Get ready for lift off!

This summer, we’ve been back at the National Museum of Flight with our Brick History tour. It’s a great venue to work in and of course, putting an exhibition underneath Concorde is no bad thing!

This year we decided to add something new to the mix and include a public BIG Build - with a twist. A 3 meter tall Saturn V rocket!

As with all of our BIG builds, we designed the rocket model at 1/4 scale, using normal LEGO bricks. Then, to scale that model up - we ask the public to create BIG versions of them, 4 times the original size.

Obviously a rocket isn’t square, so in this instance I designed a few variations of bricks that the public could build, to let us create the cylindrical shape of the rocket.

To add some finishing touches, we supplied and installed the starcloth you can see behind the model, and arranged for hire and delivery of a MEWP (the orange ‘cherry picker’), which of course I’m fully qualified to drive.

Of course, building a 3m tall model (that weighs nearly 100Kg) isn’t something you can just do. We needed to make sure that the model itself was safe to build and leave on display. It was time to break out my old maths lessons!

I designed the model to sit on a solid base, so that we could make sure it was 100% level - and to act as a ‘ballast’. This would make sure that it couldn’t be tipped over. Inside a custom built box, we installed 120Kg of weights - and mounts to bolt in a vertical truss leg. This leg doesn’t take any of the weight of the model - but as the rocket is built around it, it makes sure that it can’t be moved.

The rocket gets smaller towards the top of course, so higher up the truss is turned into vertical pole. More custom metalwork was designed and built to make those fit together.

So, why go to all this effort for a single weekend build? Well, of course we do something similar for all of our BIG builds. In this case though, once it’s finished on display at the National Museum of Flight we will take it all apart - to be rebuilt again! Keep an eye out for more details on that very soon….