Lyle

Hi, I bought 8043 a couple of weeks ago and I’m experiencing issues, like many users here it seems. I built the set as carefully as I could and chose rechargeable batteries for it. It took me nearly 2 days to fully load the 12 batteries before starting to use the excavator. At the very beginning, everything seemed to work fine. Maybe the arm moved up a bit slowly, but the motor didn’t make that “struggling” noise I expected. Problems arose soon, though, I’d say after about 15-20 minutes, with some of the movements becoming slower and slower. Now one track is much slower than the other and the worst is, the motor assigned to the gear no longer has the minimum power required to operate, which means I cannot even gear the other motors to activate the arm… And now I’m reading the set was kind of faulty right from the start! I must be humble, because I’m not a very experienced TECHNIC builder (I must have bought 4-5 sets of it in my life) and maybe there were a few things inaccurate in the way I put up this set (although I did pay attention to smooth spinning / reducing friction). Yet, I very quickly had the intuition there would be a problem with this set. To me, the motors are simply not powerful enough, regardless of how skilful a builder you are. There’s far too much strain in the clocks… and TLG designers were very clever (the gearbox is and will always be marvellous) but also overambitious in my opinion. When spinning some of the gears with my fingers during the construction I thought, several times “if those motors are powerful enough to make THIS work for hours, then the 9V Lego motors’ efficiency must have improved significantly since I bought one of those 9V trains back in the 80s” Now here’s the important question, and maybe some of you can help. In my case, what do you think is to blame? The batteries? The motors? Me  ? And above all, are 20 minutes of use enough to damage some of the motors or is it just the batteries I need to recharge? This is topical question as I bought this set precisely because it features 4 motors I’d like to use in MOCs and there’s no way I’m keeping them if they’re already damaged, presumably by TLG’s fault. If the batteries are the problem, I can just take the set apart and keep all this already valuable equipment (I got the set in a shop in Luxembourg for €140, which is fair). Actually this is a bit of a dilemma for me. For those of you who had issues too, what did you guys decide? Thanks for your advice.

Thanks for the replies. I guess I'd rather go online for this one.

Hi, I recently fell in love with that set and, although I' m considering buying it off the Lego website, I've started looking for it in various shops around my workplace (in Luxembourg, near France). Seems no shop has that set or even similar ones (such as the Fire Brigade or the Gran Emporium). Does Lego have a clear policy on what kind of stores it supplies across Europe? Are they only big toy shops or is there any chance I can come across a GG set on some department store shelves? Also, has it been long since Lego started to launch sets that are so difficult to find at retailers? I last bought sets nearly 15 years ago, and as far as I can remember there weren't such "exclusive" sets like nowadays.