I love LEGO

Yup, my son had all of this cool spaceships if I remember right. Not sure if they are original sets. But there were some sets of this kind. We owned some of the basic railroad sets as well with power bus in the middle.
That was an amazing time!

 

I've checked the building instruction of the Ultimate Milennium Falcon and LEGO's brick shop today. That produced some nice statistics.
The set includes 5045 bricks, 279 different parts. 140 of them are available at the LEGO online-shop (550,35 Euro). 47 are at least availible in a different colour (143,42 Euro). 92 arn't available. So even if you spend ~700 Euro you won't be able to build this legendary spaceship. As mentioned above it'll cost something around 10k Euro to buy the original.
Let's start think about printining such bricks. The wight of the white 2x4 bricks above (PLA) is 0,01 kg. Costs: 0,20 Euro. Divided by four: 0,05 Euro per brick. LEGO want 0,23 Euro for such a brick. Let's say the average price of a printed brick is ~0,10 Euro. Multiplied by 5045 parts = 504,50 Euro. That's less than it would cost to buy the available original parts and print the missing parts only.
Time of printing: one part would take something between 8 and 30 minutes. Most of the parts are simple. So let's say 15 minutes per part. 4 parts per hour. 5045/4=1261 hrs = 52,5 days printing around the clock.
The quality is bad. Since I print each layer at 0,2 mm a standard brick has 9,6 mm / 0,2 mm = 48 layers. Pretty rough. Not to mention parts with smaller details like 2 or 3 mm.
Additional I have to make 279 3d-models. Well that's not the main part.
Hmm ... hard to decide. No clue if the printer would do such a job without problems. No clue if it is really worth it. Depends at least to STAR WARS and LEGO addiction I think. I will ask my son ;-)

 

Another approach for calculation:
I need at least 8 different materials/colours (some parts with special colour arn't visible). Each of them would cost ~20 Euro/kg. But 1 kg per material should be enough to print all parts of this colour. That would mean 8 x 20 = 160 Euro. That sounds really crazy for me. Let's put a buffer into this calculation and say 200 Euro. Compared to 10.000 Euro it looks pretty good, doesn't it?
Keep in mind that we don't have crystal clear or gum parts at this set.
Finally several materials (20 Euro/kg) would suffice for more complete prints. We would end up clearly below 200 Euro material costs.

I really should check this out!

 

I am not a LEGO designer. But if someone wants to build a special model I'm willing to help with cheap or even special parts. Don't hesitate to ask me. I would like to see a nice model of my beloved Imperium Spec Lancer ... would be a blast!

 

Okay, I surfed a bit today and found most of the missing parts. Yesterday I forgot some parts. Now it looks as follows:
283 different parts, 5170 bricks overall
246 different parts, 4894 bricks original available
9 different parts, 141 bricks with wrong colour available
28 different parts, 135 bricks not found
Price so far: 1695 Euro. Average price per brick is ~0,34 Euro. The missing bricks would add 40-50 Euro.

Conclusion:
It's not worth to do such a job. The CAD models of the 283 parts won't be a problem. They could be generated within a few days and would be a good exercise for me to become better with Autodesk Inventor ;-) Same regarding the material (100 - 150 Euro). But printing all this bricks would take approximately 2 - 3 months and I'm afraid my printer wouldn't stay alive for so long printing nearly around-the-clock.

Another story would be the print of parts wich are really nowhere available to complete this breathtaking LEGO-set for ~1900-2000 Euro instead of buying it for 9 - 10k Euro.

EDIT:

 

Nahh, it's uncool. Keep in mind how long it takes to print a lot of bricks. And as long as you don't pay a 5-digit number of money you will always get bad quality. Loving LEGO I would prefer to buy original bricks meanwhile. THEY are cool!

 

In a few years? Hmm ... I don't know how old you are. I am close to the end of my life meanwhile. One year now is like a month when I was a teenager. At the other hand technical progress is way faster now.
I think 3D-printing will become the new industrial revolution. The Rotterdam Harbour in Netherlands invests massively in 3D-printing. A container harbour? Yes! They see the decrease of shipping goods and want to be prepaired for the time when goods will no longer be shipped but printed on-site. The new method to earn money will be to sell or deliver 3d- or other data instead of manufactured products. This will affect a wide range of products (plastic and electronic parts as well as food, medicine, clothes, furniture ... even toys and small bricks probably). I think the changes will be dramatically. But it'll take at least around 10 years until it'll be "normal" or "standard". Don't know if I survive that long :-/

 

Print moulds doesn't make sense in this case. LEGO bricks are made of ABS and need steel moulds because of the temperatur during the process. And you would need high pressure as well to fill the moulds. The PLA-moulds would melt immediately and the high pressure would blow them away in a moment. Even cold epoxy won't work because it would stick to the mould. In generally it could be a good idea to print moulds for gypsum or such materials. But such parts need to be removed from the mould. I engineered ABS-parts for car lamps back in the nineties for HELLA - a big automotive supplier - so I know something about this issue. It could be very tricky for complex models (like my TESO avatar Mena Oris).

One of the advantages of printing the original is that you don't have to care for such problems. You can print models with undercuts and hollows.

 

What is it? Can't find it.