I
was thinking about it for months. First of all, Dennis Bosmann,
a dutchman who make amazing Lego models has inspired me a lot.
He made a crane, model from a Liebherr LG1550. Each time I surf
on his site I get several reactions :In may 2001, I've started to build a lattice crane. It's quite a big project, and you can find here some informations on it.
I
was thinking about it for months. First of all, Dennis Bosmann,
a dutchman who make amazing Lego models has inspired me a lot.
He made a crane, model from a Liebherr LG1550. Each time I surf
on his site I get several reactions :
"4m20 high, it's incredible..., how can he do that..., it's very model-like, I want to do same kind of thing !"
Sometimes, at work, we rent some cranes (real ones !), and I'm fascinated by those machines. In 1994, I realized a tower crane.
At least, I had some contacts with Youri Bertomeu, a guy who work in hosting company in France : Mediaco. He also started a Lego crane.
After months of thinking, I started !
First
I searched on the web machinery builders, and hosting companies.
There are several kind of mobile cranes : Crawler cranes or truck
cranes.
Most of the truck cranes are telescopic, erect by hydraulic jack. Crawler cranes are often used for realy heavy charges, with lattice boom.
As it's really dificult to make high power and long course jacks with Lego, and big telescopic boom iss hard to manage, I decided to build a lattice crane.
But, in may, I haven't enough Lego crawler to build a crawler carrier. Then I've choose to mix a truck crane, with a lattice boom.
The truck carrier
is a Demag AC120, the superstructure is from Terex HC125ss and
boom combinations are from different big Demag crawler cranes.
Scale choice was imposed by wheel size. As the carrier is a 5 axle, I need 10 wheels of the same size. I decided to start with Lego 20x30 type wich is 64mm diameter.
So scale should be 1/25. It would be possible to build it, but the space into the superstructure will be limited.
I've built the crane in a curious order : I've started by main
boom, then the carrier, then the superstructure. I worked at least
50 hours before the first lifting.
And then has started the evolution processus... Second carrier, new drums, fly jib. In middle of june, I've already work more than 200 hours on this project.
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First carrier |