All was quite in The Lego Car Blog Towers this morning. The Elves were asleep in their cage room and we were quietly watching the Monaco Grand Prix qualifying, er… we mean working studiously in the office.

And then came the sound of several soft thuds, kind of like a series of bean-bags falling off a table, followed by great Elven rage. Sigh.

A wander down to the cage room revealed the cause, where an enterprising Elf had returned early in the morning whilst its colleagues were still asleep, and promptly driven a remote control bulldozer through the Elves’ cages – much to its own amusement – pushing them out and onto the floor below. Cue the Elven rage.

Unable to escape by riding atop the ‘dozer due to its limited speed, the unhappily awoken Elves had caught their attacker and were trying to feed him into the VHS machine. Mr. Airhorn was deployed to restore calm (which definitely awoke any Elves fortunate enough to avoid the original incident) and we’ve now taken control of the offending vehicle.

And what a vehicle! Based on the Caterpillar D11t bulldozer, Piotr K‘s creation is a superb example of how to utilise both Power Functions and pneumatics.

Two Power Functions L Motors drive the tracks, which are suspended by a pendular equaliser bar, whilst three M Motors power the pneumatic systems, with one driving an on-board compressor (with an auto shut-off) and the other two activating the pneumatic valves. This gives Piotr’s model a continual supply of compressed air to power the huge front blade and the rear-mounted ripper which can be operated remotely via LEGO’s IR system.

It’s very neatly engineered set-up and one that works – as the Elves found out – really effectively. You can see more images and read about the build on MOCpages via the link above, plus you watch the model in action via the YouTube video below.

YouTube Video