‘Why is there an Elf looking at me?’ thought this writer upon his entrance to TLCB Executive Washroom and Sauna for his mid-day ‘quiet time’. A forlorn Elf looked up at him from the toilet bowl, unable to answer beyond incomprehensible Elven gibberish.

Sigh. A toilet brush was held out, onto which the soggy Elf climbed, and it was sent back to the cage room from where it had presumably originated.

Not really feeling like quiet time any more this writer trudged back to the office, only to find another Elf looking up at him from within the recycling bin. Hmm. Something odd was going on.

A brief investigation unearthed the cause. A bright orange Technic truck, cheerily controlled by the Elf that discovered it, was offering ‘rides’ to any Elf stupid enough to fall for it. Which probably would have been all of them, had we not intervened.

With remote control drive and steering, a tipping load bed, and surprisingly large folding crane mounted behind the cab, Elven passengers were being plucked out of the bed and deposited in various unpleasant places around TLCB Towers. The Elf at the controls had even figured out the stabilising legs so as not to topple the truck whilst manoeuvring its Elven cargo.

With the controls removed and order restored we could assess the engineering brilliance of the creation in question, and it really is brilliant. Flickr’s Blaž Dlopst is the builder behind it, and has packed multiple Technic motors, gearboxes and control bricks inside the Scania’s ingeniously constructed chassis. The realistic cab, linear-actuator crane and tipping load bed attach in modular fashion, and the truck’s multiple motorised functions can be controlled via bluetooth.

It’s a seriously clever piece of engineering and there’s much more of the Scania XT to see, including photos showing the crane deployed and images such as the one above revealing the modular components, at Blaž Dlopst’s photostream and on Eurobricks. Click the links above to take a closer look, whilst this writer attempts another trip to the toilet…