Today I'm going back to 1985 - that's when I believe I got this set for Christmas. It came out in 1984 but likely took a little time to get down to Australia. It is set number 6928 - The Uranium Search Vehicle, from a time that the thought of searching for uranium was something kids would be interested in, although on US kids, in the UK (and thus I assume Australia) it was called the Mercury Crawler.
The old people amongst you will recognize the tell tell blue and yellow of the classic space theme, this ran from the late 70's through to the 1986 - as a kid we (my brother and I) owned a lot of this theme, space was way more interesting that life on Earth - I mean between this a Star Wars we spent a fair amount of time thinking about the Cosmos.
But what about this set? I remember this being my set, by this point my brother was getting a bit old for Lego so this is one of the very modern, very cool sets I had - I fact Bricket tells me this was the last major set of my childhood, after this (and four other small sets) which were released in 1984 the next oldest set is from 2008 which is a set I picked up in a random collection of Lego bought a some point.
At 199 pieces it is really small by modern standards, but by old Lego standards that's big and what is noticeable is that there are lots of little pieces, including a lot of tiles, which was weird, and the very very strange bubble tyres - these things existed only in three sets, ever and weirdly I own all three. Other highlights the bright yellow transparent pieces, again by modern standards this is clumsy by 1980's standards, amazing.
The front cabin has a opening hatch and a steering wheel for our spaceman (more on him later) to set, nominally guiding the various probes and dishes scanning for Uranium one assumes. In the rear cabin there is swing open doors, a printed computer screen and another space man, all behind a openable yellow skylight
The best part of this set of course though is the Black Spaceman, who is rare - he only appeared in 8 sets, the white guy, 34 sets, maybe this is racism at work, maybe they were just outfits, for interest sake in Red was in 43 sets. Yellow 26, and Blue 12 - I have to admit Blue was my Favourite, which is interesting because Blue is also my favourite M&M....
Oh and the other thing you always realise with these old sets, Lego instructions used to be way more challenging, there is literally 37 steps in this entire build and a instruction book of four pages - with 199 pieces that's an average of 5.3 pieces a step, this is why us Gen Xer's are so resilient, or maybe why we are so grumpy.
