One of the favourite subjects of designs of most of the Technic fans are mobile cranes. Why? Because they offer plenty of various functions to be built with Lego. Therefore most of the Technic-lovers build at least one small mobile crane - usually no more than 1m high. Few decide to build a crane bigger than themselves - so 2 meters high fully functional cranes appear very often at the AFOLs’ events. Yet there is a very little group of zealots who consider the height of 2 meters only a prelude to a good crane. One of these people is Pedro Agnelo, AFOL from the sunny Portugal, who, upon quitting his Dark Age, became determined to create a detailed model of one of the world’s largest mobile cranes - Demag TC 2800-1.

To make you realize the sheer scale of Pedro’s plan, let me give you some numbers. Demag TC 2800-1 is a monstrous 18-wheeler, 18 meters long and able to lift up 600 tons with its lattice boom, extendable up to 180m. It comes equipped with two Diesel engines, giving total power of 800 HP, and its boom counterweight is 200t heavy.

You can see Pedro with his crane scaled down to 5.5m height on the pic below.

Let’s hear the maker:

klocki.blox.pl - How long did it take to design and build your crane? Have you been using some designing software like MLCad, or has it been all designed by hand?

Pedro Agnelo - The complete building process took about 11 months but you would have to bear in mind I only build on weekends and holidays and at least two months were occupied with exams (university ones). The design was pretty much “on the fly”, I only learned how to build in CAD later so I pictured the mechanisms in my mind and then I’d try to make them with the parts available

- How much time was needed to document your design? I guess you must have obtained some extensive datasheet of the Demag TC 2800-1, check many technical details of a real crane, learn how the booms are balanced, and much more. What amount of documenting work is necessary to build a model that is so detailed and so close to the original crane?

- The material gathering phase lasted about three weeks and consisted mainly of pictures, the datasheet available online at Terex-Demag and some books on Physics (I never studied it before )

- Can you give us some precise data on this beast, even if estimated? I wonder how heavy it is, what’s the number of parts used, and did you use any not-Lego elements?

- Actually I wonder how much it weghts too! Excluding ballast (aprox. 10kg for erection/lowering) the carrier must be around 4kg and the boom, jib, cables and struts should be around 10kg. To build this model I used around 9500 parts and I managed to use only 3 non-LEGO parts: the ballast, which is made of cement blocks, a screw to allow 360 degrees rotation of the hook (with load) and the thread, which is the same type as LEGO’s but much longer - about 100 meters total

- How did you get the idea of building a Lego mobile crane that will be over 5 meters high? I mean, many of us enjoy building small pretty cranes, but creating something THAT big, and that masterfully modelled is an idea that would never cross the minds of most of the people. Did it need some special building space to make the main boom? Was it possible in a regular apartment?

- The idea of going this big was actually to test my building skills, I wanted to know if I could do it. Another fact is that I wanted it to look as close to the real one as possible. This in particular reflects on the building of the main boom: it’s modular! Each boom section is 60cm long, allowing for different setups and of course, building indoors. My “workshop” is 2.5m tall in case you are wondering because of the pictures.

- What are the most common questions you hear from the people who see your crane? Apart, of course, from the usual ‘what set is this and where do I buy it’?

- Actually I don’t know, mostly people want to know if it works (yes, it does), the number of parts, time spent building, and price tag :-/

- Have you shown your Demag to some official Lego designers? If yes, what did they say?

- Not that I know of, but I wouldn’t mind…

You can find another interview with Pedro in the latest Brick Journal issue - an evidence that his Demag found many fans.

Enjoy the Pedro’s amazing MOC on the pics above. It’s surely on of the constructions that prove us that the only real limit to what we can build with Lego is our own imagination.

This entry was posted on 19 June 2007 at 11:33 AM and is filed under Model, Technic, Interview, MOC, Giants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.