If you read my Lego posts regularly you'll know from this post and this post that I had more than a few micro trucks which I built. These were what us Australians call Semi-trailer, a cab hitched to a trailer.
I got thinking though, what about the other types of trucks I see. My first thought was Cement Mixers. This might be because they are building Melbourne's new Metro train tunnel at the moment and I live on the road between one of the stations and the concrete works, so I can confidently say I see a cement mixer about once every 3 or 4 minutes for at least 12 hours of the day.
Now cement mixers are not the easiest thing to build out of Lego, how do you get that conical shape, particularly in something this small, well you have to rely on some old old space pieces. The grey cones are old rocket boosters from a 1981 set. The blue L brackets are from the same set.
Combine those with the bull nose cab which was in one of those semi trailers and you have something that looks a lot like those pesky noisy truck passing my place everyday.
Other trucks that annoy me with there noise is where we are going next, imagine you are sleeping soundly and then the crash, bang of the garbage truck arrive to take you out of your slumber.
Well this one has a pretty distinctive shape as well. I took the modern cab design from the semi trailers, and rebuilt the back end.
It needed a tank like section, and I noticed most rubbish trucks stick out at the back and have some handles for picking up the green bins. Okay some are at the side, but not mine.
One of the biggest issues with this was colours. I wanted a curved top to the back, I know I had some blue curved pieces, but it turned out not enough, so it had to become two toned with light grey, which I think works, but even then there wasn't enough, so I had to introduce some Dark grey (this just tells me I need to buy more lego)
I should mention the back is hollow, you can see inside so there are some inverted slopes in there to make it interesting, all in all I'm really happy with this one, I even think the uneven colour on the grey works as it would get dirty (perhaps the white wheels are a little ambitious)
And finally let's look at the simplest of the three, again I took a cab from the previous build and rebuilt the rear.
This is a pretty simple dump truck, from a building presepective basically take the trailer from the previous build, take the roof off
and then of course you need a big hinge so that it can do what a dump truck should do, move up and down.
and hey let's throw in another photo, just because I have it
Again I really enjoyed these little trucks, they are a really nice scale to work with as they are large enough to get some detail in there, but small enough that you are likely to have all the pieces you need.
If you want to build your own versions, instructions for a couple of these are availiable on my rebrickable page here