As mentioned in an earlier post, I have a fascination with Lego and Star Wars and when the two met, out popped another hobby. For the past few months I’ve been noodling away on a studio scale prop replica of the Millennium Falcon. It dawned on me that I should really document some of the process – especially since my product design background lends itself to an entirely different approach to typical fine scale modeling.

So as not to distract from the content of this blog, I started another one. I’ve been frantically populating it with stuff as to try and make-up for lost time so forgive me if the posts thus far don’t seem very organic.

Enjoy,

J.

Last summer, my awesome wife gave me the Ultimate Collector’s Edition Star Wars Millennium Falcon. She’s so awesome!

It was a super fun build and without sounding like a “what I did last summer” essay, it took me a little over 45 hours to put together.

Of course, that included time to organize the parts – which covered our dinning room table with both leaves inserted…

And time for a few ceremonial in-progress photos (although not nearly enough)…

And the final piece!!!

Did I mention how awesome my wife is? She’s pretty awesome – and then she got awesomer!

For Christmas, Santa (a.k.a my awesome wife) brought me the Lego Star Destroyer. This was another super fun build – although it only took me about 19 hours to complete. The parts were pretty well pre-sorted in the box and there are many fewer little details to slow you down than on the Falcon – not to mention the whole Falcon is asymmetric; meaning you can’t build large sections in duplicate like on the Destroyer.

Wading waist deep through Lego Star Wars replica’s got me wondering – If I have this monster Lego Falcon  kit, but wanted a relative scale Star Destroyer to hide it on, how big would that have to be. It turns out, bigger than I could ever build – 178 ft in length!

But what about the other way around? I have a monster Star Destroyer. Could I make a tiny little Falcon to go on it?

Well it’s pretty small. It’s not even an inch in length. So I whipped-up a quick CAD model in Alias and sent it off to our 3D printer at work. The thing is so small it only took 6 minutes to build on the FDM.

Designing it was fun too. I wanted it to be a functional Lego piece and the only way to do so was to make it only one stud big. It has a hole on the underside, just a like a real Lego piece would and a single Lego stud on it’s dome – just in case I ever want to attach any additional Lego to it.

Spending a few hours researching the proper size of the Falcon and building the CAD for the Lego part, I inevitably stumbled upon Tim Ketzer’s site. I was enchanted. I also have a new hobby…