This model of USS Wisconsin was made by a member of the Hampton Roads Lego User Group, or
HARDLUG, in support of the 2021 Brick by Brick: Lego Shipbuilding event,
put on by the Hampton Roads Naval Museum. HARDLUG is a local club of Lego fans who
share the love of building and creating cool stuff with Lego as the medium for their art.
The shipbuilding event is always a highlight of our year, because it lets us meet other local Lego
fans and gives us an excuse to build big, crazy ships like the Wisconsin here to amuse the crowd,
and it gives us something to talk about with our new friends that we always meet.
This year is a little different, and the museum is making the effort to have a virtual event, so
we're supporting the event with a couple of videos that we hope you'll enjoy. The first video is just
a series of fly-bys to get a look at the outside of the ship. The second video is for the more
serious Lego fan. That's where we'll talk about building techniques and how it's all put together.
This is the old-school Wisconsin, as she looked back in the World War II days, so you won't
see the more modern radars, antennas, weapon systems, and helicopter flight deck that you'll see when
you're touring the real Wisconsin, but you'll see some other neat stuff, like there's the old-timey
quad anti-aircraft gun mounts, and there's about a zillion little .50-caliber machine gun mounts.
And there's a couple of seaplanes, which are pretty neat, on catapults, and a crane
to haul them back onboard, back aft. There are a few general questions that we always get about a
build like this, so I'll try to answer those now for you. First, she's about 9 feet long.
That makes her about a 1/100 scale model, and you'll some Lego trophy figures
that are up above the bridge and back aft that are almost, but not quite right for that scale,
but they're close enough to give you a sense of the size of the ship in relation to humans. The
scale itself was decided based on what part of the ship would look the worst if we got it wrong,
so we wanted to get that part right. For this model, it's those long, 16-inch gun barrels, so
we made sure those gun barrels were one Lego stud wide, and that made sure those would be easy to
build without making any compromises. Everything else is scaled up or scaled down from that. I used
an old plastic model that I had when I was a kid to help me keep the relative proportions right.
She comes apart in three sections of hull and a bunch of other little components. We'll have
another second video that shows you how that works. She took about four months to build,
working maybe an hour or two each day. That might sound like work, or some of you might say, "Boy,
that guy's got the most fun I know," and for me, it was the most fun I've ever had building a ship
so far. Full disclosure, she's not quite finished yet. You'll notice a couple of rough spots,
some places where the little plastic boatswain mates have left the primer showing.
We'll paint those light gray as soon as I can find that same part in light gray.
I have no idea how many bricks are in it--15 to 20,000 bricks is probably the right ballpark,
but that's just a guess. She's all Lego. There's no artificial internal structure
or anything like that. Everything inside her is Lego that holds it up or holds it together.
We don't use any glue. We recycle the bricks every build, so next year you'll probably see these same
bricks together in some other ship, and that's probably the coolest thing about Lego--when you're
tired of a battleship, you get to take it apart and make an aircraft carrier out of those bricks.
Building this big gives you the room to do some cool stuff, like motorizing the turrets. You've
seen in the video that the main guns will train and elevate. Those use the
Lego remote controls and motors to do that, and we'll show you how that works later. The smaller,
twin 5-inch gun turrets are hooked up to a central gear that oscillates back and forth.
The smaller mounts and the radars and directors can all rotate, but you've got to do that by hand
because there's just not enough room to motorize those. Working at this scale also gives you more
options to put in lots of those little details that make it look more realistic, whether you're
looking close-up, or whether you're standing back just taking in the whole ship. We've used
some weird building techniques to hide the studs, and make it look less blocky and more smooth and
realistic, and we'll get into those in the next video for those of you that're into that sort
of stuff. As big and cool as she is, this is just a model. I would encourage anyone to go down and
see the real Wisconsin for a sense of just how neat these battleships are in real life. We hope you enjoyed
this quick flyover tour of our Wisconsin, and we hope to see you in person at next year's event.