As a youngster living in a country town we didn't see alot of Lego sets sitting on the toy shop shelves, but fortunately the one shop we did have in our town had the USS Constellation on its shelves. I think I spent a good 12 months looking at it, so when I got it for Christmas in 1979 I was beside myself.

Christmas day was normally spent driving to the city to catch up with family and I quite clearly remember the agony of having to leave it behind and wait a couple of weeks before we returned to get stuck into building it.

Once started it was quite an easy build, it just took time. There was one bit from memory that did confuse me, and I think it did every time I made it, but I think it was more a situation of being hasty in my building rather than having a good proper look at the instructions.

The string was little annoying, but also required. I seemed to continually make the string too tight which caused all the masts to go onto an angle which was not a good look. My Dad was a perfectionist in these sort of things so I would normally wait for him to get home from work and fix it up for me.

There were a few pieces that would break pretty easy if touched but it was more something to display rather than play with.

Overall it was pretty detailed construction, especially considering there were not many 'custom' bits and made primarily of the standard Lego bricks.

It was fantastic that the ship also had a base to stand on for display purposes.

Now my son is getting into Lego as well, and even though his is only 4 1/2, he definitely likes the 'proper' Lego sets, he has never really been into the duplo stuff. But his interest has rekindled my interest in Lego and i think it may be time to do the USS Constellation again!

I have this set in pretty good shape and I'm pretty confident of all pieces being there, but thank heavens for sites like BrickSet and Perron to cover those pieces that I may be missing.

This is a prized possession and well worth the time spent to build it. Not really something to play with bit something to put on display.

Does make me wonder though why Lego didn't do any more of these type of ships?