Aliexpress: Lepin 05054 Star Wars U-Wing Fighter

Today, I'm going to talk about the Lepin 05054 Star Wars U-Wing Fighter bootleg Lego building set.  Well, it's mostly going to be me ranting about why the price of this Lepin set has to cost so much.

First let's look at the ship.  The U-Wing fighter is that cool troop transport vehicle from the Rogue One Star Wars franchise.  It's a quad engine gunship that has wings that pivot outwards.  In the underbelly of the ship, it can carry a number of minifigures.  The Lego and Lepin versions of the ship has a cockpit for one pilot whereas the movie version has a dual pilot cockpit.  This set has 679 pieces and comes with 5 minifigures: a U-wing Pilot, Bistan, Jyn Erso, Cassian Andor and a Rebel Trooper.

The amount of bricks in this U-Wing set is almost as many as in the Lego/Lepin X-wing fighter sets.  In my table below, I've compared the latest three Star Wars fighter sets that Lepin has copied from Lego.  Take a look.

Fighter	Lepin Model	Number of Bricks	Release Date
Poe's X-wing Fighter	05004	748 pieces	March/April 2016
Resistance X-Wing Fighter	05029	740 pieces	September 2016
Rogue One U-Wing Fighter	05054	679 pieces	December 2016

So I remember that when the Lepin Poe's 05004 X-wing Fighter first started showing up on AliExpress, it cost about $23 to $25 USD.   And when the Lepin 05029 Resistance Fighter appeared, it was priced at around $25 to $27 USD.

And I was ok with this price point because the Lego versions were and are much more.   Here's a snapshot of how much the Lego 10466 Poe's X-Wing Fighter costs on the Lego.com.   It's $79.99 USD.

I went on to Aliexpress and took this fairly current screen grab of the Lego knockoff Lepin 05004 X-Wing.  You can see it's $22.30 USD.   So the Lepin X-Wing version is about one-third the cost of the real Lego model.

The newer Lego 75149 Resistance X-Wing Fighter set is similarly priced at $79.99 USD.

The Lepin 05029 Resistance X-Wing Fighter is slightly more at $24.35 USD, again it's about one-third the cost of the real deal on Aliexpress.

So, now we are looking at Lego's 75155 U-Wing Fighter.  It is priced at $79.99 like the other previous X-Wing fighters.  But there's less pieces in this set, almost 10% less at 679.  Ok, it's 2017 Lego pricing, I get it.

So when I check Aliexpress, I expect that the new Rogue One Lepin version of the U-Wing fighter to only cost say $27 to $29 USD.  I was willing to pay that price.   But guess what, the lowest price on Aliexpress right now for the Lepin U-Wing is $40 USD!  That's right $40 USD.   That's 25% more than the other models that have more pieces.  I think that's just way too expensive for a bootleg Lego model.  It's not like Lepin has to pay any royalties to Disney or Star Wars.

As much as I want to buy the Lepin version, I'm going to hold off until the price drops to the price I'm willing to pay, which is under $30 USD.   What do you think?  Is $40 USD too much to pay for the Lepin knockoff version of the Lego Star Wars U-Wing?     Let me know, I'd like to hear your thoughts.

Sorry for the rant, I just had to get that off my chest.

My List of Top 5 AliExpress Stores that Sell Bootleg Lego - November 2016

I get asked a lot about the Lego clone sellers/stores with whom I have had success with on Aliexpress, so this post will address that question.

In November 2016, I placed 9 purchase orders for bootleg and knockoff brick sets and minifigures. At the time of this writing, I have successfully received 8 of those orders, with 1 orders still outstanding.

The criteria is pretty simple to make my Top 5 Stores list:

1.  offer a wide selection of bricksets and/or minifigures at decent prices
2.  be responsive to messages
3.  ship within a reasonable timeframe (for my country, that's one to two months)
4.  don't lie and say item shipped when it hasn't
5.  don't give me a bogus tracking number


So, for the month of November 2016, my top 5 sellers/stores (in no particular order) on Aliexpress were:

1.  Big Cabbage
2. I Love Building Blocks
3. TopKingdom
4. Great Wall Technology
5. Blocks World 

If you click on the store name, it will take you to their Aliexpress store.

Wange 34052 Creation Villa Building Set

So here's a set that I actually own, it's the Wange 34052 Villa building block set.  I bought mine back in April 2015 and I paid around $27 USD for it, so this is selling for quite a good price at just under $22 USD.  The quality of this set is good and brick clutch is decent.  I think this set might be a copy of an older Lego set but I'm not entirely sure.  This is a fairly decent size set with 755 pieces and it comes with a giant baseplate and 2 minifigures.  But just a heads up, the minifigures are not Lego compatible and look awful.