In the modern history of human aviation, the "Queen of the Air" Boeing 747 is undoubtedly one of the most classic civil aviation airliners. Its research and development began in the 1960s, after 60 years of development, competitors from DC-10, L-1011 to A340-600, A350 and even A380, it created a legend or no aircraft can match.
So what would it be like to make a cockpit of a Boeing 747 out of blocks?
The LEGO IDEAS creative project we're going to introduce today: the Boeing 747 cockpit designed by Darren Jones may be the answer to this question.
Darren Jones designed this cockpit model with reference to the 747-400 model, the newer model of the 747 family, and replaced the dense mechanical instruments with several LCD screens in the cockpit, which was more technological and reduced the difficulty of building block design to a certain extent.
In addition to the basic 5 LCD screens, two side joysticks, and four engine throttle pushers, the various large and small switches/knobs/indicators on this cockpit panel are more or less reflected, and the overall layout of the 747-400 cockpit is quite in place.
But if you pull the perspective slightly to the side, you will find that on the author's 747 cockpit panel, most of the gauges and switches are actually implemented with stickers...
Let's not discuss the high pasting difficulty of cross-brick stickers, transparent stickers may appear bubbles, fingerprints and other obvious flaws, sticker area is too large to seriously affect the building experience of these problems, the idea of using stickers to solve almost all the details of the problem can indeed be effective laziness, but to a considerable extent, it will also make its design level marked with a big question mark. In particular, the cockpit model of this 747 nominally reached a scale of 1,874 pieces, and it is indeed a bit cheap to use a large number of stickers to create the interior under such a large proportion of works.
In addition, the designer said in the details area that he prefers to use printed parts to solve, this idea... Should we say very Cobi?
The often overlooked top panel in the cockpit of an airliner is a whole piece of sticker restoration like other gauges.
A linkage mechanism is designed under the seat of the captain and co-pilot, and the part behind the center console can be pulled to lower the height of the cabin floor, and then adjust the front and rear positions of the seats.
Due to the relatively limited cabin area, the mechanic seat and a large switch panel located at the back of the cockpit are not covered, and it is still a pity that the three-person cockpit layout of the 747 cannot be restored.
Compared with the detailed instrument display inside, the exterior of the cockpit without the nose and the door is somewhat illegible; of course, this is not a big problem for a set of bricks that focus on the details of the interior.
The author's most recent update was a brainstorming attempt to replace the surface panels with transparent ones and stuff them into a set of light clusters to light up the entire dashboard. The renderings are indeed very beautifully drawn, just... How do you do that?
As of January 5, 2022, at the time of this writing, the project has reached 7,647 likes on the LEGO IDEAS website, with more than 450 days remaining in the collection date, and it is very promising to break through the 10,000 likes and enter the official idEAS review during the entire praise period.
But given that whether it is using oversized stickers or light plate prints to restore the cockpit instrument is not in line with Lego's consistent style, I personally am not too optimistic that it can pass the final review of IDEAS' mass production; if LEGO wants to push this set of bricks into mass production, the instrument panel's parts will inevitably undergo a major change.
And there is a potential problem: Boeing's authorization is in the hands of Polish friends ...