AL-PRGNKGT Paragon

Awarded to only the most battle-hardened knights and reFrame pilots, the silver-plated Paragon reFrame is a heavily improved version of the AL-MXRITTER. Overall battle performance has been improved with a special emphasis was given to thrust capacity, allowing the Paragon to swiftly close in and engage opponents in melee combat where these units truly excel. As with its predecessor, it is equipped with the PA-LNCPRGN. an improved and deadlier polearm that first skewers opponents then shreds them to bits with the side blades, and the SH-DIAMDNX, a diamond-shaped shield that is well balanced and offers superior deflection both in CCQ.

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Build Notes:

I’ve been wanting to upgrade the Ritter for the longest time and ever since the Nexo Knights line came out, I’ve been wanting to make a more Knight-ish reFrame. The moment I saw the Nexo Knight Aaron visor, I knew I wanted to make a mech using that for the head design. It was only recently that my BrickLink order with that piece arrived and finally gave me the opportunity to make my silver mech 😀

One thing I wanted to really use up here was all the metallic/pearl dark/flat silver pieces that I’ve accumulated over the past few years. When I started building this, I realized I didn’t have as many pieces in silver as I imagined, especially on the bigger curved slope pieces. I actually put the build on hold for 2 weeks as I had to leave for the U.S. but this gave me the chance to purchase some items from BrickLink and continue working on this upon returning.

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WIP Process:

I really wanted to use the Nexo Knight minifig Aaron visor for this build but was close to using the Ruby version. Only reason why I didn’t was that the Ruby knight visor had an extended piece going up to the top of the minifig helmet and that was a little too hard to hide. To mount the visor, I cut up a rigid flex tube just a little bigger than the width of where the visor would mount on a minifig helmet, ensuring a snug fit when I fit the visor into the holes of the flex tube.

The body, waist, and leg designs were simply upgraded versions of exisiting builds. The body and waist was derived from the Ascendant Lord reFrame Vzir’ Ran and the legs would be based of the Ritter (when I made the Vzir’ Ran and Rin models, I wanted the body design to become standard for most of the Ascendant Lord models I’d be making in the future).

I had this pair of 2×6 curved wedge pieces in metallic silver that I wanted to use so when I got to the shoulders, I figured I’d slap them on there and see how they looked but felt that it was too “easy” and didn’t really offer much armor segmentation as compared to the body and legs so it got scrapped.

This was a much better attempt and when I did this, I was thinking of having the bad robot arms look that I used on the thighs apply to the shoulders as well. The only thing I didn’t like about this was how flat the front looked so decided to improve on that.

Now I was getting somewhere with the shoulders. I felt that this was a huge step in the right direction, really emphasizing the shield look and having the roof tile with overhang accompany the shield tile was something I didn’t expect to look so good. This also had an early version of the arms.

At this stage, I was more or less going to proceed to weapons already but then some good friends who also build LEGO mechs (shoutout to Jet) gave me feedback how the design didn’t really have a “butt” and recommended some skirting to address that issue.

While I was modifying the back, I also thought of reducing the weight of the shoulders and that meant switching from the big airplane tail piece to these smaller ones. The blades came as an “accident” when I was trying to see what I could plug into the bad robot arms and it looked really good. Overall shoulder shape by this point wasn’t that refined yet and wanted to reduce how popped out the front shoulder design was.

At this point, was able to finalize on the shoulders and was 95% done with the mech minus the weapons. This picture also features a different version of the arms (wrist area) but I scrapped this as it made mounting heavy weapons difficult and unstable.

Got back after 2 weeks and finally finished the Paragon’s weapons and some minor updates with the parts I got (shins became a solid 2×4 curved slope, front ankle guard upgrade, some minor parts swaps from grey to silver equivalent parts). The last thing to do was to take a picture with the original Ritter to see how far the design changed 😀

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For those interested in LEGO mech building, I put out an eBook over at Amazon Kindle a while back called Mech Wars Instructional Primer. If you’re looking for a resource that could help you start or even improve your mech building skills, you might find this eBook useful

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