When you're a kid, building a Lego fortress that can withstand attacks from G.I. Joe and Transformers is a real accomplishment. As an adult, you need a bigger challenge, and that's what Lego's 3,929-piece Technic Bucket Wheel Excavator set provides. It's the most work I've ever put into building a toy, but the resulting edifice makes you feel like you deserve a job at Legoland. Lego's Technic sets have grown larger and more ambitious over time, packing an incredible amount of detail into replicas of real-life vehicles. The Porsche 911 GT3 RS model even featured a working gear box. However, whereas the Lego Porsche is powered by you simply pushing it around, the $399.99 Lego Bucket Wheel Excavator is motorised, with multiple moving features that drastically increase the building challenge. 551-pages of "what have I gotten myself into?" But the word 'challenge' doesn't quite convey exactly what you're in for when it comes to building the Lego Excavator. At 3,929-pieces it's officially the biggest Lego Technic set to date.
The box it comes in is massive, but the real scope of what you're undertaking only becomes clear when you pull out the set's 551-page instruction manual. I'm not even sure I've ever read a book that was this big. It's highly recommended that you invest in some plastic containers for sorting pieces before you start building. All-in-all I spent roughly 20 hours turning the countless bags of semi-organised Lego pieces into the excavator model pictured on the box. Lego's instruction manuals have always been clear and easy to follow, but that's not to say that some steps weren't challenging. The manual is easy to follow with clear illustrations, but you'll still find yourself staring at a page while you figure out where every last piece goes. At times the excavator build can be easy, mundane, and even monotonous, with just a few pieces being added in each step. But other times you'll find yourself spending 10 minutes hunting down pieces (a battery of plastic food storage bins are a must for sorting pieces) and then figuring out where every last one needs to go.
Somewhere around halfway through the build I was completely sick of Lego, and my thumbs were raw from pushing plastic pegs into tiny Technic holes. But I carried on, and by the time I had reached the last pages of the manual, I was surprisingly proud of what I had accomplished. My greatest accomplishment in life. All of your hard work, aching thumbs, and bloodshot eyes leave you with an impressive miniature replica of the massive strip mining machines that dig away at the earth. Working tank treads are all but necessary to support this model's weight. The Bucket Wheel Excavator rumbles along on a set of working tank treads that help spread out the Excavator's weight. The real-life version is all but dependent on massive treads like this so that it doesn't just sink into the earth, but Lego's version is also surprisingly hefty given the 3,929 plastic pieces that went into its construction. That spinning excavating wheel looks ready to take a bite out of the earth.
On the front you'll find the excavating wheel itself, one of the model's many motorised features, which spins to lift Lego rocks up onto the excavator's moving conveyor belts. The arm supporting the spinning wheel can also be raised and lowered, using a manually-operated dial that extends a set of hydraulic arms. More tank treads, but here they're used as conveyor belts to move Lego debris along. A pair of motorised conveyor belts then take those random bits of Lego scooped up by the excavating wheel and move them through the excavator. One of the belts can also be partly rotated from side to side so that the Lego debris can be eventually dumped into a tiny dump truck model that's included with the set. What's most impressive about Lego's Bucket Wheel Excavator isn't just that it's motorised: It's that all of the moving features, including its ability to drive forwards and backwards, are powered by a single electric motor. Looking underneath the excavator at all of its gears almost looks more complex than peeking under the hood of your car.
You'd assume there was at least a dozen motors powering all of the Excavator's movement, but in reality there's just one, selectively operating various functions using a complicated transmission and various gear boxes. It reduces the number of batteries you need to power the model, but the downside of being dependent on a single motor is that all that gearing results in motorised functions that operate very, very slowly. The excavator in motion, sped up 80X. See this overhead shot of the Lego Bucket Wheel Excavator driving through the frame in about three seconds? That footage has been sped up immensely. In reality it took the model just over four minutes to roll across that short distance. It's agonizingly slow, but that also helps sell the miniature scale of this Bucket Wheel Excavator since the real-life versions move even slower. It's far from being a deal breaker, though. Half the fun of playing with Lego is the build itself, and the Bucket Wheel Excavator is, without a doubt, the most complicated Lego set you can buy today.
You'll hate yourself for even thinking about attempting it once you find yourself halfway through the build and compelled to finish it. But by the time you're done there's a wonderful feeling of accomplishment that you were able to tackle the biggest challenge from Lego's designers. Twenty hours of building later, the Lego Bucket Wheel Excavator.Lego Technic Porsche 911 GT3 RS | Back then in 1977, Lego released the first big Technic car set. It was set number 853 (Brickset Database) and simply called ‚Auto Chassis‘. As a big car and Lego fan, this was a must have for me and somehow I got it. My memories are a bit unclear, but I guess I have been a good boy and Santa had no other choice than putting the giant box under the christmas tree. I built it and broke it down and built it again. And I always wanted to build a nice and fancy skirt for the chassis, but because of insufficient bricks this project always failed. Lego Technic Porsche 911 GT3 RS (42056): Weitere Inhalte
Box 1 – Antriebsstrang Box 2 – Hochzeit Box 3 – Karosserie Box 4 – Review Please follow Zusammengebaut on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. In the further years the tiny danish toy company released more Technic car sets. The 8880 Technic Super Car from 1994 was a brilliant one. A massive number of 1343 elements was the guarantee for a brilliant set with loads of cool functions. 4 wheel steering, but no body work. Working gearbox, but no body work. Flip-eyes and comfy seats, but no body work. You see the point? It is a Technic set and made sure that there is no doubt to which category it belongs. Btw.: Lego once made a version scaled up to the dimensions of a real car with millions of bricks. And it seems that they are very proud of it, because they are displaying this beauty at the Lego World in Kopenhagen, even if the set is gone off the shelves for decades, now! And you may already have guessed it: the big one also has no body work. But there was evolution.
The Super Car had at least long technic bricks to show the outlines of the body. Better than nothing, if you ask me. Time moved on and so did the Technic sets. 2007 was the year of the Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano (say that name slowly with Italian dialect) number 8145. Technic had a lot of new elements and the big cars could be made with a body. The use of flexible tube elements made it possible to reproduce the fine lines of the original. Advantage and disadvantage at the same time, these tube elements were just showing roughly the outlines of the car. There were still lots of holes and unfilled areas and you had to imagine the full body. To see the difference between a Lego Technic Car and a Lego Car, the former wood toy making company released two quite similar sets: Ferrari F1 Racer 1:10 (number 8386) and Ferrari F1 Racer 1:9 (number 8157). Both are very big and have between 700 and 1000 elements. And to be honest, I have no idea how they’ve been able to make this, because my tiny 1:20 cars are made of about 500 elements.
Anyway, the Technic one came with the well known tube elements and the brick based one does not. You can see through the body of the Technic one, but you can’t at the brick based one. It’s function versus form. Decide by your own, which one is your favorite. They are both out of production for a long time and unaffordable these days. Now we have 2016 and the biggest toy company of the world announces a brand new set: the Porsche 911 GT3 RS! Tube elements are still inside the box, but used less than in the past. Typically for a Technic set the desktop sized version of the latest invention of German engineering comes with a lot of cool features. Working gear shifting mechanism in the form of steering pedals! How the hell did they made this? It seems that there are still some points where you can look at least inside the car, but not through the entire car. Evolution has made a big step forward. Many of the orange elements (my favorite color, if I may mention that!) are old friends for Technic lovers.