[MOC] Copernicus monument made with LEGO

Nicolaus Copernicus probably needs no introduction. Polish astronomer born in 1473. We used to say that "he stopped the Sun and moved the Earth". I had great opportunity (thx LUG zbudujmy.to) to build his monument for LEGO Poland. To be more accurate - to build model of his monument from Torun city. Of course with Lego bricks.

The task was not particularly difficult because it is LEGO! Pure fun! :) But of course I encountered some problems and unexpected situations.

First of all I had to obtain lot of pictures of the real monument. Toruń is far from my home city and I was not goin' to go there any time soon. I started searching the Internet. I found some materials. Google Street View was also very helpful. But there was none pictures of the back of the monument. Also it was very hard to deduce the right proportions, because the pictures were taken from different perspectives and different lenses. Practically every photo I found was giving me completely different dimension. At the end Facebook come to rescue. I wrote post that I am looking for pictures of Copernicus monument. Same day friend of a friend, who lives in Toruń, went to the monument and took pictures from every side. That was awesome! Thanks Matilda! :)

Digital project in LDD software was the next step. I had to use only bricks which are currently in production. This was another problem because a lot of useful bricks are out of production. Or they are in production but in different colors.

Oh well, I dealt with it very fast. I just used different bricks. It is LEGO. You can build everything in countless ways.

When LEGO Poland accepted my model I gave them a list of bricks required for building it in real life. Lot of numbers, tables in Excel, boring stuff. Let's skip this part. New problems arrived. Some bricks are not available at the LEGO warehouse. I had to rebuild some parts of the model to somehow get around the lack of the bricks. Finally I received 2 packages with parts. Unfortunately several key positions was missing. There was no time for waiting for the next shipment from LEGO. I decided to order by myself on BrickLink missing parts and move to building.

I managed to finish it easily and from some time it appears on the official LEGO events. Its premiere was in big mall (Galeria Mokotów) at Warsaw, Poland. Together with other great models built by members of zbudujmy.to LUG was showed during grand opening of the first LEGO Store in Poland. It was there for over a month and then moved to other events. And now you can also watch it here!

Little postscriptum ;) I'm pretty happy with final result. I gave it a bit of my Lego style. The only thing which bugs me is an astrolabe. This measuring astronomical instrument held by Copernicus was quite problematic from the very beginning. Spherical shape in quite small size which makes it pretty hard to build with LEGO bricks.

I built few versions - most of them was to big or to bulky. The final version is based on the brick with number 6183. I ended up with black color instead of gray. Long story short - not enough time and warehouse inventory. But the color is not a big deal. The bigger problem was caused by LDD software. In LDD you can put bricks at bottom of 6183 in any position. And in real life it is not possible. There is a pin in the center which makes possible to put other bricks only in 2 standard positions - on the sides. It spoiled whole symmetry of astrolabe. This may seem insignificant detail but somehow it bothers me ;) Unfortunately there was no time to develop another solution.

Alright, that's all folks. Stay tuned for more MOCs!

Check out other LEGO posts!