Yes the annual festival of all things other-worldly is over for another year, with a smorgasbord of wonderful roving contraptions entered, about which we know exactly nothing. We’re not sure what our strong suit is, or even if we have one at all, but we certainly know it isn’t sci-fi.
But before TLCB staff can breathe a collective sigh of relief and return to writing about the engine capacities of 1960s British sedans, here are two final Febrovery rovers, as entered by Julius Kanand and Nathan Hake of Flickr, and about which – as is customary – we know exactly nothing.
Both look great though, with Julius’ final Febrovery ’23 rover (above) available to view at his photostream (where an array of other rovers can also be found), and Nathan’s fully remote controlled entry (below), complete with articulated steering, 8×8 drive, and an ingenious LEGO Spikes Colour Sensor front light, available to view at his.
Take a look via the links above, and you can check out all the Febrovery madness from this year by clicking here.
What’s better off-road than a 4×4? Two 4x4s. Bolted together. This is a Tatra T813 8×8 off-road truck, as recreated in Technic form by previous bloggee Horcik Designs for a Lego Truck Trial Championship.
Two LEGO Buggy Motors power all eight fully-suspended wheels, the front two axles steer, plus there’s a removable body and cab (re-used from Horcik’s previous Truck Trial entry).
Full details and further imagery can be found at Horcik’s Bricksafe album, in the video below, and at the Eurobricks forum, where video footage of the Tatra and its rivals competing in the Truck Trial Championship can be viewed too.
Cyberpunk is just one of the many sub-genres of Lego building about which we know nothing. Sci-Fi? Nope. Steampunk? Nope. Sky-Fi? Nope. Cyberpunk? Hard nope. To be honest if it isn’t a car built after about 1955, we’re going to struggle. In fact we’re constantly amazed that this site functions at all. Still, these two cyberpunkesque vehicles do look deeply cool, even if we have no idea what they’re for or do. Flickr’s incredibly talented Tino Poutiainen owns the mind behind them, and you can get the answers that we don’t have at his photostream. Click the link above to make the jump.
If this TLCB Writer received paid holiday (no chance! Ed.), he’d like to go adventuring in something like this.
Built by collaborative building channel MTC, this MAN 8×8 off-road expedition truck includes everything you could need to escape to a place far away.
Two XL Motors power all eight fully suspended wheels, a Servo powers the steering, a Medium Motor drives a lift for a motorcycle/ATV platform mounted under the rear of the fully-equipped camper section, whilst another drives a compressor that can elevate the camper roof on four pneumatic cylinders.
All of the functions can be controlled via bluetooth courtesy of two SBricks, which you can watch in action via the excellent and appropriately sound-tracked video below, plus there’s more to see of this amazing rig at both Eurobricks and Flickr.
Click the links to join this TLCB Writer dreaming of places far far away.
You wait ages for a Czech off-road truck, and then two come along at once. Or something like that.
Anyway, we do have two awesome brick-built Tatras today, each representing a real world counterpart and chosen LEGO building style beautifully.
First up (above) is Horcik Designs’ T813 8×8 Technic trial truck, complete with remote controlled eight-wheel-drive and four-wheel steering, functioning suspension, and much more besides.
Building instructions are available and you can find a link to them and a video of the model in action at the Eurobricks forum, plus you can check out all the images via Bricksafe by clicking here.
Today’s second Tatra switches from Technic to Model Team, but is just as feature packed. Arian Janssens‘ T815 6×6 also includes a working drivetrain and steering, plus a neat tipping container that can stand on its own legs to allow the truck to back up underneath it.
A variety of other trailer options fit Arian’s T815 and there’s more to see of the them and the iteration pictured here on Flickr – click the link above to take a look.
The war in Ukraine (or ‘Special Military Operation’ to our Russian and Belarusian readers) continues, with more devastation, civilian killings, and Kremlin lies. So far though, the Ukrainian flag continues to fly, being raised over areas retaken from the invading Russian forces in recent days.
Showing his support is Jonathan Elliott, whose neat hook-lift truck is pictured raising the Ukrainian flag in container form. If you’d like to show your solidarity with Ukraine too, please do build in blue and yellow, and you can donate to the enormous refugee crisis Putin has created via organisations such as the Disasters Emergency Committee.
Russia, and its puppet regime next door in Belarus, really know how to make a heavy duty off-road truck. It’s just a shame they’re currently using them for such evil.
Nevertheless, the Belarusian-made MAZ-537 8×8 military truck is a seriously impressive piece of equipment, and so too is gkurkowski‘s spectacular recently updated remote controlled Model Team version, which captures the real thing brilliantly.
A suite of Powered-Up components equip the model with an accurate 8×8 fully suspended drivetrain, along with a powered V12 piston engine underneath the detailed cab too.
An extensive gallery of images display the MAZ-537 on-location and in render, and you can take a closer look at this amazing machine on Brickshelf via the link above.
Unlike Vladimir Putin, Dawid Boczek has a most excellent erection.
This is his spectacular Liebherr LTM 1070 4.2 mobile crane, a 7,000 piece, nine motor masterpiece with a frankly huge boom. Unlike Vladimir Putin.
Those nine motors power everything from the remote control eight-wheel-drive and six-wheel-steering to the boom slewing, elevation, extension, winch and pneumatic outriggers, making it really very clever indeed. Unlike Vladimir Putin.
Dawid’s incredible creation also features a few mechanical functions too, including opening and lockable doors, and live axle suspension, meaning it’s both secure and stable when things get rough. Unlike Vladimir Putin.
There’s lots more of Dawid’s brilliantly-engineered build to see at both the Eurobricks forum and his ‘Liebherr LTM 1070’ album on Flickr – click the links above to get it up!
The news coming from Afghanistan at the moment is heartbreaking. A rare case of successful international cooperation, the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and subsequent defeat of its Taliban ‘government’ brought freedom, equal-ish rights, and prosperity to millions of Afghans.
It also brought about a fantastically corrupt (although democratically elected) government and the deaths of tens of thousands, but despite this it would be hard to argue that many Afghans – particularly women – weren’t better off for the intervention.
Which makes it tremendously sad that all of those gains (and the blood spilt to achieve them) may now be lost thanks to a hasty politically-motivated Western withdrawal, with the Taliban regaining power even quicker than they lost it twenty years ago.
More tragically, it’s not the first time that foreign powers have put their own politics before the lives of Afghans…
This is a Soviet BTR-80, a remarkable 8×8 amphibious armoured personal carrier, as used in the Soviet-Afghan War.
Back in 1978 a coup in Afghanistan overthrew the presidency, replacing it with the ‘Democratic Republic of Afghanistan’, a puppet Communist government supported by the Soviet Union, which many of the Afghan people resisted via a brutal guerrilla war.
The UN ordered the Soviet Union to withdraw, which they ignored and engaged in a 9 year war in support of the Communist government, razing villages, destroying farmland, laying millions of landmines, and committing rape and torture.
Sanctions and a mass boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics followed, but worse was to come for the Soviet Union, who ultimately lost the war to the Afghan Mujahideen and the international community supporting them, which – many argue – hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.
The BTR-80 used towards the end of the conflict was still a mighty impressive piece of hardware though, and so too is this spectacular fully RC recreation by Sariel.
With eight-wheel-drive, four-wheel-steering, all-wheel suspension, a three-speed gearbox, motorised hatches, a remotely operable gun turret, rotating and lit searchlight, a working winch, and powered propellors all controlled via bluetooth thanks to three SBricks, Sariel’s BTR-80 is an engineering masterclass.
You can watch all of those incredible features in action via the video below, plus there are more stunning images of Sariel’s creation available to view at his ‘BTR-80’ Flickr album. Click here to make the jump to a pointless war in Afghanistan sometime in the late ’80s.
And back to that disastrous piece of Soviet foreign policy; even after the Soviet Union withdrew defeated, peace in Afghanistan was not forthcoming. A civil war continued to rage, taking the death toll to as many as two million Afghans.
Eventually, after years of turmoil, it was the Taliban who ended up in power, which brings us right back to 2001, the international intervention, and now – twenty years later – the rapid undoing of everything that was won.
Things with blank, expressionless faces are terrifying. How do you know what they’re thinking? That’s why car styling always sort of resembles a face, even if that face is an increasingly angry one these days.
Oshkosk didn’t get that memo though, and – in creating their HMETT 8×8 off-road truck – gave it a face of such horrifying blankness it could belong to a Cyberman.
Still, vacant serial-killer stare aside, the HMETT is a mega bit of kit, and so too is Thesuperkoala‘s Technic recreation, which includes eight-wheel-drive, four-wheel-steering, lockable differentials, a high/low gearbox, all-wheel springless suspension, a removable load bed, and BuWizz bluetooth remote control.
Which means it could drive around the house seemingly of its own free-will, which gives this writer shivers.
There’s more to see of Thesuperkoala’s excellent Technic Oshkosh HMETT 8×8 truck at both Flickr and via the video below; click the links to take a look, whilst this TLCB Writer draws smiley faces on anything vaguely resembling a head in TLCB office and tries to think happy thoughts…
A military truck loaded with mystery green canisters can’t be good. Well, the model is good, but you know what we mean. Regular bloggee Ralph Savelsberg is the builder of this ’80s M985 ‘Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck’ loaded with the rocket launcher cargo used in Operation Desert Storm. Blow up something in Iraq circa-1991 via the link above.
NASA’s ‘Perseverance‘ rover is currently relaying some truly magical images back to Earth from the surface of Mars, where it has been for over a month.
Perseverance’s mission is to look for the building blocks that support life, either in Mars’ distant past, or for a human colonisation future. Fast forward an undetermined number of years and – if BobDeQuatre is correct – Perseverance found what it was looking for.
This is the Mars Corporation ‘Poseidon Mobile Water Extractor’, which uses a powerful microwave generator and magnetic field to raise water to the surface to support the planet’s colony. Or something. To be honest we’re a bit hazy on the science, but that doesn’t matter when it looks this cool!
A detailed microwave/magnetron/robotic arm thingumy is carried between a pair of articulated and suspended bogies, whilst a crew of two control the water extraction from the cockpit up front.
There’s lots more to see of Bob’s impressive ‘Poseidon Mobile Water Extractor’ via his album on Flickr at the link above, plus you can see one of his (and Mars Corp.’s) other machines by clicking here.
This mega MAZ-537 8×8 truck, complete with an enormous logging trailer, was inspired by a similar creation by Pavol Vanek that featured here back in 2015. Following appropriately slowly is this version by Matt’s Lego Creations, whose own MAZ logging truck has arrived here half a decade later. Measuring over a metre long it’s quite a beast, and one you can see more of on both Flickr and Eurobricks.
We’re often asked why we don’t feature more digital builds. Well mostly it’s because they don’t look like this. ‘This’ is Finn Roberts‘ Mining Truck, built to serve the icy world of Hibernia that seems to be popping up all over the place in the online Lego community of late, and rendered so well you’d be hard pressed to know it’s a digital build.
What makes the renderings even more impressive is that they showcase the model’s ‘working’ features, like its enormous tipping bucket, folding entry ladder, and four-wheel-steering system. Head to Hibernia via the link above to see more, where there’s also a link of to an animation of Finn’s model in action.
The world could learn something from LEGO’s perennially smiling Classic Spacemen, peacefully conducting whatever research and exploration missions their giant fleshy masters directed them towards.
First featured here over five years ago, TLCB favourite Billyburg has recently updated his 6950 Rocket Launcher redux, and we like it more than ever. Of course this being a Classic Space vehicle the rockets on board Billyburg’s 8×8 transport are not firing Russian implements of death at airliners, rather satellites for, well… we’re not sure, but we bet it’s something wholesome.
