Installing a LEGO DeLorean Briksmax Lighting Kit – Part One

If you think building a LEGO Set is challenging, you should try installing a lighting kit for some truly intense circuitry and engineering fun…

We recently received a Briksmax LED Lighting Kit for the LEGO DeLorean Back to the Future Time Machine. The kit promised to take our iconic vehicle to the next level by lighting up the headlamps, rear lights, driver’s cabin, fusion reactor, and tires. We have often considered trying out some LEGO lighting kits in the past but have never got around to it – they can be time-consuming to install.

With this in mind, we handed the kit to one of our newest staff members, who had never attempted anything like it before!

Here’s how they got on…

Unboxing the Briksmax Lighting Kit

After spending some time half-drooling, half-nerding over the Back to The Future LEGO set, I opened the Briksmax Lighting Kit to take a look inside.

Everything was contained neatly within a small box, carefully separated into sealed pouches labelled with numbers corresponding to the instructions. I was very grateful for this as the tiny wires, circuit boards, and bulbs looked very delicate and easy to muddle up. Briksmax also provided a pair of assembly tweezers and several manuals.

It was good to see printed colour manuals included, even if the instructions looked a bit like assembling a rocket at this point. Nothing is worse than downloading instructions on your phone when you just want to get cracking and give your eyes a rest from screens for once.

With everything laid out on my desk space, I took a deep breath and started the build…

Lighting Up the LEGO DeLorean Headlights

“Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.”

All the same, it is good to have a roadmap of some kind. After struggling to remove the bonnet as per the instructions, I felt ready to give up. Surely my colleagues would understand that this wasn’t my forte. Sneaking a look ahead at the rest of the instructions, it seemed easier to build a flux capacitor.

As it turned out, I had picked up the wrong version of the LEGO DeLorean. My tip is to first, make sure you are definitely using the right version of the LEGO model, or it will not work! After this, the instructions began to make sense.

Back on track with the correct vehicle, I set to work, carefully removing LEGO pieces with the tweezers and attaching the tiny, wired bulbs. This involved replacing a few blue headlights with replacement parts included in the kit so that the bulb elements could fit under the brick (sometimes, the studs take up too much room).

After some time, I managed to get the first half of the lights installed. Seeing the wires sticking out, my excitement grew – it was all starting to come together at last! By now, I felt more confident about the challenge ahead.

Securing the LEGO elements back into place exposed one of my criticisms of modern LEGO models – the pieces ping off so easily. Obviously, the thin wires do not help. Still, I often pine for the vintage LEGO blocks that would fit reliably together like real foundations. The modern studs feel so loose, making it hard to even lift the model without bits falling off. This was a common complaint with the LEGO Time Machine, but that is not the fault of Briksmax.

Disguising the Lighting Kit Wires and Attaching The Circuit Board

“Nobody calls me chicken, Biff. Nobody!”

With the words of everyone’s favourite American high school bully ringing in my ears, I set to work on one of the fiddliest parts of the process. This involved easing each of the wires through the inside of the car before twisting them into a larger thread, attaching each minuscule plug into a socket on the circuit board.

This was quite tricky with my notoriously trembling hands, but in the end, I managed to get everything wired up and attach the circuit board to the car using the sticker foam squares provided.

It may not look like much in pictures, but this had taken me just under two hours since opening the box. Admittedly, I was being overly cautious with the build, and I knew I could probably speed up on the following sections.

Lighting Up the Inside of the DeLorean

I felt like I was getting into my stride by this point. With the confidence of Doc Emmett Brown conceiving a new invention, I gracefully installed the lights on the side wings and car interior.

By this point, I was really starting to appreciate the imagination and work that had gone into finding ways to hide the wire threads using LEGO pieces and stuffing them through small gaps in the model. I have no idea how the team at Briksmax figure out the best way to do this, but it is very clever.

I started to get a bit confused by the directions at this point. While the illustrated instructions were appreciated, I would have liked some accompanying text to explain what they meant. Sometimes it was not clear what the variety of symbols wanted me to do, indicating vague commands such as twist, remove, turn, etc.

As you can see, I probably did not disguise the wires as well as intended but opted to leave them for now, as I had already started threading them into place beneath the model.

Three hours into the project, I decided to take a well-earned break.

Find out how the rest of the installation went in next Friday’s blog!

Up next: the rear lights, numberplate, wheels and finishing touches.