This astounding creation is a Volvo FH16 750, and it’s one of the finest Technic creations of the year so far.
Packed with working functions, it took builder blaz62 over two years to complete, with a remote control 8×6 drivetrain linked to an inline-6 engine that resides under a fully suspended cab, all-wheel suspension, LED lights, working front, middle and rear outriggers, and an incredible three-stage folding ‘knuckle boom’ crane.
Based on the Palfinger PK 165.002 TEC 7 crane (ah yes, that one. Ed.), blaz62’s amazing feat of engineering can unfurl (via much knob twiddling) to reveal a three-stage first boom, with a further second two-stage jib and third single-stage jib thereafter. It offers 360° of rotation, a 400g payload, and a reach longer than a 1983 Monty Python sketch.
Technic Supercars are one of our very favourite things in the Lego Community, and despite LEGO’s foray into officially-licensed replicas of real-world vehicles, we do still like seeing interpretations of the fictional Technic Supercars that used to be LEGO’s flagships.
Cue this rather lovely example by IA Creations, whose fictional supercar nods to several real-world counterparts as well as LEGO’s own past flagship sets, and includes a wealth of Technic functionality.
Working suspension, opening doors, front trunk and engine cover, LED lights, and a V8 engine all feature, with IA going a step further by including full remote control drive and steering, plus an electronically deployed rear spoiler, courtesy of four Power Functions motors and a BuWizz 2.0 bluetooth battery brick.
It’s a fantastic build and one of which you can see more at both Eurobricks, where a link to building instructions can be found, and Bricksafe, where over forty high quality images are available.
Click the links above to see more of IA Creations’ super car.
This rather excellent Technic Supercar is a BMW M8 Competition, BMW’s 600bhp, twin-turbo V8, all-wheel-drive flagship.
Constructed by IA creations, this recreation of BMW’s super coupe includes a wealth of Technic functionality, with both traditional mechanical ‘supercar’ elements and motorised remote control.
A working V8 engine, all-wheel-drive, steering, and double-wishbone suspension take care of the former, whilst a BuWizz bluetooth battery powers twin drive motors, servo steering, and three sets of LEDs for the head and tail lights, enabling programmable bluetooth remote control.
It’s a fantastically well engineered creation and one that you can build for yourself too, as IA has made instructions available. Head to the Eurobricks forum for full details, plus you can find the complete image gallery of IA BMW M8 Competition on Bricksafe.
Finally, you can win an awesome BuWizz 3.0 Prolike the one powering IA’s magnificent M8 by entering TLCB and BrickNerd’s Festival of Mundanity competition! This M8 Competition is definitely much too interesting of course, but a grey 320d… that could do very well indeed!
Eurobricks mihao has created this superbly engineered remote control garbage truck (or ‘bin lorry’ to us here at TLCB), complete with motorised drive and steering, a tilting cab, suspension, piston engine, tipping garbage compactor, and – most ingeniously – a side-mounted garbage can (‘wheelie bin’) arm that grabs, raises and tips said receptacle automatically.
Have we been using this to grab TLCB Elves and tip them upside-down for fun? Yes. Yes we have. Because the garbage man can! See more at Eurobricks via the link.
We may not be the most professional, well connected, articulate, or competent Lego blog, but we sure do have the most tenuous Christmas titles!
Continuing the Christmassy nonsense is this, Danifill’s marvellous MAZ 5316 4×4 truck, complete with BuWizz power, Servo steering, remotely locking pneumatically-controlled differentials, live-axle suspension, a tilting cab, and working LED head and tail lights.
Danifill has taken his MAZ into the snow to show what it can do, and you can read more about the model and watch a video of it in action at the Eurobricks forum here.
But good as some of these kits are, what lights us up is builders designing their own creations. It’s what LEGO is all about, and yet there hasn’t been a product allowing builders to easily light up their own vehicular designs. So we asked LEGO lighting specialists Lightailing to make one…
This is what they sent us, the Lightailing Light Starter Kit, containing a power source (USB or coin-cell batteries), two expansion boards, connecting cables, and two bright white LEDs, two red LEDs, and a white self-adhesive strip light, all neatly packaged using the components readily available from Lightailing’s other kits.
So is the Lightailing Light Starter Kit any good, and what creation did we light up? Read on to find out! Continue reading →
LEGO like distribution trucks in their Town/City range. With generic ‘Cargo’ branding and the blandest of styling, they’re… well, perfect actually.
However the Technic and Model Team ranges, which lean more towards supercars and excitingly yellow pieces of construction equipment, tend to omit such workhorses from their line-ups.
Cue Eurobricks’ designer-han, who has decided to right that wrong with this; his fully remote control distribution truck, complete with generic ‘Cargo’ branding and the blandest of styling. And it’s fantastic.
Han’s creation includes remote control drive and steering, a motorised tilting cabin (under which sits a working V8 engine with spinning fans), LED lights front and rear, and – most importantly – a brilliant working tail-lift.
Powered by two L Motors, Han’s tail-lift opens the cargo area, drops parallel to the ground, and lowers to allow an exciting array of ‘Cargo’ (in this case Duplo bricks) to be easily loaded.
It’s well worth a closer look and you can do just that at the Eurobricks forum via the link above, where further details, a video of the truck in action, and a link to building instructions can all be found.
This is not a car. It is in fact a Prussion G12 steam locomotive, depicted here in Royal Württemberg livery (and in a wonderful snowy scene) by Flickr’s Pieter Post.
Around 1,500 G12’s were built between 1917 and 1924, when it became one of the first standardised locomotives in operation across Germany.
Pieter’s beautiful recreation of the G12 utilises a slew of third-party parts to maximise the realism, with custom valve gear, tender wheels, LED lighting, and a BuWizz bluetooth battery powering the LEGO L-Motor that drives the wheels.
The result is – as you can see here – spectacular, and you can check out the full description of both Pieter’s Prussian G12 build and the real steam locomotive at his photostream.
Click the link above to take a winter’s journey across 1920’s Germany.
The Lego Car Blog Elves are having a great day today. Previous bloggee Jakub Marcisz is back with this lovely Classic Ford F100 pick-up, which not only looks fantastic, there’s a complete Power Functions remote control drivetrain underneath too.
The Elves therefore, are riding around in the back. A few have inevitably been run over, but for the most part it’s good clean fun.
Jakub’s model conceals its remote controlness well, with the only clue visible being if the brown box is removed from the bed, and the model also features opening doors (revealing a beautifully constructed interior), dropping tailgate, opening hood, LED lights, working suspension, and a high/low gearbox.
It’s a top quality build that’s worth a closer look, and you can do just that via Jakub’s photostream at the link above, where more imagery and a link to a YouTube video can also be found.
This is a Bateman Assault Bridge Carrier, an experimental tank-bridge-laying-combo based on the excellently-named ‘Medium Dragon’ Mk.1 artillery tractor that was trialled by the British Royal Engineers in 1926.
It’s one of the more obscure vehicles to appear here then, and it’s been recreated brilliantly by Tarix819 of Eurobricks in a colossal 1:8 scale.
Weighing almost 10kgs, Tarix’s creation features two coil-sprung tracks, each with its own mechanical tensioner and independently powered by an SBrick and three XL motors.
A working V8 engine lives within the armour, and a functioning searchlight is able to light up the obstacle ahead in need of crossing.
And cross an obstacle the Bateman can, as Tarix’s model can deploy the huge bridge mounted on the top of machine. The real Assault Bridge Carrier relied on hand-powered winches (which are also recreated here), but Tarix’s build utilises a Power Functions Medium Motor to complete the model’s suite of remote control functionality.
It’s a monumentally impressive piece of Lego engineering and you can see how Tarix has done it at the Eurobricks discussion form here, and via the brilliant video below.
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.
This is an Autozam AZ-1, and it’s awesome! Produced from 1992 to ’94, fewer than 5,000 units were built across all three brands that marketed it (Mazda, Mazda’s kei car brand Autozam, and Suzuki, who supplied the engine), with sales hampered by a high list price, collapsing economy, and it being weird even by the standards of the Japanese kei-class.
Effectively a 1:2 scale mid-engined gull-winged supercar, the AZ-1 we have here is even smaller, at 1:11, but it’s as packed with interestingness as the real thing. Built by syclone of Eurobricks, this brilliant Technic recreation of the coolest kei-car of them all features remote control drive, steering and headlights, a working steering wheel inside a detailed cabin, independent front and rear suspension, a working piston engine (in there somewhere!), and – of course – opening gull-wing doors.
Building instructions are available and there’s much more to see of syclone’s brilliant Autozam AZ-1, including a video of it in action, at the Eurobricks discussion forum. Take a look at this fantastic 1:11 recreation of a 1:2 supercar via the link above!
The LEGO Technic 42111 Fast & Furious Dom’s Dodge Charger set received a rather good review here at TLCB when we got our hands on it. Certainly a better one than movies did. But, like those awful awful movies, could there be sequel; one that’s even faster and furiouser?
Well no, neither of those adjectives. But we do have a 42111 sequel that’s more sparkly.
That’s because we’ve outfitted our 42111 Dom’s Dodge Charger set with an array of LED lights courtesy of suppliers Lightailing, who have a huge range of LEGO compatible light kits available for sets including Creator, Modular Buildings, Star Wars, Harry Potter, City, and – as here – Technic.
Our 42111-compatible kit is produced by BriksMax, and it came in a neat box containing an instructions booklet, a 1 Year warranty card, a remote control, a battery box, and an alarming number of resealable bags.
Said bags were numbered and described, corresponding to the relevant point in the instructions denoting when to open each one. Inside each was a well-coiled set of wires, tiny circuit boards, sticky pads, or a combination of these.
So is adding the BriksMax light kit to your 42111 Dom’s Dodge Charger set fun? Absolutely not. Fiddly – yes. Fun – no.
Despite the instructions being reasonable, the installation process is effectively threading needle around two hundred times. It makes us wonder if these LED lighting kit companies could design a little attachment that clips into Technic holes and holds the wire, removing the need to endlessly thread LEDs through Technic beams and making the instructions simpler to boot (you can have that recommendation for free Lighting People!)
The process is made harder by the wires being black and in this case the model being black too, although the BriksMax kit does sometimes differentiate between wire types via coloured band, plus each LED has the bag no. printed on its reverse, which is a thoughtful touch.
Only a few parts of the set need to be disassembled to install the LEDs, and only two pieces are replaced (the front indicator bricks switching from tiles to studs to give more room for the LED inside).
Overall though, the installation process is not fun one bit. However, the end result is, well… fantastic. Continue reading →
This may look like a normal cab-over light duty truck, but it is in fact a kei car, Japan’s microcar class in which vehicles can measure no longer than 3.4m, no wider than 1.48m, and have an engine size no greater than 660cc.
It is, therefore, absolutely tiny. Plus, obviously, it’s a Lego model, so it’s even smaller than that…
This superb Technic kei-class truck is a Daihatsu Hijet S110P, and it comes from syclone of Eurobricks who has packed it with an unfathomably large amount of features.
Under the really rather good exterior is a full remote control drivetrain, complete with all-wheel-suspension, all-wheel-drive, servo steering (linked to the steering wheel too), opening and locking doors, dropping bed side walls, and even working headlights.
There’s loads more of syclone’s Daihatsu Hijet to see at the Eurobricks forum, including a video of the kei truck in action. Take a look via the link above!
It’s some time in the future, and the Earth is completely depleted of helium. Clearly such a situation has massive ramifications, and the balloon-animal industry, vital to so many, have apparently take matters into their own highly-skilled balloon-bending hands.
Sending equipment to the Jupiter’s moon Europa, the inflatable contortionists are mining the satellite for its precious precious helium, returning the gas to Earth via transport ships, and – before that – these enormous gas-rovers.
With twelve-wheel-drive, a crew of five, and eight huge gas-filled balls, the gas-rovers are impressive machines, at least in the minds of Jon & Catherine Stead, whose backstory we have completely butchered for the purpose of this silliness.
We could have gone with either a testicle or enhanced-boobs theme though, so count yourself lucky Steads!
Anyway, their Europa gas-rover is a properly good build, with LED lighting, incredible brick-built wheels, and an ace five-person cockpit, where – presumably – the crew all talk in squeaky voices.
