howitzer

Tower crane is weird in that it's one of the most visible piece construction machinery out there so it feels like a natural subject for Technic set but there's never been a tower crane set (b-models don't count). But I guess the boredom of truss building and necessary hugeness of such a set have prevented it from being realized so far. The new parts from 42146 however should change that, so I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a tower crane set in few years.

Liebherr Liebherr no weights Daytona Zetros Airbus John Deere Audi Weight 7,982kg 7,082kg 6,99kg 3,3kg 2,69kg 2,42kg 1,87kg RRP 680,00€ 680,00€ 450,00€ 330,00€ 210,00€ 190,00€ 170,00 € €/kg 85,19 96,02 64,38 100,00 78,07 78,51 90,91 I ran some numbers on a few recent sets for comparison. Yes the counterweight pieces affect the outcome, but they also serve a purpose, it would be a pretty bad crane without counterweights. The truss pieces are also quite heavy, and so are the 3x19 and other frames which are quite plentiful there - not to mention the electronics. From the numbers above I'd say the Liebherr isn't exactly a great value but it's not abysmal either. I guess it comes down to whether you find the electronics and tons of frame parts useful or not, so it's not objectively bad or good, it depends on what you personally want. Funnily, it appears that Daytona is actually pretty good value in comparison to these other sets, though the lack of electronics certainly helps there.

It would be interesting to see comparison of various techniques to build lattice booms with older parts. As I understand, the new parts simplify boom building greatly, so I see them worth it, despite the cost (and it's not like they are that expensive either, they are available Bricklink starting from 2,5€-3,5€ apiece or so). I also don't think 8288 or 42042 compare as the former while it has certain realism, has no electronics and is much smaller and the latter is quite unrealistic and lacks important parts like jib and derrick boom. I went through stuff that Rebrickable has to offer, and if you discard small builds, stuff that's not exactly a crawler crane and builds that are mods of 42146, there's not many left. Those tend huge and would've required significant investment in parts anyway, and there's not much in the way of quality guarantees on the build. I did spend quite a bit of time considering if 42146 is good buy for me or not, weighing in the parts, the expected building experience, etc. and came to conclusion that it might be worth it after all. One thing that actually swayed my opinion to the "buy it" side was the comments from @allanp earlier in this thread. It's obvious that you have different opinions on many of the points regarding the value of the set, and that's fine. I brought up the "worth" of the set because it's definitely not a necessity and it's not even something of practical use to make our lives easier or more comfortable (as for example a car or a computer would be). It's a luxury toy and as such the concept of value in any general sense becomes pretty useless. Being luxury toys they are stuff that some people want really bad while others view only as a frivolous waste of money, regardless of price. As such some of them I might want and can afford (such as this set) and some I might want but couldn't ever afford (such as big yacht) but stuff in either category is stuff that can be assigned a price, but not value. As an investment... well, I don't think my hobby has to be something which returns money to me.

It's true that backhoe or many other machines wouldn't need all motors to be running simultaneously, but the hubs must still be able to account for that, as people are going to use them in their MOCs with no considerations of what they are capable. Having six ports would require heavier wiring and electronics, which would drive up the cost.

But I don't see them doing anything, regardless of the load on the hook. The battery box tilt is entirely independent of the springs. Ok, this is a good explanation, and of course those springs worked in similar fashion when assembling the model. Thanks!

So, I finally finished building the set. Here's some of my impressions and feelings about it. First I must say that none of the photos I saw beforehand prepared me for the size of this thing. Now that it's there, sitting on my building table I really see how huge and imposing it is, I don't think any of the photos I've seen of it do it justice size-wise. The proportions are still significantly off, but seeing it live it's not nearly as bad as in photos, I think especially the main photo on the box is badly chosen from this point of view. There's of course the downside of it being really difficult to move around the house. As a building experience, I'm not sure what to feel. The bottom part (understructure, tracks, turntable) was quite boring with mostly structural stuff with minimal mechanical builds and almost no interesting building techniques. I get why it is so, but it still doesn't change how it is. The upper part with the booms was much more interesting, and especially the string routing was challenging and required care and thinking, something that I don't encounter too often in today's Technic sets considering the dumbed down instructions. I also had some leftover parts which I feel shouldn't have been there (mainly pins, but too many of them or such that there's never extras) so it's obvious that I made some errors. Whether that's my fault or if the instructions are unclear is debatable. I also routed the hook string wrongly in one place and only noticed after making the reel knots, which is kind of annoying but not a huge issue. As for the functions, the set works well and it does what it's supposed to do. It also gives nice insights at the workings of such a machine, even if the ballast on rollers is unrealistic. Something I don't get though, is what's the purpose of the motorcycle springs supporting the derrick boom? They don't seem to do much. The load sensing function on the other hand is nice even if it would be great to have it even more sensitive, though it's obvious that making truly sensitive load sensor would be quite hard with current parts. The counterweight parts look nice but are otherwise disappointing, as the lack of connection points and shape makes them really hard to use anywhere else, which in my opinion goes against the spirit of Lego. There's also several places where the design felt unfinished or hurried. The aesthetics is minimal and feels half hearted - most of those could've been left out entirely and it wouldn't even be noticeable. As for the price... I was interested in building it and seeing it work, but I also wanted to make it bigger and do other modifications, so in that respect it's a good buy. I guess I could've attempted to make a crawler crane entirely of my own design, but I don't know much about crawler cranes so it would've been daunting task, and now I at least have learned the basic principles first hand and and gotten insight on some of the technical solutions necessary to build one. In the end though, I don't think there's much point in the discussion if it's a sensible purchase or worth the price. Some people pay 10000€ for a bottle of whiskey, and I guess they are happy with their purchases and think it as money well spent, and this crane feels similar. It's expensive, sure, but I wanted it and I could afford it so why not buy it?

I don't see them using that hub in Technic sets though, so while it exists, it's not like we're going to see it in actual sets outside educational sets. I hope I'm wrong though.

Relative to weight, Liebherr wasn't that expensive. The huge number of large pieces drove the price up a lot. It was probably also some sort of test case of how much people are willing to spend (regardless of contents) and I feel the set has sold quite well, though of course I have no numbers to back up this feeling.

Thanks!

Not sure if I have time to familiarize myself with all the entries in such a short amount of time so I'd prefer at least two weeks of time for voting.

Lego.com rrp for myself is ~100€ for the orrery and 210€ for the Airbus. So about the same relative difference as my local retailer. I'm still baffled about the pricing, what makes it so expensive?

I'm not talking about discounted prices, those in my screenshot are normal prices at that particular shop.

Varies a lot depending on the set though. With something like 42055 you can just swap the motor and battery box with minimal modifications, though it might require two motors as PU XL motor isn't as powerful as PF XL. I believe many other single motor sets would be similarly easy, while sets with multiple motors (like 8285 or 9398) would be significantly harder. Full RC mod to non-RC sets is of course going to make things quite a bit harder, but that's not in the spirit of keeping them as close to original as possible.

Is it just me or is this set really expensive? Here's a screenshot from my go-to Lego retailer: Especially the Airbus seems a bargain compared to the orrery, considering you get battery box, motor and almost 4 times the parts for little over twice the price. Of course the orrery has some expensive parts like the hemispheres, hoops and some frames and many gears but still...

Oh, I hadn't seen this either. Going to take a good look on @Marno's photos and think about making my own version later when I have finished building the original. Thanks for bringing it up @R0Sch!

Yeah, I guess the best bet would be to use the load sensor in the original model, though I'd have to find out how exactly it works. I'm not really going for realism, so the exact model designation isn't that important for me. I don't think I'd be able to replicate either model accurately enough anyway to really distinguish them.

I just obtained the set today and first I'm going to build to the instructions, but then I'd be interested in doing some modifications. First and most obvious thing to do is of course extending the booms and increasing counterweight to balance it properly (probably with some non-Lego weights). Also, as there's unused motor slot in the hub of the superstructure I'd be curious to replicate the Liebherr V-frame using it and some linear actuators, which would allow repositioning of the ballast on the fly. It would be interesting to have the crane balance automatically by adjusting the ballast depending on the load. Thoughts? Here's some more info on the system: https://www.liebherr.com/en/int/products/mobile-and-crawler-cranes/customer-magazine/all-about-cranes/v-frame.html

Or perhaps the license agreement was made for three years and two sets each, completing last year and maybe the sales weren't big enough to warrant a contract renewal. After all, TLG isn't under any obligation to renew a contract they feel doesn't bring enough customers.

So today I ordered the set with a nice discounted price of 440€. Going to comment on my feelings about it when I have finished the build and played with it a bit. Hopefully I can then decide if this was a good use of my money...

I haven't really used Studio, but the pain of dealing with non-right angles in other similar software indeed makes it really difficult to work with designs involving them.

This would be great!

So... now it's discounted to 440€ which is almost the same as in Black Friday when I nearly bought it. I watched the kbalage's video about the price breakdown and according to his estimate I'd be getting the electronics and counterweights essentially for free.

This is true. Finding the correct angles is hard and requires either lots of calculations or a strong intuition built on lots and lots of experience, and for designers at TLG neither is an obstacle, while amateur builders tend to go the easy way and build mostly with right angles. Only the most skilled builders seem to manage to break free from the right angle cage in a meaningful way. Some trigonometry resource to help with this would indeed be great.

This is an interesting thing to hear from you! I suspected it could be a great build for an AFOL who knows their way around Technic, but it's nice to have confirmation on it! Now if I only could get it with good discount (at the moment the best I can get is 500€) and then get some more boom pieces along with longer strings...

By not building. I hit an obstacle which I haven't been able to solve, so either I'd have to make some serious modifications or abandon the project. Not that I haven't had much time for building either...