Tested by customer Henrique: The tow truck from Lego
16.11.2017
Translation: machine translated
Every month we give away a Lego novelty. Galaxus customer Henrique has won the tow truck from Lego Technic. This is his test report.
The idea
As an association for technology-loving children, we regularly build things together with the children. Lego is always popular and sets no limits for the children. A Lego Technic takes the whole thing to another level. The children are between 8 and 16 years old, so some of them are under the suggested age group. As a rule, people build such a model alone or in pairs. We wanted to do it with a group of ten children. You need a plan for that!
The preparation
The parcel soon arrived and the big question was, how can ten children work on a model with one set of instructions? We divided the instructions into the sub-areas, had a main assembly and suppliers. It looked something like this on the plan:
The next question was: Should we pre-sort the parts? Anyone who knows Lego City is used to numbered bags. If all the children have to get parts from the same box, it quickly ends in chaos. So we sorted the parts by size and function.
The assembly
On the day, the big question: Can the children finish it in two hours? 587 individual steps. We divided the children into three teams of three and they had to coordinate within the group. Who fetches the parts, who assembles them, who gives the instructions. However, there was one important task that we didn't include: Debugging.
It happened again and again that something was not assembled correctly. The sooner this was discovered, the better, of course. However, it was unavoidable that certain rebuilds were carried out. But I've rarely had so much fun assembling a set. I only worked on the dismantling and still had a lot of fun with the children. How far did we get in two hours? About a third of the work was done. So we carried on the next weekend. On the third weekend, we continued building the model during the "Maker Faire" Live and finished it on Sunday.
The test drive
The first ride took us from Dynamo via the park of the National Museum to Zurich's main railway station. The gravel path was a nice test track, but the motor performance of the kit left a lot to be desired. Even on small inclines, the speed dropped noticeably. The mechanics for the various functions (swivelling crane arm, climbing, extending side arms, steering lorry) are impressively built. A lot can be done with just two motors. A lot of effort has been put into the details, including the suspension of the wheels.
Conclusion
Building Lego kits in large groups is great fun, but requires coordination. The model kept a whole group busy for a few days and the final model has some exciting functions that you can also have fun with. It's definitely not an off-road truck, but that's not what it's trying to be.
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