The first thing I did when I had my Lego train set was acquire some tanker wagons, but I don't have anywhere for them to visit, unlike my car transporter wagon loading dock or cranes. I have decided to build an oil tank for them to discharge their cargo. It will be a transfer station with road access for Lego tanker lorries to fill up and take off into the city.

But oil tanks are generally roundish, and Lego is, well, blocky. So this proved a bit of a snag. I'd seen oil tanks at the Brick Planet exhibition in Woodhorn Colliery Museum back in 2015. They were on an airfield and I thought they were very effective.

This looks really good, but they are brick built and still a tiny bit blocky when you get up close. I was considering other options when I discovered a Star Wars Lego set on eBay that included a "ring".

The Jedi Starfighters in Star Wars Episodes 2 and 3 don't have hyperdrives, so move from system to system using these rings that have hyperdrive engines fitted to them. They then park the ring somewhere safe and fly into the system. Obviously I didn't need the hyperdrive engine bits. But the basic ring looked really interesting. The Lego Group have PDFs of instruction manuals for all their kits on their website, so I downloaded the manual and had a look. Inside it showed how the ring was constructed.

I had a few of the relevant pieces but needed a lot more, so I put in an order to Bricklink, a website where you can order Lego bits. They duly arrived...

And I built a frame structure for the tank.

The attached plates are 24 studs long and show how a 16-side tank can be quite easily created. It's not perfectly round, but in this scale it's round enough. It will also dwarf Lego figures and look about right in terms of scale.

I decided I wanted to make it in Octan colours, which are white with a red and green stripe. The tanks I saw in Woodhorn had the Octan logo on the side and that looked impressive, but I must admit this felt a slightly easier option.

This is what the internal bracing looks like, for reference.

But now I needed some white plates. I worked out I would need 80 6x4 plates to complete the tank and started looking at Bricklink to see how much that would cost. I also needed red and green plates to make the stripe. Then, however, I had a stroke of luck. Visiting my local Lego Shop I found they had white 4x6 plates in the 'pick and build' wall, which is like a pick and mix Lego feature they have at the back of the store. I could fit the 80 plates (plus a few spares) in one of the large tubs (along with a few other bits).

(The drilling machine helping to open the pick and build cup is another recent acquisition. It's in the 'volcano explorers' range. I'm planning on modifying it into a slightly more prototypical tracked industrial vehicle. It is a really nice machine though and was great fun to build.)

And this, for the record, is what 80 plates looks like just before you stick them on the sides of an oil tank.

I will show you what it looks like now in my next blog post. Thanks for reading!