I want to start my review with the fact that I absolutely love this model. As Hannibal Lecter said, "we begin by coveting what we see everyday." In my country rear loading garbage truck is everywhere, so although there has been an official garbage truck, namely 42078 B model, which is sth Im also absolutely in love with, it is a front loading garbage truck and therefore still misses that something that can satisfy my coveting. And this gorgeous C model satisfies it really well. Also, this is the first time ever I bought a 3rd copy for a C model. That means I've never built a C model before even when some of them looks really good. Those things should be enough to express my liking.

However, this model has quite some serious shortcomings, and I believe it's better for them to be spelled out and hopefully corrected in the instructions rather than hidden all away. My discussion about them should in no way be interpreted as dissing this model or the efforts of the creator. Coming up with this C model and including the 3 functions is an ingenious task already. To make my critiques constructive, I'll also point out simple fixes that use the remaining parts. The build of this C model is restricted to bags 2 and 3 of the official set, which correspond to the truck and trailer only. So the parts I'm using to fix these problems will also only come from those bags.

I'll go over each of them in separate posts.

1. Extending the ejector blade.

The blade is ejected through rotation of a knob on one side. 

When I rotate the 12z gear knob to the left, another gear will rotate to the left, which pushes a pair of white liftarms to the left, which pushes a pair of 4-6 red liftarms to the left, which pushes the ejector blade (not shown) to the left. 

 

 

 

 

The problem here is that this rotation movement does not have a movement limiter usually seen in official models. The consequence is that once the linkages pass through the middle line, when I turn the knob further left, the inner gear will still turn further left but start to retract the blade, moving it to the right.

You can seen in the above photo, the farther ends of the white liftarms start to go down. That is the maximum position to the left. After that the blade starts to reverse. And since I couldn't see where position of the blade and the mechanism, I forgot that the blade had retracted itself. I picked up the model and started turning the gear left, which caused the blade to go further right. But since it couldnt go any further right, the gear snapped.

 

A very simple solution to this problem is to add two 1/2 pins in the positions shown below.

That would be right after the blade has reached the maximum left ward position and will prevent it from going backward.

This is the end of the first problem. I will continue in the next post.

2. Travel route of the ejector blade.

Inside the side walls of the garbage trunk are lfitarms near the bottom to force the ejector to travel along a 1-stud tall route. Like the set up in 42078 B.

 

The problem is that in the middle of the travel route the blade got a bump that exceeds the 1-stud height. This causes it to squeeze against the route and get stuck. When I tried to force it way through sometimes the gears snapped.

 

Blade is at the begnning position. 

 

That is where the bump appears.

 

Quick fix: lower the connection point in the linakge by 1 stud.

 

Before:

 

 

After:

 

This quick fix has a disadvantage: even though the traveling is smoother now, the traveling distance is reduced. In other words the start position moves slightly forward, and the final position moves slightly backward. This reduces the trunk's capacity and the clearance effectiveness. It took me several days and lots of attempts, using the same parts, to figure out the best linkage position.

 

That setup has smooth travel, the furthest start position, and the furthest final position. It almost reaches the edge of the trunk when fully extended.

@Ngoc Nguyen Neat - I'll try that on mine which has the same problem of getting 'stuck' about half way down (super hard to turn, feels like it will break, resolved sometimes by going back and forth a few times).

Do you also have an issue with the gears for the back lift slipping due to the 3x5 triangle pieces underneath flexing downwards? I haven't found a good/elegant solution to that yet with the existing pieces. :)

@Dyen As everyone else agrees, this is truly awesome. My 2.5 year old son LOVES it - plays with it constantly (rubbish trucks being his favourite thing!) - it really is so nicely done!

Jonathan

Thank you @Ngoc Nguyen for review and these adjustments! Will you show us one more picture with that front wall of garbage trunk which you sent me in messages?
I am sorry guys that you have these problems with my model, I tested it many times and did many different versions of these mechanisms and maybe sometimes it gets stuck, but no snapped gears at all, sorry for that, I hope you like the model anyway. 

3. Structural Integrity of the garbage trunk.

 

3.1. Middle section

As shown below, the middle section of the trunk isn't reinforced properly.

 

When I pick the model up, the trunk will distort.

 

Simple fix:

 

 

 

3.2. The trunk's celing.

The bottom two panels aren't connected properly.

 

That can lead to this problem when I grab the whole thing.

 

Fix:

 

 

3.3. The whole trunk's integrity

The ceiling is only connected to the walls on both sides. There are no connections in the middle. When I pick the whole model by hand, the ceiling will be slightly detached. You can see the gap between the ceiling and the walls.

 

Fix:

 

4. The back wall, the illigal building technique, and the unintended consequence.

4.1 The illegal building technique.

Technically there is no list of illegal building techniques, so I'm not sure, but I consider this setup illegal.

Putting a liftarm in the middle section of a 3L pin is just ehhhhhh. This is the part that make of the back wall of the trunk (the wall behind the ejector blade and between the garbage trunk and the cabin). The design of the back wall is a solid wall made with a bunch of stacked 15L beams, with that illegal technique at the top.

 

My fix for this problem is to just ditch the wall completely. In real garbage trucks, or at least the ones I see on the streets where I live, there are big gaps in the back for the crew to climb in and perform maintenance, such as cleaning the trash stuck behind the blade.

 

 

 

And since there are two spare 5x11 frames, I put this on instead.

Simpler, better.

 

4.2 The unintended consequence.

In the instruction, between the back wall and the cabin, there's a horizontal tube that is made of 2 spare rims. However, the side profile of one rim interferes with the axle of the HOG steering.

You can see that it slightly forces the axle bent toward. This is illegal. This problem only disappears when the rim is rotated 90 degrees, but the specific angle of the rim when mounted is not indicated in the instruction. 

The best fix is to just get rid of that horizontal tube altogether. There should be space for the worker to climb in, so that tube doesn't need to be there.

Wholesome comparison photos to balance out the negativity in previous posts.