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When i was younger I played a bit with LEGO, I was given a super street sensation for christmas one year and various other set's, but since my early teen's, i have played with LEGO much. Fast forward to this year, my daughter started walking and playing with things, and it reminded me of being a kid playing with LEGO, I ended up impulse buying a 42030 front end loader as my first LEGO set in 13 year's. That was 4 months ago, two weeks ago, walking through my loca Big W store (Australian version of Walmart) doing the Christmas shopping I saw another set i desperatly wanted to buy, the 42042 crawler crane, at the rediculous price of $140 AUD, I bought it and took it home, and my Wife and I had an awesome night putting it together after the little one went to sleep, and with a bit of tinkering I got it to be able to lift about 750 grams at the closest possible radius, I swapping the 12 and 20t gear around on the claw winch to give it a greater mechanical advantage and adjusted the boom linkage to allow the boom to sit vertical. But it wasn't enough, In the interim year's I've become a pipe welder and currently work construction in the oil and gas industry, so i've seen and worked with some pretty amazing cranes, and the standard 42042 just didn't do it. So the next day I went back to Big W, and bought another 42042 set with a few idea's in mind but no real set plan, but a rough idea for what I wanted to do, I also drove to my Mother's house and picked up what was left of my LEGO from my childhood for extra bits. Firstly, I was dissapointed how the standard set didn't allow you to turn, both track's travel in the same direction, this was the first thing i set out to fix, i ended up completly re-designing to base of the crane including a reversing gearbox for each track, to drive in through worM gear's for a more realistic travel speed, and so it's not possible to push the model along, it also ended up being 6 studs wider and 6 studs longer then the standard one. with the larger base, I was able to get it to lift a massive 1.25KG!! The next thing I wanted was a movable jib, this meant I was going to need to add another winch, fortunantly due to gearbox in the substructure for driving, I no longer needed all 4 of the control's at the top of the crane, first i built the third winch into the front of the crane body, using the output that previously powered to tracks to drive the third winch, i then replaced one of the 16t freewheeling gear's in the gearbox on the idler shaft with a standard 16t and a 5l axel instead of the standard 4l, and used then to drive the shaft going into the base of the crane, this shaft now spins constantly when the motor is spinning, and selecting to drive is done by a simple linkage on the cranes base for each track. In this photo you can see the axel used to drive the third winch for the jib. from this point I got in the zone and neglected to take many picture's until near the end, but this is what I ended up with. Maximum radius is 99 centimeter's from the center of the turntable, overall length not including the extra counterweight's is 120 centimeter's, hight with the boom as high as possible is 105 centimeter's. At maximum radius with two battery boxes (with batteries) as counterweight's, it will lift about 150 grams before falling over. It will lift around 600 grams (600 ml coke bottle full of water) at a 62 centimeter radius unfortunantly around 6-700 gram's is the maxiumum it can lift as the boom isn't ridgid enough even at a smaller radius to lift any more, but I am pretty happy with it as it is, the only other thing i might like to do is find a way to use a worm gear drive for slewing to both reduce the slewing speed to be more realistic, and to allow it to slew more reliably as it tend's to slip while lifting any weight, and an XL motor would do wonder's as the L motor is pretty slow with the functions, but it does the job. And a few more picture's, just because.