Breaking Records with DFDS
This is probably our biggest, and most incredible build to date, and when we say big - we mean Guinness World Record breaking BIG! Built in collaboration with DFDS, the Danish Shipping Company, Jubilee Seaways is the world’s largest (supported) LEGO(R) ship. The ship was launched in Copenhagen on August 17, 2016. At 12.035m long, and built using over a million LEGO(R) bricks, she is a world record breaker!
Like many of our BIG Builds, the ship uses giant scale LEGO(R) Bricks, built from normal blocks - but given the scale of this project, we needed help. So DFDS called on their staff, around 7000 of them based in over twenty countries (not to mention many of their ships) to help build the big bricks.
Each department then sent their built bricks back to us in Edinburgh, ready for assembly. We had great fun seeing where all the different shipments came from! Many of the brick builders had added their names or little notes onto the inside of their bricks which was lovely to see.
But it was not just big bricks we needed, we also needed a 40ft (13.65m) trailer and a steel frame. Why you ask? Well this ship is designed to move! DFDS plans to tour the ship to all its offices and shipping locations across Europe. So this ship is going to rack up a lot of miles, and needs to be structurally strong enough to survive all these journeys.
We had the trailer and the frame, and all the bricks, we also needed a warehouse as our normal studio was not big enough, plus some extra staff to help build! For our team of seven people, it took just two weeks (around 900 working hours) to put the whole thing together (not counting all the planning beforehand). And no, for the most part it is not glued! Some glue was used on the most structurally fragile sections but everything else is just held together by friction.
The most nerve-racking part of the build was the test drive; the ship was not entirely finished but we needed to make sure it would hold together on the back of the lorry. Thankfully, everything was ship-shape(!) and the build could be completed safely.
The Scottish AFOL (Adult Fans of LEGO) Group, Tartan LUG, built vehicles for the deck of the ship for that perfect finishing touch.
And as you can see in the first picture, there is another ship! Since the big ship would not fit in the DFDS offices, we also built much smaller ship (still over 2m long!) - with all the same details as the original.