Attacking LEGO brushfires with my Wildland Ultra XT fire engine
The fire engine I built last year was mainly inspired by other LEGO builders, so I wanted to design something from scratch on my own. Here’s the result:
My brother sent me a link to the S&S Fire Apparatus Co’s awesome Wildland Ultra XT, and I just had to build this amazing vehicle — used by the US Bureau of Land Management and local departments where brushfires are common, such as the San Diego Fire Department.
Check out more photos in my LEGO S&S Wildland Ultra XT photoset on Flickr.
March 8th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
Those chainsaws are pretty cool. I mean, on top of everything else. :-)
March 8th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Holy, that’s one cool MOC! But why does the guy with the chainsaw carry chains of ammo? :-)
March 8th, 2009 at 7:23 pm
It looks very rugged and cool. Looking at the photo, I can see that it’s quite accurate as well.
March 8th, 2009 at 11:28 pm
I think you could have done this 1.5x or 2x bigger, and still kept it minifig scale. Which would have made a very imposing and impressive vehicle. What you’ve created is a great and well-detailed model, but it’s a bit too cute. The source photo looks more badass.
March 9th, 2009 at 1:06 am
I agree it’s cute but not too cute. The original is just as chunky, which makes it perfect source material. The size looks fine to me considering “minifig scale” is highly variable. I forget the exact statistic but didn’t someone determine if people had minifig dimensions they would weigh like 600 lbs or something.
Nice work Andrew.
March 9th, 2009 at 6:30 am
Needs more zombies.
March 9th, 2009 at 9:51 am
Nice. The brush truck goes without saying, but I particularly like the touch of the little cans used to start backfires. I’ll see what the firemen at SDFD station 14 think. I’m sure they won’t be too offended by the CDF uniforms instead of their dark blue.
March 9th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
@ Krypton: maybe ’cause he’s hardcore, the way the truck is. Oh yeah, and also like Andrew.
March 9th, 2009 at 6:49 pm
Thanks for the comments, everyone! This was a really fun build — half-stud offset pretty much everywhere.
@KryptonHeidt: For bears. :-P
@worker201: I donno. If you compare it with photos that have people in them, it seems scaled about right…
@Thanel: Let me know what they say. I was going to do a shot for you (and the SDFD guys) with a different crew, but ran out of daylight.
March 16th, 2009 at 8:26 am
^
Yesterday I showed pictures of the build to the local firemen. The captain posted it on the station house wall. It was out of service that day, which led to interesting lessons from two of the firemen on fire engine construction, maintenance, weight and post major-action bureaucracy. Apparently the Ulta XT at SDFD-14 was donated by the builders and is only one of 4 in active service.
March 16th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
^ Glad they liked it enough to put it up on the wall! Only one of four, huh? No wonder finding reference pictures was fairly hard…
May 4th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
hi that is an awesome set where did you get all the pieces from and could i get a set of building instructions for the set ??
thanks Robert , Portland Oregon
proud Lego builder and collector
May 4th, 2009 at 7:58 pm
^ Unfortunately, I can’t provide instructions, but my source for most of the pieces was BrickLink.com.