*Our LEGO Concorde under the National Museum of Flight’s Concorde*

When the pandemic brought regular BIG Build events to a halt, we had to adapt.

Venues often commission us to build a model of local or topical importance to accompany their run of one of our touring exhibitions. The National Museum of Flight has an amazing collection of aircraft on display and they asked us if we could do a version of Concorde for them. Not one to shy away from a challenge we jumped at the chance to recreate the beautiful shape and lines!

Design

Starting with a digital 3D model of the original plane, we use the shape to turn it into a base model that we can refine. Once that’s done we cut it into sections so we can build them separately. This allows us to see if there are areas we can design once and build multiple times in a modular way. We did this for the central sections of the fuselage. Within each of those sections we designed smaller modules that could be built in bulk and then slotted together to form the larger shapes.

There are over 60,000 bricks in the completed model!
We love building with just these bricks - it is a great reminder that no matter how many different shaped parts are now available, the archetypal 2x4 brick lets you build whatever you want - sometimes you just have to think BIG!

Build

Once we arrived on site we set up the staging for the model and then we got to work putting those 60,000 bricks together. I must admit our hands were quite tired at the end of the week! We added it up and worked out it took about 72 hours to build! We were very grateful for the hands-on support efforts of Claire & Bryony of the NMS Events Team.

Every single piece in this build is a 2x4 brick in either white, black, red or blue (and a few dark blueish grey ones for the supports). The CAD programme we use shows the design in 2x2 bricks, but when we’re actually building it we are building in 2x4 bricks.

The CAD programme doesn’t have any sense of structural integrity or take account of forces such as gravity, so although it gives us the final shape we have to use our knowledge and skills to make that shape work in the real world. The nose and the tail of this model are particularly difficult because of the overhang and conical shapes. It’s not feasible to plan every part of the build in advance, and that is where our years of experience come into their own.