Malle Hawking’s LEGO Aircraft Carrier
This page on a site called Ezprezzo.com has been circulating the Internet of late — someone even sent the link to the “everyone” e-mail alias at my company. What’s a little frustrating about the page is that it provides no information about this amazing model — not even who built it.
Fortunately, the builder has been posting work-in-progress pics to LEGO image hosting site Brickshelf.com for quite some time now. Knowing his Brickshelf user name, Weebleleezer, I was able to find a profile on German-language LEGO site 1000steine.de.
With a name and e-mail address, I contacted Malle Hawking to confirm that he was the same Weebleleezer who posted the aircraft carrier to Brickshelf, and I suggested that I could post something about it here on DB. I was pleased to receive an e-mail later in the day from Malle, and he asked me to include some additional information about the model.
- The model is of USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75).
- It’s about 5 meters (16.4 feet) long and 1.2 meters (3.9 feet) tall.
- It contains over 200,000 bricks and weighs over 160 kilograms (352 pounds).
- The cost to build it was in the five digits. (Whether Euros or US dollars, that’s a lot!)
- It’s taken over a year to build, and will be complete at the end of March ’06.
- It has electric lights on the flight deck, in the hangar, and inside the aircraft.
- Movable elevators and radar dishes.
- Motorized catapult!!!
If you’d like to see this wonderful creation yourself, you can do so at the 1000steine-Land (TSL) event in Berlin August 18-20, 2006, and again at the end of September in Munich (Malle’s hometown). Malle also says, “Next year I’m looking forward to visit the States to show the Truman on LEGO events.” Any chance you’ll be coming to NWBrickCon, Malle? ;-)
Finally, Malle offers a dedication:
I dedicated it to the staff and families of the real “USS Harry S. Truman” and all the others who ever wanted to build one themselves.
Be sure to check out the full gallery on Brickshelf. If this is just one more set of work-in-progress photos, I can’t wait to see the finished version! Keep up the good work, Malle, and thanks for the info!
July 19th, 2007 at 6:35 pm
How did Malle Hawking build his aircraft carrier?
January 6th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
With lots of LEGO. ;-)
June 1st, 2008 at 4:33 pm
[...] the United States, Malle Hawking has completed his LEGO version of CVN-75, U.S.S. Harry S. Truman (previous post with details on the [...]