Skid Marks

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The Lego Car Blog Elves – being simple creatures – see an orange digger, and they like it. We, The Lego Car Blog Staff, are far more sophisticated; the Elves brought us an orange digger, and we liked it.

Constructed by kralls_workshop, this neat skid-steer loader features a mechanically-operated arm elevation and bucket tilt (via knobs at the rear), opening doors, plus interchangeable attachments. Free building instructions are available (one hundred TLCB Points Krall!) and you can find full details and imagery at both Flickr and Eurobricks.

Green Space

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Remote control all-wheel-drive, gearbox operation, steering, and all-wheel suspension, are features normally associated with large Technic Supercars with thousands of parts. Today however, they’re all present on a model with fewer than a thousand pieces. Plus opening doors, hood, and a full interior. Which is some kind of magic.

Slovenian builder Zerobricks is the engineering wizard responsible, and you can find out how he’s squeezed a suite of Powered-Up and BuWizz components invisibly into his 1:12 green wedge-shaped racer at the Eurobricks forum. Click the link above to take a look, and play the video below to watch his creation in action.

YouTube Video

A Grand Ending

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After two decades mucking about in cars, and a global audience of millions, Clarkson, Hammond and May have finally hung up their driving gloves. Well, May has. The others probably didn’t wear them.

Their final episode of ‘The Grand Tour’ – Amazon’s monstrously expensive continuation of BBC Top Gear – aired last year, in which the team returned to the location of their first ever road-trip adventure, undertaken some twenty years earlier.

A 1970s Lancia Montecarlo, Triumph Stag, and Ford Capri starred alongside the human trio, likely also completing their last ever drive, such is the nature of television production.

They live on in Lego form though, courtesy of NV_Carmocs (photographed by Studworks), who has recreated each car beautifully in Speed Champions scale. Accurate registration plates, 3D-printed wheels, and a brick-built animal skull on the Lancia enhance the accuracy, and NV_Carmocs has made building instructions available too, should you wish to relive ‘The Grand Tour’s last adventure at home. Have One for the Road via the link above.

Foot Fetish

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This TLCB Writer doesn’t understand feet. Sure they’re there to hold you up and everthing, but to him they are functional only. Like a trachea. Or a spleen.

But not today, because today’s he’s so into them, courtesy of Caleb Ricks and this fabulous space freighter ‘The Antipodes’. Caleb’s design is a rhythm of angles, with some truly inspired techniques deployed to create the triangulated hull. A stunning interior features too, with jaw-dropping detail throughout, yet the most brilliant parts of Caleb’s masterpiece are the landing feet, which deploy in mesmerising motorised scnyhrinoscity via the ingenious mechanisms hidden within.

Like a hydropneumatic Citroen, we could watch The Antipodes’ feet gracefully rise and fall on loop, and you can join us and our foot fetish on Flickr via the links above.

Spindly Spider

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Febrovery’s weirdness continues, and this is right up there in the weird stakes. Entitled the ‘Hexapod Rover’, Pascal‘s spindly spider design is probably eliciting some primal emotions in some of our readers. Place a glass over it and slide some paper underneath, or scream and smash it with a tea-towel, depending on your persuasion, at the link above.

When a Truck Overtook a Rally Car

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Back in the ’80s, motorsport rules were… loose. Group B rallying created monsters beyond anything seen before, and Dakar… well that was even wilder. Entered in the late-’80s, DAF’s unbelievable eleven-ton TurboTwin 95 X1 was powered by two engines with three turbochargers each, producing a combined 1,200bhp, and which – as this infamous helicopter footage from the 1988 event shows – made it so fast it could overtake the leading cars.

Piloted by Dutch legend Jan de Rooy, the TurboTwin won the truck category in 1987, before an awful 180km/h crash killed one of Jan’s teammates the following year, causing DAF to immediately halt all motorsport activities and withdraw the TurboTwin mid-competition.

Sadly we’d not see its like again, but we can still get up close to DAF’s astonishing Dakar racer courtesy of previous bloggee Nanko Klein Paste, and his spectacular brick-built replica.

Constructed in 1:16 scale, Nako’s TurboTwin recreation includes those two triple-turbo engines, complete with intake pipes, radiators and intercoolers, pressure vessels and ancillaries, a removable body liveried with superbly replicated decals, a hugely detailed interior behind opening doors, and full LED lighting from Brickstuff.

On display at the DAF Museum in Eindhoven later this year, there’s more to see of Nanko’s amazing creation at his ‘DAF TurboTwin 95 X1’ album on Flickr, and you can overtake a Dakar-winning Peugeot rally car at 200km/h in an eleven ton truck via the link above.

Speeding Over Sand

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This is an X-28 Landspeeder, and… um, that’s all we know. We’re not Star Trek Wars people. But we do like racing stripes and rooster-tail dust-clouds, and this has both! Ordo (Fabian B.) is the builder behind it and you can take a look via the link above.

Kosmic Kettenkrad

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The Lego Car Blog can be accused of many things. Incompetence. Wilful ignorance. Childish humour. But Only-Blogging-Thousand-Brick creations isn’t one of them. Proving that point today is Nikolaus Lowe‘s delightfully simple half-tracked Febrovery entry, complete with a smiling Benny the Spaceman and a Storm Trooper at the handlebars. Which is an interesting play on these sorts of machines’ original drivers. Join in the space Naziism via the link to Nikolaus’ photostream above!

Dalsey, Hillblom & Lynn

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The chances are that the item on which you are sitting, reading these words, or wearing travelled at some point in the back of a truck like this.

Founded in San Francisco in 1969 (with its name being an initialism of the founders), DHL is now a subsidiary of German state-owned Deutsche Post AG, and forms part of the largest logistics company in the world. Billions of items are delivered every year, with DHL trucks such as this Volvo FH 750 and Schmitz Cargobull trailer common sights on the roads across Europe.

This excellent brick-built recreation of what keeps the world moving comes from Keko007, who has captured the truck, trailer, and iconic DHL font brilliantly. There’s more to see at Keko’s ‘Volvo FH 750 & Schmitz Cargobull Trailer’ album on Flickr, and you can click the link above to be delivered there.

The Seventies Were Cool (II)

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Despite not even being a sperm at the time, this TLCB Writer is of the opinion that seventies cars were all vastly better than anything made today. A point proven by the Ford Capri, which was once a superb coupe for everyone, and is now an insipid electric crossover for people trying to pay less company car tax.

This splendid ’70s Ford Capri RS2600 comes Versteinert, whose yellow Mk1 Capri appeared here earlier in the year, and who has now updated his original model into the high power twin-headlight derivative of Ford’s classic European coupe.

Immaculately presented, there’s more to see of Versteinert’s beautiful RS2600 on Flickr, and you can jump back to when the Capri badge wan’t on the boot of a tragic electric crossover via the link above.

The Seventies Were Cool (I)

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Today, Lancia make just one car; an electric / hybrid supermini based on a Peugeot with as much dynamic ability as your Mom. And she’s really fat.

But back in the ’70s Lancia had rather more verve, with a range of dynamic drivers cars capped by this, the wild rally-engineered and Ferrari-engined Stratos.

This lovely 1:16 brick-built example comes from previous bloggee danielsmocs, and includes opening doors, front and rear clamshells, a detailed engine and interior, plus working pop-up headlights.

There’s more to see at the Eurobricks forum and you can jump back to when Lancias were cool via the link above.

Truxcavator

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What do you get if you cross a Polish Star 660 military truck with a Waryński KM-251 excavator?

This absurd contraption is a KS-251, which did just that, mounting the superstructure of the aforementioned excavator onto the bed of the 6×6 military truck. Honestly we have no idea why, but it looked so cool, particularly in the baby-blue pictured here.

This fantastic recreation of the KS-251 comes from Maciej Szymański, who has captured its magnificent weirdness beautifully, and engineered his model to function too. A suite of third-party CaDa electronics provide remote control drive and excavator operation, and there’s much more of Maciej’s tremendous creation to see at his ‘KS-251′ album on Flickr. Take a closer look via the link above!

Super Supermarine

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It’s the 29th of December 1944, and RCAF Squadron 411 is in a battle with a group of Luftwaffe fighters over Osnabrück in western Germany.

At the controls of his Supermarine Spitfire IXe, Fight Lieutenant Dick Audet has an FW190 in his sights. The Spitfire’s guns tear into the enemy aircraft, until – after a moment – it rolls over and plunges downwards to destruction.

Audet watches for a few seconds, before snapping back to the fight raging around him, and turns his sights to the next German fighter. Over the next five to seven minutes Audet destroys a further four enemy aircraft, astonishingly becoming both an ‘Ace-in-a-Day’ and the only Spitfire pilot to achieve Ace status in a single sortie.

Audet would go on to fly over fifty sorties, claiming eleven enemy kills, before he too was killed in action, brought down in March of 1945 by the anti-aircraft defences of the German train he was strafing.

This spectacular homage to Fight Lieutenant Dick Audet was discovered by one of our Elves on Flickr, and comes from crash_cramer, who has recreated Audet’s glorious Supermarine Spitfire IXe in massive 1:9 scale.

Measuring over a metre long and with a 120cm wingspan, this incredible brick-built replica doesn’t look like LEGO at all, such is its phenomenal realism. Admittedly, that might be because a few components are not in fact LEGO, with the propellor spinner, exhausts, wheel caps, guns, aerial, and outer-wing leading edges meticulously 3D-printed, whilst the cockpit canopy is vacuum-formed.

A green vinyl wrap recreates the Spitfire’s camouflage, with superb decals replicating the roundels and squadron markings of Audet’s fighter.

The result is very probably the most accurate aircraft that this site has ever featured, and you can find all of the stunning imagery, plus read more about the build and the amazing story of Fight Lieutenant Dick Audet, at crash_cramer’s photostream. Join us there via the link in the text above.

Anthropomorphic Breadbins

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Febrovery has barely begun and we’re already deep into weird purple trees and anthropomorphicised breadbins. Amongst the peculiar biology is Frost (aka TFDesigns!)‘s fantastical rover, a unique dome-canopied 6×6 piloted by the famous adventurer Kepler Van Allen himself. There’s more to see of Kepler, his rover, and the sentient toasters on Flickr, and you can rove the planetary surface for yourself via the link above.

Honey, I Shrunk the Arocs!

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The Technic 42043 Mercedes-Benz Arocs is one of the highest rated LEGO sets of all time. Now a decade old (where did that time go?), the 2015 flagship united Power Functions and pneumatics into one of the most technically advanced sets ever released.

Today’s creation pays homage to LEGO’s original masterpiece, only rather smaller. Constructed in 1:35 scale (vs. 42043’s 1:17), TechnicMOCer‘s half-size tribute features twin-axle steering, three-axle pendular suspension, a working piston engine, tipping bed, and mechanically-operated crane and outriggers.

Building instructions are available, to which you can find a link, as well as further imagery, at the Eurobricks discussion forum. Click the link above to shrink your Arocs.