It’s part of the great circle of life that toys and scale models that provide a reflection of macro-sized objects like vehicles and buildings will eventually be scaled up again to life-sized proportions. Case in point the LEGO Technic dune buggy that [Matt Denton] recently printed at effectively human scale, while also making it actually drivable.
The basis for this project is the 8845 Dune Buggy which was released in 1981. Unlike the modern 42101 version, it’s more straightforward and also seems more amenable to actually sitting in despite featuring more pieces for a total of 174 pieces. Naturally, [Matt] didn’t simply go for a naïve build of the 8845 buggy, but made a few changes. First is the scale that’s 10.42 times larger than the LEGO original, based around the use of 50 mm bearings. The model was also modified to be a single-seater, with the steering wheel placed in the center.
With some structural and ergonomic tweaks in place, the resulting CAD model was printed out mostly in PLA with a 1 mm nozzle and 10% infill using a belt FDM printer to help with the sheer size of the parts. After that it was mostly a LEGO kit assembly on a ludicrous scale that resembles a cross between building a LEGO kit and assembling Ikea flatpack furniture.
At merely the cost of most of his sanity, [Matt] finally got the whole kit together, still leaving a few suspension issues to resolve, as it turns out that so much plastic actually weighs a lot, at 102 kg. With that and other issues resolved, the final touch was to add an electric motor to the whole kit using a belt-driven system on the rear axle and bringing every LEGO minifig’s dreams to life.
After a few test drives, some issues did pop up, including durability concerns and not a lot of performance, but overall it performs much better than you’d expect from a kid’s toy.
I see more and more of these – I think these people are paid by filament vendors.
Seriously though. At this scale plastic doesn’t even make much sense, and FDM printing is just really slow. 102kg at ~10USD per KG is ~1,000 USD in filament alone. It’s cool and all, but I’d never toss a thousand dollars and 200 hours at something like this. Mostly because I have neither :D
If you want to FDM print something like this, a pellet extruder printer would be a lot faster and cheaper to run. A big one can do 10 kg or more per hour and pellets are a lot cheaper than filament. The build area is usually a cubic meter or more too.
But if you already have a belt printer and all you need to buy is filament (or get that stuff sponsored) a pellet extruder / printer is still more expensive.
I read that argument all the time: “XYZ is cheaper than doing it that way”. It’s irrelevant if XYZ is more expensive to buy than what the builder has at hand…
I’m not aware of a pellet extruder that is really capable of fine detail and ‘retracts’ to avoid lots of stringing – far as I know they only really make sense when it is almost purely structural, who cares what it looks like or the whole thing is relatively low detail thick walled vase mode printing. Not saying you are wrong, as it no doubt could work well enough for giant toy blocks, but the filament printer is very controllable to dial in the results you want.
In the video he mentioned that the car would be exhibited in Frankfurt. Where exactly? Is there a fair?
The first thing that comes to mind is Betonblock® vs. LEGO®. Up next: content creator sued for misrepresenting brand.
Ahh the memories. 50 years ago my brother and I got a giant tinker toy set for Christmas. Giant size, where the little yellow wooden wheels were about 10″ in diameter vs 2″. And all the connections proportionally as big. We made a car that a kid could sit in but we fought over who had to push the other one around
And it was all plastic
‘Creator’ surprise butt-sex face on thumbnail trend continues.
I’d have fixed the roll bar height. Otherwise quality control would have to be ten times better than whats leaving car lots now.
Great, more plastic crap we don’t need. All to make a youtube video.
Great all these costumes and sets made all for your TV show of choice, all that internet bandwidth for your games and video, etc etc
The entertainment is in part at least the product and as entertaining objects go this is really really cheap. Plus there is the fun of the challenge in making it work for Matt himself – if anybody here at HAD hasn’t made something silly just because the idea seemed too good to pass on I’d wonder why you are reading HAD, as the core here is tinkering, fixing and creating things that probably shouldn’t exist (at least according the manufacturer/vendor that rather likes to lock you out as you are only supposed to have their carefully calibrated subscription of enjoyment).