Tips on Building a Lamborghini Countach with Lego Master Nick Della Mora

There’s good money to be made in selling nostalgia to Millennials and few brands have capitalized on the generation’s obsession as well as Lego has. But just because you’re playing with a toy doesn’t mean you have to build like a kid.

AutoTrader was recently invited to the Lego store at the Yorkdale Mall in Toronto to assemble one of the brand’s many automotive sets with some help from a bona fide master builder. Indeed, Nick Della Mora (alongside teammate Stacey Roy) was the winner of the third season of CTV’s Lego Masters TV series, and he’s made a career for himself in the world of Lego.

Not only can you follow along as Della Mora builds sets on Twitch and YouTube, but he also reviews official Lego sets on his channels, too. So passionate is he for the toy that he can frequently be seen sporting a bow tie made of Lego and his business card is printed on a stack of 1x4 bricks that he pulls apart to hand to people. There could, therefore, be no better partner to build a Lamborghini Countach with.

Stay Organized

Whether you’re building Lego’s 1,500-piece Countach set for adults or the slightly more manageable 268-piece Speed Champions Countach kit, as I was, Della Mora says that the best way to make the build more enjoyable is to keep your parts organized. Whether that’s by sorting before you start so that each piece fits into a category or simply ensuring that you have a clean workspace without too much clutter, organization will help you spend more time building than searching for bricks.

Staying organized is also an important skill when it comes to creating your own builds, too. Della Mora’s workspace features a dizzying array of drawers in which he organizes his countless bricks into over 700 categories. He admits, though, that no matter how organized you become, there will always be moments when you can’t find a brick that’s right under your nose.

Think Ahead

Unlike Della Mora, the majority of us will never build a Lego set competitively and will never need to race to finish our creation. However, the responsibilities of the real world can mean that we have less time to build than we want. Fortunately, planning ahead can ensure that we finish our builds before our bosses know we’ve been building Lego instead of working.

Della Mora explains that many builds (especially automotive sets) have mirrored sections. These are parts like the doors on a Lamborghini Countach that must be built twice. He says that if you build both doors at once, rather than finishing one and then going back and doing another, as the instructions suggest, you can shave precious seconds off your build times.

Do Some Reading

Building Lego sets with instructions is great and, for many of us, is all we ever aspire to. But by paying attention to the engineering going on under the surface of these sets, those of us who want to use bricks more creatively can learn a lot about how to build our projects.

The Countach is a particularly good example, as it employs many Lego-building tricks to manipulate the rectilinear bricks to form the angular shapes required by Marcello Gandini’s famously angular shape.

If those tricks inspire you to make your creations, Della Mora says that watching pros like him and reading blogs like New Elementary can teach you how to handle bricks in ways you might never have imagined.

If you do end up making your own creations, Della Mora’s top tip for new creators is to keep your ideas “low res.” Even with all the tricks professional creators employ, building with bricks can be limiting, so trying to create something with too much detail can actually make it harder for people to recognize what it is. Keeping your vision simple and clear will ensure that people understand what you’ve made.