June 21 (UPI) -- An Arizona man said it took him three years to build a Guinness record-breaking pyramid from 1,030,315 pennies.

Cory Nielsen, known on YouTube as the Penny Building Fool, said a Guinness official is due to pay him a visit in Phoenix this week to verify that his 44.6-inch pyramid breaks the record previously set in Lithuania, where a pyramid was assembled from just over 1 million pennies.


Nielsen said the pyramid took him exactly three years to assemble and weighs 6,360 pounds. He said the pyramid is composed of 93,665 small stacks of 11 pennies. The base of the structure is 65 stacks long and 65 stacks wide.

"The way I built it, I take 11 pennies; I made a little stack, and I just place them on the ground; there is no glue, no adhesives or anything like that, and you just kind of free stack them on top of each other, and I go up consistently," Nielsen told The Arizona Republic.

He said the world record attempt was inspired when a coworker asked if his previous penny pyramid, made from about 47,000 coins, was a world record.

"I originally had built a smaller one, 47,000 pennies on my desk in my office," he told KSAZ-TV. "I thought that was pretty big, and I saw people work, and they ask me if that's a world record. I'm like, I don't know, but if it isn't, I will make it one."