Tag Archives: Tracked Loader

Skid Row

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The Lego Car Blog Elves are having a great time this morning. Too slow to run them over but fast enough for them to ride upon, Bricksley’s four-motor Liebherr LR 636 G8 tracked skid-steer loader is providing much amusement to our little workers.

Those four motors are the LEGO Powered-Up variety (meaning they can be controlled via bluetooth), and they power each track, the arm, and the bucket, with two Powered-Up Hubs delivering the control.

The Liebherr’s exterior realism matches the excellent engineering within it too, with outstanding attention to detail, beautifully accurate decals, and perfect presentation making it a specularly life-like creation. Except in the TLCB Office that is, where half-a-dozen mythical creatures are joyfully riding upon it.

It’s all fun and games until one of them falls under the tracks, but until then we’ll continue to enjoy Bricksley’s brilliant build, and you can check it out too to via Eurobricks, or their ‘Liebherr LR 636 G8′ album on Flickr, where over twenty top quality images are available to view.

Bend & ZNAP

This is an ŁM-50 tracked front-end overhead loader, a Polish device characterised by two curved metal bars that allow the bucket to pass from the front to the rear of the machine over the head of the driver.

Which provides something of a conundrum when recreating it out of Danish plastic, because LEGO don’t make Technic bars in curved form. Or rather, they don’t any more…

Back in 1998 LEGO were in trouble. The perceived threat from electronic toys and rival construction brand K’nex sent the firm down some very dark alleyways, and the darkest of the lot* was Znap.

Essentially a K’nex rip-off, the Znap range lasted just two years across nineteen sets, and its most notable feature was that it had virtually nothing to do with LEGO bricks whatsoever.

It did however feature curved beams, beams that Flickr’s Maciej Szymański has somehow integrated into his superb fully-RC ŁM-50 front-end loader, enabling the bucket to slide over the model just like it does on the real thing.

A suite of third-party CaDa electrics power the movement of said bucket, plus the skid-steer tracks, but seeing as they’re about as genuine LEGO at Znap was, we’ll let it slide.

Excellent attention to detail and top quality presentation complete Maciej’s model, and there’s much more to see (including a video of the model in action) at his ‘ŁM-50’ album. Click the link above to bend and Znap!

*Except for Galidor of course.

**Today’s tenuous title link. You don’t get quality like this at The Brother’s Brick.

Skid Marks

The Lego Car Blog Elves, as has been well documented on these pages, love to commit acts of extreme violence on one another. We’re not really sure why, but as we suspect a trip inside the Elven mind to uncover the reasons for this evolutionary oddity would raise more questions than answers, we’re content to let it be.

Today’s source of mythical mischief comes courtesy of JLiu15 of Flickr, who has recreated this neat remotely controlled tracked loader. A suite of Power Functions motors provide the drive, skid-steering, and linear-actuator-driven bucket elevation and tipping, which the Elf at the controls used first to first scoop up its fellow workers that weren’t paying attention, then drop them onto the floor to run them over.

We now have some Elven skid marks to clear up, so whilst we do that you can head to JLui15’s ‘Tracked Loader’ album to see more, before we return later on today with a very different sort of skidding vehicle…