Build Yourself An Aircraft Carrier

Thirty-six year-old IT consultant Malle Hawking, of Munich, Germany, never left his boyhood behind... as evidenced by his scale model LEGO construction of the USS Harry S Truman aircraft carrier.

The 300,000 LEGO brick model now lays claim to being the largest LEGO ship in the world, at 14.7 feet, and weighs in at more than 353 pounds. (The USS Harry S Truman is, after all, one of the largest ships currently afloat.) It features electric lights on the flight deck, in the hangar, and inside the aircraft, as well as movable elevators and radar dishes and a motorized catapult.

No stranger to LEGO building, Hawking has built planes, trains and automobiles with the ubiquitous brick over the years.

His mission of copying the life-size carrier (the real thing is shown below) down to the tiniest detail came about after watching a documentary about aircraft carriers.

"I used to play and build LEGO models when I was a boy, all my friends did as well," he said. "I stopped building in my teens but in February 2005, almost 20 years after the beginning of my so-called Dark Ages -- when I did not have any LEGO -- I watched a documentary about aircraft carriers."

"I was so inspired I ran down to the cellar, poured my two boxes of LEGO on to the floor and immediately started trying to build one of my own."

Hawking used Internet pictures as the models for his model. "I had only about 25 pictures from the Internet to work from and there were some real challenges in making the model the right size for LEGO figures," he said.

The construction took over one year.

The vessel will go on display in Cologne, next month before going to the Brickworld 2007 LEGO convention in Chicago.

The LEGO brick, first launched in 1958, was named twice as "Toy of the Century." According to the LEGO Web site, there are more than 900 million ways of combining six eight-stud bricks of the same color.

FMI: www.lego.com, www.recordholders.org/en/list/lego.html, Click Here For Pics!