JMBricklayer The White Swan Ship 40104 Building Block Set Review

Hello brick fans!

Today's brick toy set review is the JMBricklayer White Swan Ship, set number 40104.  It looks to be closely modelled after the Brazilian Navy shop called Cisne Branco.

I'll be doing a quick unboxing and build today and give you my thoughts on the set.

Thanks to JMBricklayer.com for providing the White Swan set to me for today's review!

Here are some details about this building block set.  The impressive White Swan ship model is 66cm long by 10cm wide by 41.5 cm tall.  It comes with printed parts and a sticker sheet.  

Brand: JMBricklayer

Set: The White Swan 40104

Theme: The Age of Exploration

Number of pieces: 1672

Stickers or printed parts: Both

Minifigures: none

Missing parts: No

Extra parts: Yes

Age rating: 14+

Here's what's in the box:

Here are all the parts, six bags corresponding to each stage of building plus one extra bag of parts consisting of the sails, the rigging and the chain pieces.

The sticker sheet.

The instruction manual has 87 pages and a total of 359 steps.

Unlike a lot of other brick built ship sets, the hull of this ship is brick built rather than a single hull piece.

The SNOT (studs not on top) building technique uses many bricks that have studs on the side to facilitate the cladding which will come next.

In addition to the side cladding, we have installed all of the bricks for the decking.

Please note that on my set, some of the printed pieces are not properly aligned.  Some of the port holes are higher and some are lower.  It's only noticeable if you come up close to the model, from a distance it's ok.

In this set, more surface detail is added.

Here are the two interior cabins that fit into the ship.  One looks like a galley and another might be the captain's berth.  The larger scale of the cabins doesn't really match the scale of the ship in my opinion.

Fitting the cabins into the ship.  The black round studs are supposed to be portholes.

So at the bow of the ship I found one problematic design issue where the front plate is held onto the rest of the ship hull by just one stud.  It would keep falling off whenever I tried to attach anything to it.  Fortunately it stayed on for this picture!

A pair of teeny tiny lifeboats!

The chains are comprised of separate links which you have to attach together and my fat fingers had a real hard time of it, but I did it!

Here are the three tall masts and with the attached sails.  Mine don't look as nice as the pictures, :( .

Here is the custom stand that comes with the White Swan set.

I made a complete mess of the White Swan sticker when I tried to affix it to the stand.  I got it completely off center and when I tried to move it, it just ripped, arghh.

The stickers are quite fragile and I decided not to apply anymore stickers to my set. 

Instead I substituted the signage with one of the custom printed tiles you can order from the JMBricklayer website.   They come in a variety of shapes and you can send them an image of what you want printed on the tiles.  You can check out all of their custom printing options here.  Maybe get JMBricklayer to print a custom White Swan sign!  Now, why didn't I think of that?

My seasonal allergies were starting to get the best of me, with lots of sneezing and sniffling.  Because of this I decided to put off adding all the rigging to the sails, until a future date, so for now this is how my set looks.

This is what I had left over.  You get lots of extra chain link pieces plus several assorted 1x1 parts.  The string for the rigging and the smaller sails, I'll save for later.

Final Thoughts

All in all, the White Swan is a very accurate representation of the three masted clipper ship, the Cisne Blanco.  If you'd like to see how the ship is supposed to look like, check out this Youtube video on the JMBricklayer channel!

The ship itself is quite sturdy, but the design of the bow could be improved to add more clutch power to the front cladding.  The cloth material used for the sails was a bit thin and I was concerned that I might accidentally rip it while putting it on the masts. This is the first ship I've built with cloth sails so I'm not sure if this is the standard or not.   

The stickers are a two sided affair, first you peel the sticker off the paper backing and apply it to the brick, then you peel the top layer off the sticker.  You need to be extra careful when apply the stickers because one wrong move and the sticker is fubar, as I discovered.  But then I don't generally have a lot of luck when placing stickers, so it could just be me.   

It would have been nice if they had only included printed parts with no stickers, but then again, some of the printed pieces were misaligned on my set, so ...

Another issue I had was the various scales used throughout the ship, from the large cabins and ship's wheel to the teeny tiny lifeboats.

I also learned that I don't have a lot of patience putting together the small chain links as I'm always in a hurry to move on to the next step.  You really have to take your time with the links and this kind of took the wind out of my sails towards the end. (You saw what I did there, right?)

The White Swan makes a very nice display piece so I will give it a rating of 3 out of 5 for the reasons above.

But hey, if you are a fan of pirate ships and sailing ships look no further than JMBricklayer's selection of nautical themed building block sets.  They have a ton of other unique building block sets too.   Use my code itsnotlego15% to save 15% off all non-discounted items on their website.  Don't forget to check out the latest JMBRicklayer deals in their Amazon store.

Thanks for looking, Bye!