173 - Christmas Distraction

I hope that everyone has had a great Christmas and is looking forward to the New Year. As well as my GW collection, I am also very fond of LEGO and have a decent collection of City, Star Wars and TECHNIC sets. Each year I'm always after something and this Christmas my wife certainly delivered.

And this is what I got! This it the 42042 TECHNIC Crawler Crane, a 1400 piece beast of a kit.

So after work this week I spent some time putting this giant thing together. This is after about an hour and all of the pieces from bag 1. The tracks consist of 45 individual links per side!

Fast forward another 2 hours and this is how the crane was looking with bags 2 and 3 out of the way. Bag 2 contained all of the pieces for the gearing and bag 3 was the outer shell.

This kit does have power functions - the power cable is sticking out the back. It also has 4 different functions which hopefully you can make out on the tiles at the bottom of the picture.

After another hour (so that's at least 4 hours total build time), I am left with this! It is an absolutely massive kit and really does look awesome!

Here is a close up now that all of the outer pieces have been attached. When I first tried to use the power functions, I had a panic moment as they didn't work. Then I realised that the battery pack took 6x AA batteries, not the 3 that I had put in. After the extra batteries had been added this crane trundles around, turning and lifting loads - I used it to steal the remote from the missus.

For anyone that likes building LEGO or construction kits, this is well worth a go.

Thanks for reading! See you in 2016!