book provided by Studio 2.0. But
by page 200, he says, “things
started to fall apart.”
Design f laws spanned the
length of the ship. “The engine
end broke apart multiple times,”
Charles says. “I had all these
sharp angles that worked per-
fectly in my computer model,
but refused to stick together
in reality, and the tip of the
model sagged at the bottom. To
fix that, I had to design a way
for the last underside panel to
lock upward into place.” This
wouldn’t be as straightforward
as a professional LEGO model,
which, by coincidence, was
becoming available at the exact
same time.
THE REAL DEAL
While Charles was modeling his
custom Star Destroyer on Stu-
dio 2.0, LEGO commissioned
their creative teams to build
the exact same ship. The LEGO
Group’s official “Ultimate Col-
lector Series Star Wars Imperial
Star Destroyer” hit shelves in
October 2019.
“I started building it in my
free time at work,” says Hen-
rik Andersen, lead designer
for the official Imperial Star
Destroyer model. Henrik’s
supervisors noted his passion
project and tasked him to make
it official, assigning him a dead-
line and a price point of about
$700. That price cap, hefty as it
is, means LEGO’s destroyer is
around one-quarter the bricks
of Charles’s custom ship. Nev-
ertheless, at 4,784 pieces, the
official model is among the
biggest sets the company has pro-
duced. It takes about 30 hours of
brick-clicking to finish.
Henrik and Charles deployed
similar engineering strate-
gies to keep their respective
15- and 44-pound models from
collapsing or breaking apart.
They each relied on a support
spine and skeletal system con-
structed from classic LEGO
bricks and load-bearing LEGO
Technic bricks (the latter can
be fitted with interconnecting
axles). And they independently
worked out the same solution to
locking the starship’s underside
panels onto the model—using
the bottom spine as leverage for
pressing in the pieces.
It was the destroyer’s under-
side hanger (the one that
swallows Leia’s cruiser in A New
Hope) that posed the biggest
test for both builders—and they
each took a different approach.
“The hanger is almost as deep
as the ship, which ends up put-
ting a large hole right where
you’d want a support spine to
be,” says Charles. Henrik made
the official hanger shallower
than what you see in the films
so a spine could run above it,
but Charles bisected his ship’s
spine around the space for pro-
portional authenticity. “Making
that work was an enormous
challenge,” Charles says. “As I
added elements to the model,
the increasing weight started
to pull on [that section of the
spine], f lexing pieces and pull-
ing apart bricks. At one point
I came back from a trip to find
the middle of the ship bowing
and falling apart because of that
hanger.” Charles had to rede-
sign the weight-bearing spine of
his 44-pound beast twice, add-
ing more supporting ribs and
adjusting the anchor points of
his underside panels.
Charles’s model is sleeker
and more true-to-film than
Henrik’s, who says he “tried
to balance the studs and f lat
surfaces to give it the charac-
teristic look of a LEGO model,”
but the two creators are largely
complimentary of one another’s
builds.SELL YOUR
MODEL
WORLDWIDE
If you think your custom
LEGO model is impressive
enough to be mass-produced
and shipped around the world,
you have two options:THE OFFICIAL ROUTE:
LEGO IDEAS. Launched
in 2008, this is where
fans pitch new sets for com-
mercial production. If you
have an idea for a set (must
be 2,000 pieces or less), build
it, take photos, and post it on
the LEGO Ideas website. If it’s
popular and receives “sup-
port” from 10,000 fans, the
LEGO Group will consider it for
production.
If the bigwigs approve,
you’ll work with the LEGO
design team in Denmark on
final tweaks. “It’s one thing
for a model to be complex
and beautiful, but you have to
make sure that building it is a
fun experience,” says Johnny
Castrup, head of LEGO Ideas.
After tweaks, your set will hit
stores worldwide, and you’ll
receive 1 percent of the royal-
ties in perpetuity.
It’s tough going, however: In
12 years, only 27 fan sets have
been published.THE FAN ROUTE:
AFOL. In fall 2018,
BrickLink launched a
production platform called the
AFOL (Adult Fans of LEGO)
Designer Program. It worked
like a Kickstarter. Fans sub-
mitted more than 400 designs
through Studio 2.0, and Brick-
Link worked with professional
designers from the LEGO
Group to test those designs
and nominate 16 finalists for
crowdfunding.
The AFOL Designer Pro-
gram paid off in May 2019,
when BrickLink shipped 13
of the finalist products to
consumers. The sets are gor-
geous—there’s an antique fire
engine and a steampunk chess
set—and if you missed the
boat the first time, the contest
continued on page 80 might return this year.March/April 2020 53