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CLAAS Jaguar 900-Series Harvester

Should I feel the need to visit the Product Development Centres based at Ford's Melbourne Headquarters, from Geelong, the traffic is either Sunday-afternoon light or terrible.

 

One saving grace of terrible traffic, is that it gives me more time to look longingly at the lovely white-and-lime tractors and harvesters at the local CLAAS distribution centre, next to the highway. (Incidentally, the distribution centre nestles just besides the highway overpass used in 'Mad Max' where the message is phoned in that the hell-razing, post-apocalyptic bikies are heading in to town - but that is another story.)

 

In an earlier LUGNuts challenge that focused on food-related and on farm vehicles - Challenge 37 'The Food We Eat', I took delight in building various model s from the CLASS Tractor range, in miniland scale. This resulted in some nice (and very large), lime tractors. An absence of time, large wheels & tires, and lime Lego, left a few model untried, including the magnificent CLASS XERION, a double steering axle, giant wheeled behemoth, with a swiveling cab so it can go forwards, backwards, AND sideways - AWESOME.

 

The XERION will have to wait for another challenge somewhere down the line.

 

The other CLAAS with which I was captivated appears periodically in the distribution yard, and is equally magnificent. This model is the equally enormous CLAAS JAGUAR Harvester. I am a little bit sad that it can only go forward, but it makes up for this in being able to carry all sorts of crazy cutting, slicing and dicing tools on the front end. I have modeled only two here the Maize Cob Silage (MCS), designed to harvest corn/maize type plants, and the more traditional spinning long blade harvester type tool. There are more cool tools too, so they may be modeled for adaptation to the MotorCity-scale JAGUAR shown here.

 

One key difference from the Challenge 37 tractors, and the JAGUAR Harvester shown here is the scale. The sheer size of the real JAGUAR - 6.6 metres long (20 ft), and 3.8 metres tall (10.5 ft), not including any tool attachments, make it a seriously big entity. Maybe I will get to a Miniland-scale JAGUAR someday, but for now, I display the model in a more manageable 1:28 (MotorCity scale).

 

Incidentally, the Lego Group have also released a Harvester in the past few years under the 'City' line. One of the images shows this model (Nr. 7636). My JAGUAR was loosely based on this model for size and tool compatibility, and also as an example of the customisation of original Lego models that can add a dose of individual creativity to Lego modeling.

 

The point of this?

 

This CLAAS JAGUAR model has been created for Flickr LUGNuts 68th Build Challenge - 'A Baker's Dozen', to the sub-theme Nr. 11. 'Any tractor or combine harvester'.

 

 

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Uploaded on July 3, 2013
Taken on July 3, 2013