With small LEGO builds, it often takes ingenuity to make for an impressive creation. We are of course partial to these builds, but sometimes nothing beats the brute force of a gigantic, multi-thousand (if not tens of thousands) piece build. It’s hard to tell, but I think Beat Felber‘s colossus falls into the latter category. Just. Don’t you think?

This isn’t a new build: Beat first uploaded a video of its operation a couple of years ago, which we’ll get to in a moment. But he has now uploaded a host of pictures of every nook and cranny on this P&H 2355 dragline excavator. Which is the perfect excuse for us to cover it in some more detail!

Let’s address the elephant in the room: this thing is BIG. The real thing has a boom length of 48.7m, which at Beat’s scale of 1:28.5 still works out at 1.7m (or about 5’7). While he hasn’t given us exact dimensions, we can probably assume the whole thing is well over 2m in length. That’s big!

All those Technic beams and lengths of string must be under some serious stress; LEGO can get surprisingly heavy when there’s this much of it. Despite all that heavy engineering, there is plenty of space for detail. This cutaway shot shows off some of that detail, alongside some of the motors.

I say “some”, as the two motors in here are exclusively for powering the hoist. There are 9 (yes, nine) motors that make this excavator fully motorised. Despite all that weight, the mechanisms are surprisingly smooth, as evidenced by the aforementioned video.

All in all, this is a quite astonishing feat of engineering. But we shouldn’t be surprised – Beat has previous, after all.