Robot Claw

Over the last week, I assembled this Lego kit:

As far as these kits go, this one is seriously lacking originality, being almost identical in design and construction to other cranes I have made before.

As it turns out my familiarity with the basic design would almost be my downfall! This kit has 108 pages of assembly instructions, with over 250 individual steps. And on the 19th page, less than 20% into the construction, I made an error. This isn’t the end of the world – everyone makes mistakes with complex Lego kits here and there. But this tiny mistake became massive indeed since I didn’t notice it until over 70 pages later!

Here it is:

See that circled piece? We’ll call than an ‘eleven-er’. It should have been 2 tabs shorter, a ‘nine-er’. But it’s so embedded into the construction of the crane that removal at this point would require essentially dismantling 50% of the build and redoing it – losing many hours of work. What was I to do? I was so close to the finish at this point that my options were few, and I really, really didn’t want to dismantle and start again. So I had a brainwave:

Can’t see the fix can you? The curved piece on the side of the crane is attached using the 9 piece that I should have used 70 pages earlier. I had to attach it differently (the original instructions required the 11 piece and it was attached at the bottom not at the top as I did). But it’s very clean and it’s only visible in profile that there is an error:

Notice how on the left side the side panel is not flush with the body of the crane? Not perfect perhaps, but good enough 🙂

Here’s the final product compared to a very large animal so you can see how big it is:

It’s a very nice kit. The crane can be raised and lowered, and the claw at the end opens and closes using a fascinating mechanism. The kit can also be fitted with the technic motor and be battery driven, but my motor is still in my other crane so I didn’t do that. All things considered this is a great kit and while derivative of the other cranes I’m glad I own it 🙂

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 21st, 2014 at 10:46 am and is filed under Miscellaneous, Otaku, Toys. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.