Customer Reviews

MB Actros Pole loading truck with portal jib crane

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

We bought this for our 7 year olds birthday. At first, I thought this was too much money for a toy truck. But after seeing what you get I changed my mind! This truck is well worth the money! My son and husband love playing with it! And I have to admit so do I!

We got this for a 4th birthday present for our little boy, and he absolutely fell in love with it. What's more, so did I. Bruder's stuff is well regarded as being high quality (if expensive) with good reason. Even though it is entirely plastic, the truck and jig are solid and stable. They fit together easily and disassemble without risk of breaking. The only thing about this particular toy is that after you set up the jig, you'll need something else to load onto the truck. Some 1" or 3/4" PVC pipe cut to size (and optionally painted) makes a nice stand-in for "trees going to the sawmill," which is our favorite game.

This is very, very big and, I thought, loaded with potential. Unfortunately, the example I bought was missing a rear stancheon (green vertical upright). The other uprights can easily pop off, and once they do so it seems that the truck will no longer have much point, since it can't carry the poles without the stancheons.

The crane is flimsy and weak -- I guarantee that it will break first, defeating the purpose of this truck. The crane can barely reach back into the rack to load/unload crane sections, so it is also too short.

I also doubt the play value of the jib crane. The only thing that it could be used for is to load crane poles and other parts onto this truck, but once you've assembled the crane, you have no parts left to move. Also, this toy does not "interact" with the other Bruder toys in the fashion that the various Bruder loaders (tracked and wheeled) can be used to fill the several types of dump trucks or way that the bulldozer and grader and asphalt roller can be used to progressively smooth sand dumped by the trucks. Kids love that stuff and it gives them a sense of process and progress. THAT is what makes Bruder a winner.

I've bought a lot of Bruder construction/sandpile type toys for my grandsons and they have all been great or at least very good. Ultimately, little kids are gratified by "moving the mountain", either by digging a deep hole or by building a ramped mound or by shifting a small mountain from over here to way over there. They love excavators, bulldozers, tracked loaders, motor graders, dump trucks and asphalt rollers. They love huge sandboxes and piles of sand (maybe with some round wash stones from a river for variety). Given all that, I don't know that this limited mechanical construction toy makes sense.

Now if only Bruder would instead build a big crawler crane with sturdy tower, strong cable, properly sized control wheels and a good size claw bucket in 1/16 scale. They should model it on the Tonka crawler crane of 35 years ago, which my son used constantly for several years, along with his Tonka dumptruck, bulldozer and motor grader. The Tonka came as either a bucket crane, a claw crane or a dragline crane (depending on which decade it was made -- and all were good for kids), but Bruder should combine the three via accessories, given their very high pricing.