LEGO make lots of neat floral arrangements these days, and even little Christmas trees, too. While they’re fun to build out of tiny little blocks, they’re a little small for use as your main Christmas tree. Sadly, a bigger version simply doesn’t exist in the LEGO catalog, so if that’s your desire, you’ll have to build your own—as [Ruth] and [Ellis] did!
The concept behind the build is as you’d expect. The duo effectively just 3D printed giant versions of LEGO pieces, with which they then assembled a large Christmas tree. It sounds very straightforward, but scaling an existing LEGO design up by six times tends to come with some complications. A tactical decision was made early on to ease proceedings—the original LEGO tree had a large brown base that would take lots of printing. This was eliminated in the hopes that it would speed the build significantly. The long plastic shafts that supported the original design were also replaced with steel shafts since printing them would have been incredibly difficult to do well.
The rest of the video demonstrates the huge amount of work that went into actually 3D printing and assembling this thing. It’s pretty great to watch, and you’ll learn a lot along the way.
We’ve seen other creators try similar projects, where they 3D print their own building blocks from scratch. It normally turns out much harder than expected! No surprise when you think about all the engineering that went into perfecting LEGO all those years ago.
Thanks to [Jonathan] for the tip!
Maybe it is time for the OSHW community to standardize giant LEGO dimensions.
What’s to standardize? Lego has already done it for us… 8 2×4 standard lego bricks = 1 2×4 standard duplo brick. Next size would be 8 2×4 duplos = 1 (not lego, and pegs are not to scale) 2×4 megablock. Continue to scale, anything else is not lego scaled.
Fill in the sizes in between and you should be able to connect to the lego storage containers even.
The next size above duplo is quattro, and Lego actually manufactured it for a short time. I have a small collection, acquired mostly by accident via yard sales and etc.
The size above that is where a standard could be made, but the scaling principle seems already fixed.
Oh no, they’ve given my girlfriend ideas now. My poor printer is not ready for this. 😅
I think it’s awesome
I do Lego comps and I am really good at Lego.
The amount of filament is scary
Where is the hack though? Sure, it’s mildly interesting but it’s just taking an existing design and printing it in a bigger scale.