The newest addition to the grand list of Coolest Things Ever is being unveiled in New York today: the Lego X-Wing, the largest Lego model ever built. The model of the classic Star Wars fighter being unveiled in Times Square has a wingspan of 44 feet and comes complete with R2-D2 and a full range of sound effects. It’s a super-duper-sized version of Star Wars Lego starfighter set #9493 and was made with 5,335,200 Lego bricks. That, according to Lego, makes it the largest model ever built, eclipsing the Lego robot at the Mall of America by some 2 million bricks. This replica of the Rebel Alliance dogfighter is 42 times the size of the Lego version we’ve all built and a bit bigger than a real X-Wing. (Yes, yes, we know they’re not real. Just go with it.) The X-Wing Luke Skywalker and his fellow rebels flew was about 41 feet long, 2 feet shorter than this Lego masterpiece. The X-Wing was built at the Lego Model Shop at the company’s facility in Kladno, Czech Republic. It took 32 “master builders” (Note: This is a real job, and we’re preparing our resumés.) 17,336 man-hours to construct the X-Wing.
Plans for the model were created using Lego’s proprietary 3-D design software, and the construction team had to work with a team of structural engineers to ensure that the model was safe, master builder Erik Varszegi told Wired. “This has been a wild and exciting project for us, and it’s taken an international team of designers, engineers, structural consultants, model builders, and logistics personal over a year to bring this model from a conception to reality,” Varszegi said in an email. “In one respect, designing it was the ‘easy’ part, as we were creating a scaled version of an actual toy construction set.” Once completed, the model — which weighs 45,980 pounds — was broken down into 34 pieces to be shipped to New York by boat (the voyage took two boats two months to complete). Lest the West Coast feel left out, the starfighter is coming to Legoland California after its tenure in Times Square and will remain there until the end of the year. Twenty-three tons is a whole lot of anything, especially Lego bricks, but much of the model’s weight lies in the model’s steel skeleton, which it needed in order to withstand the vibrations from the subway that runs beneath Duffy Square in Manhattan and any seismic activity it could face in Southern California.
While a slightly larger-than-lifesize Lego X-Wing would be awesome even if were made for no particular reason at all, the model was built to celebrate the forthcoming premiere of the latest Lego Star Wars series The Yoda Chronicles — a three-part animated miniseries launching on Cartoon Network next Wednesday. That’s the official reason this was built, but we wouldn’t be surprised if Lego made this thing just for the thrill. “My fellow Master Builders and I are always looking for a challenge — and for projects that push our skills to the next level,” Varszegi said. The team chose the X-Wing because it “is one of the most iconic vehicles in the Star Wars universe and the sheer size and scope of the building and engineering challenges was one we couldn’t resist.” We’re awaiting the day these Lego master builders create a Death Star for this X-Wing to annihilate.Easy Lego CakeLego Man CakeMan Birthday CakesLego BirthdayBirthday IdeasCake TutorialDiy TutorialGeek PartyLego FiguresForwardLego Man Birthday Cake Tutorial via The Nifty Nerd |
Check out this easy tutorial for creating a Lego figure cake; perfect for a nerdy birthday or geek party!AMSTERDAM A giant, smiling Lego man was fished out of the sea in the Dutch resort of Zandvoort on Tuesday. Workers at a drinks stall rescued the 2.5-metre (8-foot) tall model with a yellow head and blue torso. "We saw something bobbing about in the sea and we decided to take it out of the water," said a stall worker. A woman nearby added: "I saw the Lego toy floating towards the beach from the direction of England." The toy was later placed in front of the drinks stall. Austerity measure: Britain's PM May gives up crisps for Lent LONDON British Prime Minister Theresa May, who is not known for her self-indulgence, has revealed she will be giving up crisps in the run-up to Easter -- a period called Lent when many Christians fast or give up luxuries. Flour power lifts spirits as Greek village stages mock battle GALAXIDI, GREECE Greek villagers staged a street battle on Monday with bags of colored flour in an annual tradition called the Flour War.
Staff at Italian hospital suspected of shirking on grand scale ROME Doctors and nurses are among 94 hospital workers from Naples who have been placed under investigation on suspicion of repeatedly skipping work, police said on Friday.LEGO Star WarsSee allLEGOLEGO bricks are a classic building toy enjoyed by the young and young at heart for generations. At Walmart, you'll find a wide seletion of LEGO sets, all at Every Day Low Prices.LEGO sets let you build new and familiar worlds in creative ways. With LEGO Super Heroes sets, you can enter the worlds of your favorite superheroes, including Batman, Spider-Man and the Avengers. Enter the Star Wars universe with Star Wars LEGO sets. Recreate scenes from Jurassic World with LEGO Jurassic World sets. Or build your own urban landscape with classic playsets'>LEGO city sets. Fans will also get a kick out of LEGO Minecraft sets and LEGO Creator sets. For imaginative pretend play, check out the LEGO Friends sets. And for the perfect introduction to building with LEGO bricks, pick up a LEGO Juniors set.
With a huge selection of LEGO sets and other toys at great prices, Walmart has you covered. on October 25, 2011 This morning on Siesta Key Beach (a.k.a, the best beach in America), some guy found a giant LEGO man in the surf. It’s 8 feet tall, made out of fiber glass, and is wearing red pants and a green shirt that says “NO REAL THAN YOU ARE.” Giant LEGO men like these have also washed up in other beach resort towns: Brighton, England in 2008 and the first one in Zandvoort, Netherlands in 2007. They all wear red pants, but the one in Zandvoort had a blue shirt; the other two had green shirts. And the ones in Sarasota and Zandvoort were 8-ft tall and had the “NO REAL THAN YOU ARE” slogan, while the one in Brighton was 6-ft and had no slogan. That slogan, by the way, is the title of Ego Leonard’s website; he’s an artist and has a picture of a LEGO man on the site that says “HELLO HOW ARE YOU DOING TODAY.” If you for some reason use only his last initial, his name is Ego L. ;
if you then did the last-name-first thing, you’d end up with L., Ego — the LEGO man. The earliest the Internet archive time machine crawled his page was in October of 2007, two months after the first man was found. His website title was the same. There’s a very interesting pattern at play here: besides the fact that they appear in beach resort towns, you can draw an almost straight line on the map, going southwest, connecting all three towns. And each time, it crossed (or went around) land too — first, across South East England, then across Florida. It took nine months for the phenomenon to cross the North Sea to England, and then just five days shy of four years to cross the Atlantic to Florida. In miles per month traveled though, it went four times faster across the Atlantic: 5,000 miles in 48 months vs 375 miles in 15 months; maybe it had a faster ship to cross the ocean. If the pattern holds, it should next land somewhere around Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, sometime in mid-2013 — assuming same speed over land, and a bunch of other things.