It took $20,000 worth of plastic gray bricks, but Malle Hawking of Munich, Germany, has built a LEGO replica of the USS Harry S. Truman, one of the US Navy’s nuclear aircraft carriers.  As you can read in his story, he was inspired by the Discovery Channel documentary “City of Steel,” about the ship’s construction, sea trials, and launch.  Check out the full image gallery of this amazing feat of bricksmanship at Brick Shelf.

The LEGO version consists of the Harry S. Truman is composed of over 200,000 bricks and weighs in at an astounding 350 pounds!  It features moving radar dishes, a motorized catapult, and working lights!  It also boasts a full compliment of airplanes and tiny plastic flight crews in life vests.  Even more amazing, he managed to assemble this ship and somehow maintain his marriage.  If you thought making a matchstick Minas Tirith was tough, imagine having to explain to your wife that you spent $20,000 on toys!

Image:  Makezine

Tags: Melle Hawking, Munich, Germany, Legos, Lego models, Harry S. Truman, Lego aircraft carrier, USS Harry S. Truman, Nimitz-class aircraft carrier in Lego, toys, models

The Seminole Indian tribe is a little different from your standard American Indian group.  For starters, they’ve never actually surrendered to the United States government at the end of the Seminole Wars.  They’re also the tribe to make the switch from being simple tribal gaming organization to actually owning their own casino company when they […]

China is a veritable wonderland of weird people and even weirder animals.  Snake with a foot?  You know it’s from China.  Alien fish monster?  Found in a cave in China.  Village of midgets, dwarfs, and other wee folks?  China all the way.  And now, joining China’s menagerie of monsters and freaks is a six-legged calf, […]

Bryan Berg has been practicing his craft, building houses of cards, since he was a kid.  When he was 17, he broke the record for the world’s largest tower of cards, then later broke that same record again in 2007 with a 25-foot tower.  Given his love of stacking cards and his background as an […]

Among all the events at the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, nothing was as popular in the home country as was the hockey.  Specifically, the men’s hockey gold medal game between the United States and Canada, which set all kinds of viewing records on both sides of the border.  If you take one look at this […]

I smell a holiday tradition!  On the heels of the amazing Sketchy Santas website is a companion piece for the spring, known as Easter Bunnies Will Steal Your Soul.  While the Easter Bunny is less likely to be a blatant child molesting old drunk, it’s no less creepy to find yourself terrorized by a 7-foot-tall […]

Mars, our nearest planetary neighbor, has long been a source of fascination for the world.  Are there aliens there?  Will we go pay a visit and explore the surface?  Are there gorillas?  Well, actually, the Martian gorilla pictures are a new phenomenon, but long story short, mankind has a long and storied history of being […]

What do you get when you take the best in Japanese high culture, the haiku, and mash it up with the best in Japanese pop culture, the giant kaiju monster?  Well, quite simply, you get the brilliant Godzilla haiku macros of blogger Samurai Frog.  You can find them at his blog under the tag Godzilla […]