breaking 200,000 atoms with pieces of a shaft

I went on something of a quest a few days ago to break one million atoms, that is to model a single structure made of at least 1,000,000 atoms. I started with a shaft section, a little over 50,000 atoms (the above picture is four of these sections), and then just kept extruding and fusing, but ultimately I (or NE1 failed). I did get two long shafts that together were over a half million atoms, but things started to get a little buggy when I tried to fuse them together.

I don't think NE1 has ever been tested out on this side of the envelope, so it's not that much of a surprise this started to get weird. I have a screen shot of the 500,000 atom shafts not quite drawn all the way. I intend to send it to the guy working on improving how NE1 handles those things.

I find this scale interesting, maybe because it is approaching that point were materials can start to be seen at continuous. I can easily transition from my macro-scale machining experience.