A Star Wars fan has bypassed the official LEGO Millennium Falcon set (and its eyewatering price tag) by building it out of LEGO he already had at home.
Reddit is frothing over this extraordinary ‘piece of junk’ that u/ben851 posted a few days ago, who assures any naysayers that ‘She’s got it where it counts, kid! I’ve made a lot of special modifications!’
The actual LEGO set will set you back $AU1299 retail but, in the comments, Ben said he couldn’t justify the spend.
“For me my favourite part of Lego is, to quote Bob from Bob’s Burgers, ‘The thrill of the build’,” he said.
Using the building instructions which are freely available from LEGO, Ben created his own Millennium Falcon which he says is about 85 per cent accurate, the rest is improvised.
“I did have to order about $60 worth of parts off of BrickLink just because of the quantities required,” he said. BrickLink is an online marketplace for LEGO products.
“It took about 6 months working for a few hours a week to complete – 90% of the time is searching for the parts.”
He admitted that some of the smaller details had to be omitted from the build simply because of the sheer time it took to find pieces.
“I know I have the pieces, but I could spend 20 minutes looking for that one piece and not find it,” he said. “I kept a mental note in my head for common small pieces I needed and would put them aside as I built the rest of it.”
To say people were impressed is a straight-up understatement.
“Honestly….this method of building this is probably the most true to the spirit of the millennium falcon… and Lego,” one Redditor said.
“Seriously man, this version rocks exactly for the reason he mentioned,” said another.
“I don’t know how/when/why Legos became all about ‘kits’ (and not pooping on anyone’s party for those that enjoy them) but to me, Legos was all about the imagination and building and cobbling things together from scratch with nothing but whatever you had and an idea in your head.
“This is so the epitome of not just Legos but the Millenium Falcon. Not to heap too much praise on you but you should definitely be proud of this and display it because if I saw this and the regular kit one side-by-side I would spend way more time looking at this one just so I could see/pick out the pieces and think about my own.”
Ben’s plan for his build is to “keep it for a bit” before breaking it down to start a new project.
