LEGO® Xtra review & MOCs: 854048 Road Tape & 854065 Water Tape

French concept artist and architect Pierre-E Fieschi (@pierreefieschi) returns today but this time with one of our strangest briefs ever: we sent him rolls of LEGO® Xtra 854048 Road Tape & 854065 Water Tape. The products in this article were provided for free by LEGO; the author's opinions are not biased by this. Thanks to Adeel Zubair for product photography.

I was tasked by New Elementary to review and test out the decorated adhesives released in 2020 as part of the LEGO® Xtra line of accessories, before trying to include these very particular 'forbidden elements' in MOCs. A completely unusual LEGO experience for me; challenging but fun. There are 2 variants of this 15m long (49ft) roll of tape: a road print and a water print. 

Forbidden Elementary: Sticker sheet cardboard box

Inthert (on Instagram) returns today with a wholly (and holey) different idea for a New Elementary post. Welcome to Forbidden Elementary, where we look at elements that aren't elements. Heresy!

Designed to withstand even the most enthusiastic play, the average LEGO® brick doesn’t typically require individual protective packaging. However, some of the more fragile, non-standard elements like rubber bands, string and cloth pieces need exactly that and so are placed in small cardboard boxes to keep them safe from factory to consumer.

This particular specimen comes from the Speed Champions polybag 30342 Lamborghini Huracán Super Trofeo Evo which was available for free with qualifying purchases from LEGO in June and August 2020. Unusually, it does not contain one of the vulnerable element types listed above; instead it protects the tiny sticker sheet from getting crumpled in the bag. Before diving deeper into the wonderful potential of cardboard LEGO elements, let’s take a brief look at the model itself because without it, I wouldn’t have embarked on this bizarre endeavour.

Forbidden Elementary: The Spurious Sprue

While some fans will be thrilled at the return of LEGO® Harry Potter, we were more excited about the arrival of the new wand element (Design ID 36752) which Elspeth De Montes examined recently. But as she now explores, there is more to the element than simply two wonderful wands: there is a little piece of plastic designed to hold them neatly together in the mould – the sprue.

Due to numerous reader questions, comments and ideas across social media, we’ve decided the wand sprue is worth a closer look. It is anchor-shaped and approximately half the depth of a tile, with a flat side and a slightly rounded side.