Dumbledore’s lectern

Each year on 1 September, Dumbledore would welcome the students back to Hogwarts from his lectern in the Great Hall (and then typically proceed to announce a new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher). As the lectern features in most movies, I am glad to have built a lectern for my own Great Hall now.

It has been a while since I did any serious building. Instead, I’ve been busy refurbishing and organising my new LEGO room. More about that in a later post. But with all time spent organising of my LEGO collection and in particular my loose bricks, building MOCs has now become a lot easier.

First to benefit from the increased level of organisation is Dumbledore’s lectern. Below is a photo of what it looked like in the movies.

Back in September 2020, I built the lectern in larger scale, when I tried to come up with alternative builds using the bricks that came with the LEGO Harry Potter – Build Your Own Adventure book. Considering the limited selection of bricks that came with the book, I was pretty happy with the result, which is shown below.

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As I noted back then, the Build Your Own Adventure book even had a suggestion to how you could build one in minifigure scale as shown here.

Since then, I wanted to build my own version – though slightly bigger as I planned to build it using the minifigure wings instead of the flame pieces. It got almost completed but as I was missing a few pieces (including the wings) it ended up in a plastic bag in a box with other “work in progress” projects and eventually forgotten.

When I recently started moving my LEGO into the refurbished room, I found it again – and as I worked my way through boxes and bags full of LEGO parts, I eventually also found the few pieces I needed to complete this. So here my minifigure version of Dumbledore’s lectern…

The photos below show in more detail how it has been built. I’ve also made a set of instructions available here. Note that the placement of the candles is rather fiddly and is absolutely not an officially sanctioned LEGO connection!

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Overall, I am pretty happy with result, though the candles in particular are a bit fragile because the way they are attached, but I haven’t come up with a better way to have the ones at the wing tips higher than those in the middle. It wouldn’t have worked for play, but it is okay for display.

I may try a few alternatives in the coming months to see if I can improve further. Maybe it also need a smaller head? Time will tell…

Till then, Build the Magic!