For many AFOLs (adult fan of LEGO) the main attraction are their MOCs (my own creation), using LEGO to build your own designs. And boy, do some of the guys make magnificent MOCs. Maybe one day I’m heading in that direction as well. As a child growing up though, I remember reverting to the opposing direction as my dark ages approached: I rebuilt all the original sets I had torn up for my own creations – at least the ones I could find instructions for. The impending teenage was fast destroying all my imagination, as often happens. When the time came back in 1990, I just dumped all those models into cardboard boxes and hauled them off to storage. Hence most of my old LEGO are completed TLG (the LEGO Group) designs from the 1980s and a bunch of spare parts.

I have written about the one exception on this blog before (here and here), my old attempts at a 6080 King’s Castle look-alike gatehouse, with drawbridge and portcullis. This was most likely my very last MOC as a child. It is in too many pieces to fully recreate now, it was a small castle I’m pretty sure, but I finally managed to find my old ad-hoc portcullis in one of the cardboard boxes. I attached the portcullis and a few additional pieces to what is left of my gatehouse MOC, to take one final look at it before breaking it up for my current 6080 King’s Castle project. You can see how the portcullis was lacking pieces on the back (I was so out of black 1-wide plates by then) and also how it was winch operated. The rails which guided the portcullis are mostly missing.

P.S. Looking at the pictures now, it seems the portcullis may be upside down.