There are plenty of life-size LEGO lightsabers out there (including LEGO’s own promos), both from the Star Wars films and builders creating their own. Dicken Liu has taken inspiration from an altogether different source for their 1:1-scale brick-built laser sword hilt, however. This LEGO lightsaber is a model of, well, a LEGO lightsaber! I suppose that technically makes it 12:1 scale. This minifigure accessory has been virtually unchanged since the Star Wars line made its debut 23 years ago. Here its form is very faithfully recreated, making good use of the myriad round and curved slopes in the LEGO parts catalogue. Interestingly I think virtually all of the external parts you see here didn’t exist back in 1999, when we got the first Star Wars sets!

Super-sizing the lightsaber this way leaves a lot of dead space in the middle, which Liu has seen fit to fill with the crystal mechanism. While the colour choice of light bluish grey is a logical one from an accuracy point of view, here it allows the attention to be drawn to the metallic and chrome gold of the inside. There’s some nice symmetry with gold lightsabers making up some of this detail. The two king’s crowns make for very attractive housings for the kyber crystal – which is red, so clearly we’re dealing with the weapon of a Sith rather than a Jedi here! I haven’t seen many LEGO lightsabers in cross-section, but now I want to see more…