Despite having no prior mining experience nor the know-how to drive anything larger than a regular car, I am fascinated by Beat Felber’s new LEGO creations. Maybe the size and power of these giant earthmoving machines tickle my fancy. Whatever the reason, here’s the 400-ton Terex Unit Rig MT 6300AC dump truck. The real deal has tires that are four meters or well over 13 feet in diameter. The-um-LEGO deal has custom tires that are not official LEGO parts but suits this beast quite well.
LEGO builder Beat Felber sure loves construction equipment! Whether Liebherr, Komatsu, or in this case Orenstein & Koppel, Beat gives them their due in brick form. This particular model in the O&K livery of red and white is a 1/28.5 recreation of the RH 120 C excavator, fully motorized for the toughest jobs. And despite this functionality, there’s no skimping on the details either! Check out all the intricacies around the treads and where the boom meets the front of the cab.
People who design and build massive, powerful, yet very accurate LEGO trucks are unlike any of us, ordinary minifigure collectors. Look at Beat Felber. I bet he doesn’t even bother purchasing any LEGO wheels smaller than enormous 84mm’s that his newest Komatsu HD785-5 runs on. And it’s not even truck’s best feature.
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!
LEGO builder Beat Felber is a master at building massive moving vehicles with Technic. Take this Land Rover 110 for instance. He tells us that this model uses two Power Functions L-Motors for the all-wheel drivetrain and a servo motor for steering. The chassis features a hi/low gearbox which was automated using an M-Motor. Also both front and rear axle are of the solid type with differential and are spring mounted.
If that wasn’t impressive enough, here is the model posed with the real Land Rover. The car was used as a fire engine for about twenty-five years until Beat bought the vehicle in 2017.The car is called ‘Grisu’, named after an Italian cartoon figure of a dragon who wanted to become a firefighter. Be sure not to miss out on some other Technic vehicles from this builder in our archives.
I was recently at the Caterpillar Visitors Center in Peoria, looking at the big construction vehicles made for shaping the Earth in a profound way, from the gigantic mining dump trucks to the tiny little excavators. Somewhere in between are the bulldozers, offered in nearly a dozen sizes. The biggest Caterpillar, the D11, is one huge rig, but shockingly it isn’t the biggest dozer around. That title belongs to the Komatsu D575A-3 Super Dozer, weighing in at 336,400 pounds and measuring 38+ feet long, 24+ feet wide at the blade, and 16 feet high. While Beat Felber‘s LEGO model is not quite so large, it is not small, either. The builder has a whole series of 1:28.5 scale machines, from dump trucks to mining shovels, and the Super Dozer is a super addition to the lineup. The little kid inside of me is drooling all over the keyboard as I look at this beast, because this is the bulldozer every kid imagines driving as a construction worker.
If this 1:28.5 scale model of the Marion 5760 Mountaineer stripping shovel doesn’t make your jaw hit the floor, then I suggest you take a closer look. Personally, I am glad that it is equipped with robust power functions to lift mine back up. Beat Felber, also known as Engineering with ABS, has created an absolutely stunning model of this monster of a machine used to scrape off the top layers of earth from seams of coal in Ohio. The Mountaineer was in operation from 1956 until 1979, and considering how massive the LEGO model of it is, I can only imagine how enormous the real thing was. It must have moved a lot of dirt. I almost said “a ton of dirt”, but I’d bet the shovel could lift a lot more than a ton of rock and dirt in every scoop. (It was closer to 60 tons per scoop! – Ed.)
