Everyone’s favorite flat-front, ugly/beautiful German off-road workhorse, the Mercedes-Benz Unimog, is now even more awesome and attainable than ever—at 1:12th scale and constructed from Lego bricks. The Unimog U400 is a variant of the contemporary Unimog, a model line that dates back to 1951; to commemorate its 60th birthday, Lego and Mercedes teamed up to create a build-it-yourself version. The resulting Lego Unimog is awesome, and the combination of its 2048 individual pieces and scale makes it the largest Lego Technic model ever offered for sale by the toymaker.
Lego Technic models—the complex cousins to the basic Lego sets—feature moving parts and mechanized actions, and the Technic Unimog takes these core tenets to new heights. Not only are details such as the engine and hub gearboxes painstakingly recreated with tiny moving pistons and operable gear-reduction systems, but the small rig is electrically driven and sports a fully pneumatic gripper arm mounted aft of a pneumatic “dump” bed.
The young (and young at heart) can guide the pneumatic gripper arm through nearly 360 degrees of rotation, alter its reach, and grab things (candy, your spouse’s hair, the dog’s tail) using an external controller. The crane and winch can be reconfigured into an operable snowplow attachment for tiny shoveling jobs. The Lego Unimog also sports four-wheel drive, coil-spring articulating solid axles, and a power front-mounted winch. The kit goes on sale in August and will be available from both Lego and Mercedes-Benz for £190, or about $275 at current exchange rates. The tips of our fingers hurt in an oh-so-good way just from the thought of getting our mitts on this fantastically complex kit.
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