What an amazing few days for this Lego Landcruiser project! I have been so pleased to see the strong response and to have already crossed 500 supporters in such a short time is fantastic! So thank you for supporting the project and for sharing with your friends and family and through various social networks and blogs… let’s hope the project continues to gain exposure and the supporters keep growing!

Your comments have been very encouraging and there have been lots of questions from people wanting to learn more about this project… I will try and address a few of them in this update and get back to you all again soon enough.

Firstly-the dimensions-the vehicle is 16cm high x 14cm wide x 33cm long

Secondly-Colours-fortuitously the Lego tan brick is ubiquitous and matches up well with one of the common colour schemes for the 40 Series. In sourcing the Lego bricks and elements that I needed for this project, I quickly realised that beyond white or tan, it would be impossible to build the model in another colour as the bricks I needed simply weren’t available. Of course there is always Photoshop and I will endeavour to get some images of the alternative colours for a future update

Thirdly-a bit of background to the design process.…

I found the key dimensions of the 40 Series online and then determined some scaling factors that would enable me to create a Lego vehicle that was between 14 to 16 studs in width. This would result in a model that matched up closely to the size of the existing Lego Creator Expert vehicles such as the Kombi (set 10220) and the Mini Cooper (set 10242).

The next step was to search through the range of existing Lego tyres and find a size that fitted within this scale that I had chosen. I found that 62.4 X 20 would be a good match. Some of the tyres around the same diameter had a much wider tread pattern which would have been good for a heavily modified 40 Series but as I was trying to replicate the original vehicle, I wanted a narrower tyre. So on the basis of the diameter of these 62.4 x 20 tyres, I settled on a width of 16 studs for the vehicle and established the other dimensions from there. And in fact, looking at the photos of the soon-to-be-released Lego Ferrari F40, it appears that this vehicle will also be 16 studs wide…so I think that was the right decision for my project.

One of the major differences between the Landcruiser and the Mini Cooper of course is ground clearance and, as such, the chassis, running gear and suspension are quite visible in the 40 Series and I wanted to be able to replicate that in this Lego version. So I ordered the tyres and wheels plus a bunch of bricks and technic elements and began to play around with creating leaf springs and a basic outline of the chassis.

Once I had gained confidence with some of these components, I switched to the Lego Digital Designer software and continued to build the virtual model. With the software, I was able to comparatively quickly create a first version of the full model and then set about finding the bricks and ordering them from about 20 online stores around the world. Of course once I started to build the real model, I found a number of weaknesses and structural flaws which I amended first in the virtual model and then the actual Lego model. Eventually I had a completed model which was quite solid and strong and incorporated all the details that I had in mind from the outset. It probably took me about five months to reach this point from when I first started with the Digital Designer software.

And for the sake of comparison, here is an excellent example of a BJ 42 that my friend owns.