. I like this a lot. It’s a straightforward build that probably took me about half an hour.

Unusually for Lego, the set was missing one brick - luckily just a 1 x 4 plate in yellow… initially this meant that I was missing a visible part above one of the rear windows, but with some rework I was able to recover one from the inside and use that temporarily. Lego’s excellent online customer service came to the rescue - I reported a missing piece to them and they posted it out to me at no additional cost.

Here’s the finished video:

And here’s some still pictures of the finished product:

Side view - hard to say which side is the driver side as she sits in the middle!

Front view.

The other side view.

Rear view with spare wheel.

Straight on side view.

The box for the Defender kit.

Lego’s online missing parts service was easy to use, and I was quickly able to identify the part using their inventory system and place a (free) order for replacement:

Ordering a replacement piece online.

It arrived a few days later with a nice letter and all was good!

The missing piece arrives, with a nice letter from Lego.

I used the same recording technique I applied to my previous Lego build video for the Audi Quattro (front facing camera on iPhone 7 clamped to a small tripod on the desk. I edited the video in iMovie and used that to remove the original background noise, add titles, and speed everything up. The music was free and it’s called “Sleepwalking” by “Airtone”. It’s available from their page on ccmixter.org.

If you’d like to get your own Defender, pick up a kit over at the Lego website! If you’re interested in learning more about real Land Rover Defenders, Wikipedia has a lot of detail.

Check out my previous Lego build… the Audi Quattro S1. I’ve also subsequently documented my experience building the Lego Creator Shuttle. Have fun!