It took about 16 hours total.  I think.  I wasn’t really keeping attentive track of time.

It was spread out over at least 5 different days.  Only 2 of those were primarily devoted to building.

In the end…. it’s FREAKING AWESOME.  And it’s huge!  I think it weighs about 20 lbs.  Seriously.  I’ve never seen so many legos.  It was mind blowing.

First off, it was shipped.  It came in 3 nested boxes.  One outer one seemed to be a shipping box, then there was a middle one I have no idea about, then the actually display box.  I’m moving, so this is useful, but I still don’t understand why.

Once inside the boxes, it was divided into 3 sections, stocked to the brim with Lego in bags.  The instruction book covered the top of two of these sections.  I mentioned earlier that the instruction book weighed over 4 lbs.  The production values of the instruction book were astounding.  It was wire bound, so it laid flat, no matter what page you were on.  Given that it was open to some page for almost a week, this came in handy.

I had originally thought I’d use a single table to build, but found that I could fit all of the pieces in bags, with duplicate bags stacked, on a single table.  So I pulled out my second table and spread out.  This proved to be a wise decision, as there was plenty of room to build and to spread out pieces.

The internals of the Falcon are pretty spiffy.  There is a very sturdy frame, in a sort of plus (+) shape.  The interior corners of this are then reinforced so it’s almost round.  From there, the back engines go on, then the twin bows, giving the Falcon its distinctive shape.  Underneath, several very solid structures provide something that you can pick it up by, and 7 identical landing gears are used to support it.

After putting together the frame, the rest of the build was primarily about constructing a section of the hull and attaching it.  First the bottom, where the attachment was quite solid.  Then on to the top, where a lot of the pieces more or less just rest in place.  The identical top and bottom turrets epitomize this.  The bottom turret is attached to the main frame at 8 or 16 points, while the top turret slides into place and can easily be removed.

Towards the end of the build, things start to blur together, as there is a lot of fairly similar looking, yet actually different combinations of pieces protruding from the hull.  Then, the cockpit gets finished, and that’s exciting.  And finally the satellite dish.

But wait!  There were a bunch of other pieces, and a few more pages to go.  Oh, yes, there’s a plaque.  That’s right, a plaque, made of Lego, with a large sticker giving information about the Millennium Falcon.

After the build was over, I was left with the usual extra pieces they throw in, and several that looked, well, wrong, because they weren’t the usual sort of pieces that extras are thrown in for.  In particular, I had one smooth 1×8 plate that was the only smooth plate of that color left when I needed a 1×6, so I was sure that I put a 1×6 somewhere that a 1×8 should have gone (I found it a couple days later as I was explaining this to a friend, huzzah!).  But the extras just stuck in my mind as several mistakes that were almost impossible to track down.  Oh well, I can’t tell where.  If someone else can, I’ll fix them.

In the end, I’m very satisfied.  It’s definitely my largest build, and provided me relaxation and distraction in my free time for nearly a week.  And out of it, I get a mini-fig scale model of quite possibly my favorite Star Wars ship.  You just can’t beat that.

This is a series of pictures of the Millennium Falcon work area.  I really enjoy flipping through them and watching the mountain of pieces disappear.

These are pictures of the Millennium Falcon as it progressed through the build.