76447 Hogwarts Castle: Flying Lessons may be a LEGO Harry Potter set, but it makes for the perfect base to create an epic addition for your LEGO Castle collection.
One of the more interesting sets to come out of LEGO Harry Potter’s ‘most detailed Hogwarts’ collection is 76447 Hogwarts Castle: Flying Lessons. As mentioned in our review, it may be a little pricier than we’d hope for, but it serves up an excellent selection of minifigures and a wonderful 2-in-1 LEGO build, capturing a smaller outside wall to Hogwarts.
It can be displayed open out in wall configuration complete with small gatepost and bookended by a small and large tower, or it can be folded around into a single observation-style tower.
As you can see, it also lays the perfect groundwork for a mid-sized entry into the ever-expanding LEGO Castle collection. We’ve not short of LEGO castles to build at the moment as the classic theme enjoys a continued renaissance in recent years. But as buying habits of Collectible Minifigure series and voting results on the BrickLink Designer Program series suggest, Castle fans have a big appetite that has yet to be sated.
So, with a little work on BrickLink, 76447 Hogwarts Castle: Flying Lessons serves up an excellent portion of Castle-goodness with generally just a simple colour-swap, as demonstrated here. All we have done to get the parts we need is open up the set listing on BrickLink, created a wanted list from parting out the set and made sure to remove the extra pieces we won’t want specifically for this project (any of the LEGO Harry Potter-specific items like the broomsticks and minifigures).
Then, we have selected all the tan and medium nougat pieces in the build and changed them to light bluish grey, and selected all the dark tan pieces and turned those to dark bluish grey. The corner wall sections aren’t yet available in light bluish grey so we had to pick out 15 corner bricks instead to stack up five-pieces-tall each to replace the three that are used in the set. Elsewhere, the green base piece is swapped to dark green (albeit with two 2x4 plates as opposed to one 4x4 plate), and the plant pieces are swapped to dark green or olive green, and all told we have a much more muted, castle-specific colour palette across the set.
Once all the parts are ordered it’s a case of just building through the instructions (which you can find on Brick Search’s set listing for the Harry Potter set), whilst remembering to use the new colours in place of the original ones (light bluish grey instead of tan or medium nougat, dark bluish grey instead of dark tan). And the end result comes that quickly, and for any Castle fan it’s just perfect, without much need of extra detail being worked in.
We did swap out the window for something more authentic to a medieval castle, replace the broomstick-holders with basic bricks, replace the outdoor lanterns with open-flame torches, and add a light bluish grey helmet to the statue for Castle-themed details, but otherwise this is a very close 1-for-1 recolour. We even recoloured the flooring on the internal pull-out classrooms because if you don’t want to completely redesign those floors they don’t look too out of place like that.
The end result offers the same 2-in-1 functionality and, adding a handful of Castle minifigures from a faction of your choice (and a flag if you have it for the flagpost at the top) transforms the set into a sentry post of some sort, and a perfect addition to an already sizeable Castle collection.
What do you think? Are there other sets in other themes that could be transformed into a Castle-themed set with a recolour and a couple of changes?
The original set this project was based on was provided by the LEGO Group.
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