I have all the period (pat pend) parts to make this set including the wheels and tow hook, but I do not consider that I own it unless I have a manual as well. If I am going to buy that, I might as well get the whole set — except I might get a cobbled together set from the seller’s spare parts bin!

@MeisterDad:Totally agree with you. I Bricklinked some of the parts for 6894 and 6932 and downloaded the instructions, but I didn't list them in my owned sets list, mainly because I finished them with parts from my pre-existing collection.

@TheOtherMike For me it isn’t so much that the parts might not match, as I have studied the stampings to the point where I can have a pretty good idea of what year(s) they were made (and I am not too concerned about having “all original” parts for a particular set as long as they are of the same time period), but that I don’t have the paperwork to go with it.

In this set for example, you can find modern replacements for all but the wheels, headlight and tow assembly piece. Upon having the manual, if I made this set with new parts but used the old retired parts with it to try and make the claim I own it, I could not live with myself for telling that lie.

@MeisterDad said:
"I have all the period (pat pend) parts to make this set including the wheels and tow hook, but I do not consider that I own it unless I have a manual as well."
Yes, I only consider them complete if they include box, instructions and 100% Pat Pending parts.

@sjr60 said:
" @MeisterDad said:
"I have all the period (pat pend) parts to make this set including the wheels and tow hook, but I do not consider that I own it unless I have a manual as well."
Yes, I only consider them complete if they include box, instructions and 100% Pat Pending parts."

Boxes are a rare luxury for me! Don’t even get me started on sticker assemblies…

I’ve just realised those wheels aren’t wheels, are they? They’re rounded bricks clipped onto the base. Were Lego not doing wheels yet when this came out?

@CarolinaOnMyMind said:
" @Zordboy said:
"You wonder, don't you, what would be the response if you could put the Lego designers from the 70s into the TARDIS and show them some of the sets that Lego is producing in 2022? Take the design team from 1970 and show them Voltron, or the Disney Castle, or the Monkie Kid Bone Demon, or one of the bigger Technic sets.

That would be trippy."

That would be trippy. But they’d probably be like “Forget LEGO! Why is everyone staring mindlessly at small handheld devices? And why does all the music suck? And what did you do to the planet?!?“"

THIS!!
Though, I love a lot of today’s music - though the 90’s had the best music! :)

@Huwbot: Where does the part count comes from? By looking on the picture it seems that there are less than 20 parts in that model (set). Bricklink is quoting 15 pieces.

This truck would be of comparable scale as the first (true) minifig cars from 1977/8

Look on this and wonder that the same company would one day be the largest toy manufacturer in the world! That’s kinda like an F1 car getting passed on the home stretch by Fred Flintstone.

@Brickalili:
No, it’s a wheel assembly. It’s a black 2x2 brick with two loops formed into the base, and grooves cut through the tube in the center. A metal rod is inserted through these loops, and two red plastic wheels are attached to the ends. The wheels are not removable, nor do they freely spin, but I’m not sure how they are locked onto the rod.

@cabbie said:
"The wheels do freely spin. But they do not come off the 2x2 brick piece. There were wheels like this with thin tires, and ones with thicker tires with a groove down the center of the tire, like a double tire sort of. All bricks were black. The stud in the center of the wheel is usually red, but I've also seen light gray."
Wheel assemblies were slightly modified later.
In both versions the wheels were an interference fit on the axle, but on later versions the axle had a groove in each end, to make the wheel a tighter fit and less likely to become loose and fall off.
In early versions the axle was secured to the brick by open clips, so the axle and wheels could be popped off. These clips were very fragile and easily broken, so were later changed to enclosed loops.

@cabbie said:
"The wheels do freely spin. But they do not come off the 2x2 brick piece. There were wheels like this with thin tires, and ones with thicker tires with a groove down the center of the tire, like a double tire sort of. All bricks were black. The stud in the center of the wheel is usually red, but I've also seen light gray."

Most bricks were black, but a few sets came with white, red, or yellow. The red wheels were wider for the “twin” width tyre, and I haven’t seen any grey versions - but some Town sets later in the 1980s had a white stud instead of red, after the 2x2 brick changed to a 2x2 plate.

@chefkaspa said:
" @Huwbot: Where does the part count comes from? By looking on the picture it seems that there are less than 20 parts in that model (set). Bricklink is quoting 15 pieces."
Part count confusion comes from Samsonite counting the wheel assemblies as 4 pieces each, and everyone else counting them as 1.

The red wheel hubs didn't come apart from the block as they were glued to metal axles which meant far less friction when pushed. I had the more modern city town version 6628 (with missing mini-fig?) when I was a kid. It still used the same slope brick crane part 3135, which went from 1969 to 2003 in red.

@Huw said:
"Saturday's RSotD has been replaced with VSotW which will select a set released between 1967 and 1977. I hope you approve, and enjoy them."
A great move in the right direction... Only a few more years to go!

@PurpleDave said:
"
No, it’s a wheel assembly. It’s a black 2x2 brick with two loops formed into the base, and grooves cut through the tube in the center. A metal rod is inserted through these loops, and two red plastic wheels are attached to the ends. The wheels are not removable, nor do they freely spin, but I’m not sure how they are locked onto the rod."

Ah, ‘kay, just from the picture looked like the tyres are fused into the wheelarch. Just black tyres blending in with black brick then?

1 wheel assembly = 1x black brick + 2x red wheel hub + 2x rubber wheel + 1x metal axle?
You could pull off the rubbers and I think there were also those black axle bricks where you could snap in and remove the axle.

Thanks for the information.

The 3D view of this set is way off...

@chefkaspa said:
"1 wheel assembly = 1x black brick + 2x red wheel hub + 2x rubber wheel + 1x metal axle?"
For some reason the part count on Samsonite boxes was 4 ... 1 x Brick + 1 x Axle + 2 x Wheel/Tyre. It seems that even they considered the wheel and tyre inseparable once united!

Even if these aren't all my cup of tea, that's true for things like Scala or Clikits or Drome Racers too, so I'm glad to see they've been added to the mix--even if it's under their own title, rather than being worked into the main pot of random sets. And this post is mostly to voice that--lest the "yays!" are silent and lost amid the contrary opinion.

I think the only piece I'd be missing to make a period-accurate copy of this set (using only pieces acquired piecemeal--i.e. not as part of a known set) is the tow block. If I got that, I WOULD count this as a set I owned, but, to be fair, that's more for personal inventorying of parts and things available to play with/use in comics than for Internet bragging rights. I probably WOULD add it to my Brickset inventory, because having my spreadsheet not match would bother me, but I suppose I might feel a bit guilty if that skewed the numbers of people who "Really" own this set.

But as I don't have the tow part, it's all hypothetical.

Even when this isn't the greatest set ever, good to see some love for the old stuff!

Regarding the '70s-designers-in-a-TARDIS thing: Stop by the early 2000s and let them see what Lego was doing then. On the one hand: Bionicle was just getting started. On the other: Galidor.

@cabbie:
My brother and I only had a few of these from late during their production range, so I’ve only seen pictures of the clip-style base that @sjr60 mentioned. But on the ones we had, the wheels and metal bar were bonded together somehow, and the whole assembly spun as a single piece within the base brick.

@cm5878:
I’d forgotten about those. I knew I barely ever used the brick version when playing as a kid, but couldn’t remember why. The plate worked with the various 4-wide fenders if the day, where the brick version combined with the fenders just makes it look like you took a stock sub-compact car and gave it a giant lift kit without swapping out the wheels and tires.

@sjr60:
22-15=7. There are only six tires (two singles and four dualies, which represent a combined ten tires on a real vehicle). Looking at the rest of the parts, I’d guess the seventh discrepancy might be the hook for the tow arm?

A basic minifig with no headgear consists of nine individual components (head, torso, hips, L arm, R arm, L leg, R leg, and 2x hands), but are only counted as three pieces when adding up the piece count. The torso assembly and legs assembly both come pre-built from the factory, which is why the arms, hands, and legs don’t get counted. Samsonite produced their own parts (sometimes with terrible designs, like the waffle-bottom plates), so maybe they shipped the tires and hook loose, and Billund shipped them pre-attached.

@Brickalili:
Click the picture and then click the zoom icon in the lower right corner and you’ll be able to see the top edge of the tires a little better. Looking up the inventory, the front tires are singles that fit on the same wheels as the old minifig motorcycles. The middle and back sets are what are known as “dualies”. In real life, this would consist of two wheels with offset centers that are bolted onto the same hub, and most commonly associated with 18-wheeler semi trucks and trailers. In these sets, the dualie wheels are just extra wide, and the dualie tires are molded extra wide with an equatorial groove that makes them look like paired tires.

In practice, building dualie wheelsets is challenging, because a lot of wheels don’t allow you to build off of them. I have built two designs that incorporate dualies, though. One really useful cheat I figured out was that I could fit a pair of modern motorcycle tires over a single smaller tire, which is what I did for Mater from Pixar’s Cars franchise.

@chefkaspa:
You might be thinking of something larger. There was a 2x4 brick with a clear bottom and red insert that lined up with holes on all four sides. And there were I think two styles of wheels (one with a 2x2 arrangement of studs, the other with spokes around a single stud) that had a metal rod molded into them. The metal rod was a little thicker than the ones on this set, they were about one stud long (so you could attach two of these opposite each other across the 2-stud width of the brick), and there was a groove formed into the end of the rod that would catch on something inside the red insert to retain the wheel once it’s fully inserted. This larger style of wheel later changed to incorporate a pin hole that I think was a little shorter than what Technic normally uses, where the wheels shown here largely got abandoned along the way. Currently the closest you’ll find to this style of wheel (the front wheels, not the dualies) is the old motorcycle wheels that are mounted under 2x2 plates for things like tail gear on planes.

I've got a real soft spot for this era of LEGO vehicles. Despite being well before my own heyday there were plenty of these bricks in my family's collection and I would love trawling through the bricks and rebuilding these from instructions in absolute tatters.

I'm sure Huwbot crunched the numbers, let's give him a chance to get the implementation off the ground and see how it goes for a while.

The blue 1x1 plates on top make it look like a fire truck. Fire truck tow truck :)

@sjr60 said:
" @chefkaspa said:
"1 wheel assembly = 1x black brick + 2x red wheel hub + 2x rubber wheel + 1x metal axle?"

For some reason the part count on Samsonite boxes was 4 ... 1 x Brick + 1 x Axle + 2 x Wheel/Tyre. It seems that even they considered the wheel and tyre inseparable once united!
"

Surely 1x black brick + 1x metal axle with red wheel hubs moulded on each end + 2x rubber tyre? The answer is still 4 though :)

The other combo, later on was the grey 2x2 plate with axle and red wheels, as found in 886 and other early Space sets. I don’t think there were any other plate colours aside from black.

@cm5878 said:
" @sjr60 said:
" @chefkaspa said:
"1 wheel assembly = 1x black brick + 2x red wheel hub + 2x rubber wheel + 1x metal axle?"

For some reason the part count on Samsonite boxes was 4 ... 1 x Brick + 1 x Axle + 2 x Wheel/Tyre. It seems that even they considered the wheel and tyre inseparable once united!
"
Surely 1x black brick + 1x metal axle with red wheel hubs moulded on each end + 2x rubber tyre? The answer is still 4 though :)"
Yes, that would work, but only with the split clips axle holders. With the enclosed axle holder a wheel would need removing to free the axle from the brick.

(All the wheels can be removed, but the later ones are tougher, due to the groove ended axle having a sort of ratchet effect on the interference fit wheel as it's pressed on.)

The fact is, the assembly was 6 pieces... who can tell for sure why Samsonite called it 4 pieces and most others called it 1 piece!

@legomaniac:
I mean, it does, a little, just because we’re used to seeing red fire trucks. Many other countries, and even parts of the US, have shifted to hi-vis colors like neon yellow, but many US cities found when they tried that, people didn’t recognize them as fire trucks because we all learn from an early age that fire trucks are always red. I think the only fire truck I’ve personally seen that had blue lights was a Hot Wheels or Matchbox car I owned as a kid. Typically blue is limited to use on police vehicles, and red on emergency vehicles in general (police, fire, ambulance). I did recently read about someplace in the US where they added blue flashers to the back of snowplow trucks to make them stand out more, as some people don’t realize what they are until they tailgate them and get showered in rock salt.

Vintage set category is perfect, LEGO celebrating its 90th year, and existed long before minifigs(44 years with moving arms) or even plastic bricks(64 years)

@PurpleDave said:
" @legomaniac:
I think the only fire truck I’ve personally seen that had blue lights was a Hot Wheels or Matchbox car I owned as a kid."

My guess would be that it was a Matchbox. Being a UK brand the toys followed the UK standard of blue lights for all four emergency services (not sure what we use on aircraft or boats though). “Blues and twos” is a common phrase here referring to the lights and sirens of emergency vehicles on a call.

Other road vehicles like breakdown recovery, gritters, highway maintenance, utilities etc. use yellow lights exclusively, to avoid confusion.

The blue plate definitely suggests fire engine to my UK eyes, so yellow might have looked better (if such a piece was even available then). I wonder if production capacity / storage capacity limitations of the day would have ever influenced what sets were released; “we have lots of these parts, let’s box up some recovery trucks”.

@ComfySofa:
https://hotwheels.fandom.com/wiki/Fire_Eater

Apparently not. It would have been one of the first two on the list. From the looks of it, they used red lights with a yellow paint job and blue lights with a red paint job because both resulted in contrasting colors. Red with red would have also made the panels on top behind the cab blend in with the body color.

All things being equal, high-vis yellow has been determined to be the most attention-grabbing (which is a good thing, for an emergency vehicle), and some parts of the US have switched to that and stuck with it. But red is traditional, what kids learn about growing up, and what people of all ages see on TV. Some fire departments tried high-vis yellow and ultimately decided to switch back to red because otherwise people just ignored them, and others never even tried to change in the first place. Either way, those are basically the only two body colors that make sense in the US, so the majority of releases just stuck to those two color schemes.

@PurpleDave said:
" @ComfySofa:
https://hotwheels.fandom.com/wiki/Fire_Eater"

Oooh, nice website! That's gonna eat a couple of hours of my day :D We had a Hot Wheels catalogue from the late 70s or early 80s which had full chrome Snake vs Mongoose. I wanted them SO badly!