frame

I was stupid enough to drive to Ikea on a Friday afternoon yesterday, but I needed some things to help me organise and display my growing LEGO collection. First of all, I bought three long LACK shelves and a TV bench to put along one wall to display my Micropolis and larger builds. I was pleased to put the shelves up nice and level, but there was a lot of drilling involved!

I had been thinking about how best to display my Minifig collection for some time. There were various options but I wanted something which would be dust proof, and most of them were proving expensive. However, I did a bit of online research and found that other folks had had some success using the cheap Ribba shadowbox frames from Ikea. Hence my trip around the M25…

I had the 48×48 baseplate already, and simply pushed the black CMF display plates between the baseplate studs. Perhaps it’s not a legal connection, but they fit nice and snugly and even with a heavy minifig attached, they show no sign of coming out in a hurry.

Then I chose some of my favourite CMFs and put them on their plates – and voila! It looks great hanging above the fireplace in the lounge. I probably have enough minifigs to do another one too, but I will need to buy another baseplate and frame before I can put that together.

Having successfully built the Tipper Truck yesterday, I set about making a start on the actual Bucket Wheel Excavator today. I started with Bags 2:

These held the parts to build the lower frame of the thing, which took shape quite quickly. The circular yellow rack will guide the rotating turret once it is in place.

Next up, bags 3:

These contained the bits to make some guides for the caterpillar tracks:

These fitted to the frame chassis and then the caterpillar tracks were laid over the wheels to give the desired shape and form. They are driven by the big toothed black cog in the picture above, which joins to the main transverse drive shaft at the front of the chassis (the yellow connectors at each end).

Bags 4 contained the parts to begin the turret mechanism:

The turret also connects to the linear actuators which incline the main conveyor at an angle as desired. The gearbox here (all the red cogs) is quite complicated and when I had nearly finished this bit I realised I had one gear left over! Oh no… strip it down again (thankfully in quite big chunks) and find where I had missed inserting the extra cog. Eventually it went back together, but not without a bit of swearing!

Once attached to the main chassis the build is really beginning to take shape:

Next onto the relatively small Stage 5 bags:

These constructed a pair of vertical supports on the main turret, which are used to anchor the big conveyor structure. It didn’t take long to add them to the build.

Fitting the first conveyor to the uprights…

After the fiasco with the gearbox, and having seen the number of bags involved with Stage 6, I decided to call it a day for the moment. I will continue soon, hopefully.

Minifigs: Display Frame & Shelving

Technic: Bucket Wheel Excavator (42055) – Part 2