This is so cool.

Fully functioning models of various firearms, built in LEGO. The engineering that went into this is fascinating.

What’s cooler is the plans for building these is soon to be released in a book called LEGO Heavy Weapons.

What’s coolest? The creator of these designs, Jack Streat, is 17 years old. This kid has a bright future in engineering. What were you doing when you were 17?

I was able to see an advance copy of the book. If you’re familiar with LEGO sets, you know they come with instruction manuals. The manuals are step-by-step pictures on how to build. At its heart, the LEGO Heavy Weapons book is no different; that sort of familiarity is good. But what the book adds to the mix is explanation and history. Up front there’s discussion about how he goes about design and creating models, which I thought was some pretty cool insight. Then each design has some discussion about what it took for him to build it. There’s also some breakdown on how the model actually works. It’s really quite cool to see all of this in-depth detail.

The designs are complex, and they’re going to require a lot of parts that are unlikely to be in your bins. Thankfully he provides a complete parts list complete with quantity and exact LEGO part number for ease of ordering.

Really, this is pretty slick.

It’s not going to be for everyone… serious LEGO and gun nerds need apply. But even if these aren’t your direct things, you just have to appreciate what Jack did. The desire to build, the patience to build, the further patience to document the design, the ambition to publish a book. Like I said… what were YOU doing at age 17?

(Disclosure: I was contacted by No Starch Press about this book, they gave me the promotional copy, and so on. While I normally don’t accept and do outside promotion because this blog is my personal blog, I opted to do this because I like guns and I like LEGO and chances are  once I learned about this I would have posted it here anyways because I think it’s way cool. Besides, No Starch publishes a lot of awesome title… check ’em out.)