Over the years, LEGO building blocks have been a source of hours of endless entertainment for kids (and kids at heart) worldwide. Encouraging creativity and unintentionally rewarding children for selfishly bogarting all the pieces of a particular color, all sorts of interesting things can be made out of a decently sized tub of LEGO bricks.

However, there will always be people who do their best to go beyond the acceptable limit for awesomeness (and subsequently ruin playtime for everyone else). In sharp contrast to the “cars” (four wheels attached to a couple of long bricks), “buildings” (four tall walls of different-colored bricks), and “robots” (leftover pieces and random plates that nobody else wanted) that children make on a Sunday afternoon, these five LEGO masterpieces were made by enthusiasts who seem to take LEGO a bit too seriously.

A 3D Printer

Photo by Nbanerjee.

Printers are nasty box-type things that never work properly when you need them to. Add “3D” before the word “printer”, though, and it automatically becomes amazing. Add “Lego” to that, and people’s heads will start exploding within a fifty-mile radius. Armed with this knowledge (and a ton of LEGO bricks), Arthur Sacek went on to build a fully functional 3D printer, the LEGO 3D Milling Machine, consisting almost entirely of Lego pieces. The only part of this machine that isn’t a LEGO brick is the drill bit that it uses to shape foam into accurate representations of digital models. Actually, this isn’t the only thing he’s managed to build using LEGO pieces, but by far, it’s one of the most remarkable. In fact, there’s a 2.0 version of the 3D printer that holds the foam using something that functions like a pig spit, leading us to wonder if a LEGO chicken roaster is on the way as well.

Guns

Guns are already inherently cool, but guns made out of LEGO? That’s like making a salad made out of bacon, cheese, and more bacon – not a good idea, but an undeniably awesome one that everyone else will want to imitate. Sebastian Dick came up with the idea to make a minigun out of – you guessed it – LEGO, and the result is a colorful 8-barrel powerhouse that shoots rubber bands at an approximate speed of 11 bands per second. That’s not the only “real” LEGO gun in existence, either; in fact, there are enough of them in real life to make the Punisher happy. Jack Streat has made fully functional and presumably – hopefully – non-lethal versions of submachine guns, rifles, and pistols, which should probably make anyone think twice about bullying LEGO nerds from now on.

Cloning Machines

By using LEGO MindStorms software, Andreas Dreier created the Cube Replicator, which actually sounds more like a throwaway gadget from an old Star Trek movie than an awe-inspiring device of massive humanity-enslaving potential. The machine scans LEGO cubes made out of different-colored bricks, analyzes them, and then proceeds to make exact copies of them using the same components.

Also, take a look at this contraption, which scans any object and determines the kind and color of LEGO pieces necessary to make a LEGO version of it as similar in appearance to the original object as possible. If that doesn’t scare you, well… Guess we’ll just see you in the slave mines when our LEGO overlords inevitably take over the planet.

A Gigantic Ball Contraption

What’s the point of a gigantic LEGO ball contraption, you ask? Why not make something practical, like perhaps a LEGO business phone, or a LEGO laptop? Well, if you feel the need to ask in the first place, that only means you’re missing the point. Come on, It’s a gigantic LEGO ball contraption. What’s not to like about that? Seriously, just watch this video and tell me that this doesn’t fill you with a warm, fuzzy feeling inside.

A Lego House

Photo by Gaius Cornelius.

In a special Lego-themed episode of his television program about bringing favorite toys of the past into the modern age, television presenter James May pushed LEGO to its logical limits. Five years ahead of that singer who looks like Ron Weasley, May unleashed upon the world a LEGO house – a perfectly habitable structure made entirely out of multi-colored LEGO bricks, built on an empty space in Dorking, Surrey. With the help of 1200 volunteers, 3.3 million LEGO pieces were used to build the house. Unfortunately, it had to be dismantled because it was too expensive to send to LEGOLAND in Windsor, and because the owner of the land it was built on needed the space for a decidedly non-LEGO structure. Knowing May, though, he and his friends Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond probably thought of driving through the poor house during a Top Gear taping.

Kind of makes you want to disassemble that LEGO “race car” you’re so proud of, no?