Name: Combine Harvester (#7636)
MSRP: $44.99
Pieces: 360
Price Per Piece: $0.12
Minifigures: 1
LEGO Description
Let's start with the box itself:Climb into the cab of the combine harvester and start harvesting, threshing and baling grain in the fields outside LEGO® City! With its huge rotating threshing drum, this vehicle can handle any crop on the farm. Includes combine harvester, 1 minifigure and mug! Lift cab and place minifigure behind the wheel! Threshing drum measures over 10" (25cm) wide and vehicle is 11" (27cm) long!
Inside the box you will find the instruction booklet, 3 bags of bricks and a sticker sheet. Sadly enough my son got a hold of the sticker sheet last week and he incorporated them in one of his drawings. I guess someday I'll have to get a new sheet on bricklink.
Let's take a look at the book first:
Here is a random page from the instructions. The instructions do not list what pieces are needed for each page. So it kind of turns into a game of find the difference. It is easy to miss a piece here or there. For instance I missed the two 1x1 sloped clear yellow pieces that server as headlights.
Instead of making a picture of every single brick in the set I took a couple of each of the more unique pieces:
This set comes with one minifig, the farmer that controls the combine. Except for the front of his chest piece he seems kind of blend. However I may have gotten spoiled by some of the detail on the minifigs in series 1 and 2. He has a little wrench and a coffee cup.
Now that we have looked at the parts let's take a look at the final build. The chute can be rotated around 360 degrees and it can go up. However the set does not come with a truck that actually goes with the combine.
Now let's flap open both door and tilt up the roof and window of the, by lack of a better word, cockpit.
This pictures gives a good idea of how huge this thing is. I was hoping it would fit in with the rest of the city sets, but the size seems to be way too big. You can also see in this picture that the gray top comes off, you can drop the 2x3 yellow bricks in here and they will come out in the bottom. However this is really just a giant hole in the middle of the set with a lid on it.
The front of the harvest can come off, this opens up the possibilities for some modding, however given the size of this set I am not sure I want to.
This set does use some cool sideways building, here you can see the back bumper and the two sets of stairs/sides that the farmer can use to climb on the top
My son is really likes the big moving parts on this set. The cockpit windows, the cockpit roof, the chute and the drum. However this item seems way out of scale for the rest of the city sets. It is an interesting build, but the 'search the difference' instructions make this set a lot more time consuming then it needs to be. This set does contain however a relatively large amount of cool and interesting pieces. I was really excited to be able to get some farm vehicles when they came out. I saw this one at TRU during a BOGO 50% sale I picked it up. I paid 38.50 after tax, or 10.6 cents per piece, however at full price the pieces are over 12 cents a piece. That seems awfully high for a big Lego original set. For instance the Police Command Centre (#7743) set has the same list price, but has 3 minifgs more and almost 150 pieces.
I am going to give this set a 6/10, it lost points for the following items: 12 cents per brick is 2 cents per brick more then I'd like to see, so that cost 2 points. The set only comes with 1 minifg, which for a nearly 50$, non Creator set, is too little in my opinion, a 2 point deduction. The instructions are very confusing and as mentioned before make for a game of find the difference, another point. And my last complaint is the scale, I really think it would have been better of being a little bit closer to regular city scale (the big tires are almost as tall as the bus in the city corner set). This costs the set another point. I am however giving the set a point back for the interesting pieces it contains and another point for some decent playability.
I would recommend only getting this set if you can get it for at least 25% off. I am hoping that lego will continue trying the farm models, but they'll need some work.
