L is for Like LEGO - But Impossible!

Bought this on eBay the other day, I have a soft spot for Lego, and having been talked into selling half mine for bugger-all-money following a flood in my storage unit, I'm now clearing the rest on eBay, but still have a vague interest in the stuff and things related to it.

First inspection looked promising, hard to tell whether it was German or Swiss, but my guess is one or the other (so - knowing my guesses it's probably Dutch!), very well engineered but immediately it became apparent that for such a simple looking vehicle (in the photo on the box it seems to be more simple than the classic 1970's Legoland trucks) there were an awful lot of very small pieces.

These are they. The pile of tiles and number of white junction-bricks led me to believe they had provided spares to help the budding Lego traitor explore his imagination with this new system, I was wrong, although the instruction sheet tried hard to keep me in the dark!

To build one of the old Legoland articulated trucks would take me five or ten minutes, I would use everything in the box except the one or two spares they always provided of the very smallest pieces, and the finished model would look just like the pictures/drawings on the box.

This photograph is the result of about 8 hours work over two evenings, some of the bits left in the pile of 'spares' should actually be on the vehicle, but where is anybodies guess. It took over an hour to get the layer of protective wax off the 6 tyres (and the carpet will never be the same), the fifth-wheel arrangement is not right, and the whole thing was 30% guess work as the instructions are clearly - less than clear.

Add to that, the wheels stick out like a wide load and the whole thing is less realistic than the crudest of eary 70's Lego vehicles.

Yeh...Baks...or Herbert, or Herbert by Baks, the system you've never heard of because they produced an over-engineered product with instructions you couldn't follow, aimed at an age group who couldn't have dealt with it, and hoped it would knock Lego off it's perch!