This is 
is a what we can call a huuuuuge Lego Technic set. Well in fact, it’s the biggest that Lego has produced till summer 2015, almost 3.000 pieces, a motor, lots of pneumatic parts, few interesting and innovative ideas for the chassis building and a devastator look ! I got it from Germany for less than 200€. It’s quite expensive for a Lego box, but this is less than 0,07€ per part only, which makes it in fact very cheap, even more compared to those overrated Star Wars boxes !
The A model is a Mercedes dump truck, an Arocs, not one of those you’ll see everywhere, which are Actros trucks. Arocs and Actros are easy to identify, they look quite the same but the Actros has only 2 axles whereas Arocs has 4 ! The model has a pneumatic arm and side stabilizers. It’s not fully RC and the interesting functions are located around the pneumatic arm, not steering nor driving.
Well, the A model is nice, it’s big, plenty of functions, challenging to build and will occupy you at least 8 to 10 hours… But once built, what remains of the interest ?
My son gave it the ultimate playability tests !
The manual steering and driving are ok, the model is a bit heavy for a 7 years old kid, but remains playable.
The dump works well, it’s motorized with one large actuator, you can raise at least 0,5 kg of stuff with it, but not much more. It’s enough in fact, a full load of Lego pieces wont weight much more than that.
The problem, because there’s a problem, is the pneumatic functions. The arm is heavy and the pistons can’t handle it so well.
If you want to lift loads, you’ll quickly realize that it’s not really doable, and if it finally works, the moves will be abrupt. When you’ll lower the arm, it will fall because the weight will compress the pistons and make the arm almost uncontrollable
Unfortunately, the use of pneumatics is as usual with Lego Technics, more a wish to make something different than a search for efficiency. The arm is not really playable, the double buckets won’t be able to load things, so disappointing…
Overall, i liked the model. Firstly because of it’s look, it’s well made, it’s big, it’s heavy, that’s a truck ! A bit sad it’s not a toy, but only a model that you’ll install on the shelf… unless you unbuild it and buy the B model, which is, in my humble opinion much better !
B model is a smaller Mercedes truck, let’s consider it’s an Actros. It has a trailer and roughly the same functionalities than A model, Although, playing with the trailer and moving is much more fun !
Adding motors to the B model is a project I’m gonna work on in the following weeks, it will probably end with instructions on the blog !
Thank you for reading me, go buy 42043 now ! 🙂
