Enlarged Miniature Forklift

How do you classify something that is gigantic and miniature at the same time? LEGO kit 850, from 1977 when it was known as an Expert Builder set, was 210 modular blocks meant to be transformed into a forklift nearly 140mm tall. [Matt Denton] scaled up the miniature pieces but it still produced a smaller-than-life forklift. This is somewhere in the creamy middle because his eight-year-old nephew can sit on it but most adults would demolish their self-esteem if they attempted the same feat.

[Matt] has been seen before building these modular sets from enlarged LEGO blocks, like his Quintuple-Sized Go-Kart. He seems to have chosen the same scale for the pieces and who wouldn’t? If you’re printing yourself a ton of LEGO blocks, it just makes sense to keep them all compatible. Isn’t combing all your sets into one mishmash the point after all? We’ll see what his nephew/co-host constructs after his uncle [Matt] leaves.

In the time-lapse video after the break, you can see how the kit goes together as easily as you would hope from home-made bricks. With that kind of repeatability and a second successful project, it’s safe to say his technique is solid and this opens the door to over-sized projects to which LEGO hasn’t published instructions.

Hackaday is bursting with LEGO projects, K’Nex projects, and even Erector set projects.

19 thoughts on “Enlarged Miniature Forklift

  1. aaaaaaaaaaahhhhh how cool is this, wow!
    He said it took him 7 days to print and the only thing that popped into my mind was “ONLY SEVEN??” I expected it to take much longer, I assume it is 7x24hours, but these parts are huge!
    Great build!

    1. Thick layers, hollow bricks. 168 hours to print. 210 bricks. That means more than one brick per hour and that assumes they were able to immediately clear the print bed. How many printers were being used here exactly?

      1. I’m sure he mentioned Lulzbots 5 & 6 somewhere near the beginning, plus this is one of the guys behind the Mantis giant hydraulic hexabot, so he probably runs an engineering company with multiple machines…

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