Jabba's Palace/Rancor Pit Upgrade

[Monkey Shuttle]

I recently purchased the Rancor Pit set and found that while it was pretty neat, it still had some pretty glaring issues. Chiefly among them, the fact that when connected to Jabba's Palace, the gate piece had to be swung outwards in order to be opened. This, along with having to disconnect the tower from Jabba's Palace, and basically losing the outside view aesthetic kind of ruined the whole combining feature for me. Even with a little finagling, I still wasn't satisfied.

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So I went ahead and bought a second Rancor set with the hopes of making the pit larger, maintaining the gate function unhindered, and overall just improving the general combined aesthetic.

I added more walkways for the Rancor Keeper to do his duties, ultimately culminating at a stairwell to access the palace above. The gate piece separating the Rancor Keeper's route from the pit itself does not move up and down. It's merely there for protection. I put a little red button near the opening rock/Luke hiding place so as to function as an access panel for the play feature.

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I also managed to expand the floor around the tower to accommodate displaying the Gamorrean Guards (something that really bugged my about the Palace to begin with). There are also some small steps that lead up to the Jabba's Throne Room.

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I walled up the portion of the Rancor Pit that faces outwards so that the original outer palace display aesthetic could be better maintained.

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And generally, I just made the pit larger so that the Rancor had actual space to move in instead of coming through the gate and just taking up the entire environment.

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I didn't use all of the pieces from the second set, but every piece used to improve the Rancor Pit came solely from that second set.

Thanks for looking.

[bamtheosg]

Bravo! Lots of great ideas including better combining, guardpost area, stairs... But your best idea was to use pieces solely form the 2nd set. Well done!

[The-Daryl]

Looks great!

[darwin316]

This is definitely better than the original design.

I modded the palace and pit last month with a second pit set as well and came up with a different configuration.





More pics here

[bee]

^That's AWESOME darwin. Is it hard to do?

[Monkey Shuttle]

I like that design, too.

[darwin316]

^That's AWESOME darwin. Is it hard to do?

Thanks, and not really. But you will need extra plates in addition to the extra pit set.

Sorry OP, didn't mean to hijack your thread. Just wanted to confirm the need to modify the original design.

[Monkey Shuttle]

No worries. I was actually kind of curious myself.

[lemus]

Both MOCs are great! Monkey's has the extra merit of only reusing pieces from 2 copies of the original rancor.