If you’re a big LEGO fan, there’s a good chance you spent the past few days calling in to your nearest LEGO store to find out if they’d gotten the Saturn V in yet. And maybe if you’re a LEGO fan who lives in Southern California and woke up a little too late every day, you were punched in the face by grief as a bunch of folks from JPL bought them all out again right after the store opened. Adam Savage and the crew at Tested had none of these problems, however, because they received a pre-release set.
How nice for them.
Seriously, though–this LEGO Saturn V build is amazing, and there’s a reason this set has brick lovers jonesin’ for a fix of branded studs and satisfying plastic snaps. And that reason is SpaceX landing a reusable orbital-class rocket after it delivered a satellite into orbit. Okay, not really, but rockets are… in the air, right?
The real-life Saturn V is the mega rocket—it’s 363 feet tall and weighs over 6.5 million pounds—that took astronauts to the Moon in 1969 on the Apollo 11 mission. The LEGO Saturn V is a set that’s equally as huge as its real life counterpart, relative to normal LEGO sets, as it has exactly 1,969 pieces and is a meter tall. It also comes with microfigure astronauts, the Eagle Lunar Lander and Orbiter, and a booklet about the mission as well as the LEGO fan designers behind the original Ideas build. The attention to detail is all over this set. (Why?! Why can’t LEGO ship more for another month?)
In the video, Savage, Norman Chan, and Will Smith utilize knolling in their build process, which means they first laid out all of the LEGO pieces by type and color. It’s hard to say if this made for a quicker overall build, especially considering the pieces already come in numbered plastic bags, but there must be a lot of gratification in knolling. Or unbearable tedium.
Either way, the three guys finished the build and almost smashed the rocket back into pieces all before lunch. There was also some discussion of Savage maybe building a custom stand for the Saturn V, which could possibly calm any indignation rocketless LEGO fans may be feeling at the moment.
What do you think about Tested’s knolling method for building this sweet set? Let us know your thoughts below!
Images: YouTube / Tested
