Bruder Piggyback Forklift

[Zabco]

About two years ago I was watching a video clip of a RC truck meet in England. If I remember correctly it was in a link posted by Bo Wallen of his trip there to the UK Nationals. Part way in there were a few seconds showing a small "piggyback" type forklift loading a flatbed trailer. I was really fascinated by this little forklift. They are very common where I live and I had never seen a working model of one before. Here is a screen capture of the forklift from the video.

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I thought it would really be neat to get one of these and see if I couldn't convert it to full RC. I really had no idea where to start. It appeared to be sort of toyish in looks so I suspected it might be made by Bruder. Sure enough, about two months later I was in a Tractor Supply store and happened to walk down their toy aisle. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a Bruder Mack box truck labeled for UPS and hanging on the back of the truck was the little forklift.

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Apparently the forklift is only sold as a set with another truck and I didn't feel like spending $100 just to get the forklift, especially as I had no idea if I could do the conversion. I went to Bruder's web store and found that the forklift was listed as a 'spare part' for the UPS truck and could be purchased individually that way. Price for just the forklift was $21. That was cheap enough that I bought two of them, one to chop up and experiment on and figure out how to do the conversion and then a clean one to do the final version with. If I couldn't make it work I wasn't going to be out much money and would have the fun of trying.

I started by searching the internet to see if I could find examples of other conversions and see if I could get some ideas on how to proceed. Ideally I would find a build article or 'how to' from someone who had done the conversion. No such luck. After many, many hours of searching I was only able to find a few photos and very short video clips of a couple of these in action. I was able to get a couple of ideas on how to build but was still left with a lot of questions. The other thing I noted was that some of the conversions were sorta crude. If you look at the photo of the forklift from the video clip you can see that what appears to be a battery pack and other parts are sticking out of the body in several places. I didn't want that. When I do a Bruder conversion one of my primary goals is to keep the body looking as much like the original as possible. If you look at one of these Bruder forklifts it is very apparent there is not much room inside for a battery, motors, servos and all the other electronics needed. That would be the biggest challenge.

After months searching and looking at the model I was just about to decide to just tear into it and see what I could do when I finally hit some pay dirt on the internet. Last winter when searching again I came across a posting on the Bruder Facebook page showing a conversion that I thought looked really good. The author posted a number of photos showing some of the details of his work and that was the info and inspiration I needed. He also said that he would post his 3D print files on Thingiverse if anyone wanted them. I won't list his name as I don't have permission but you can find the article and print files by searching 'Bruder UPS forklift' on both Facebook and Thingiverse.

Using this information as a start I was able to create what I think is a very nice, fully RC controlled model of this forklift. If there is any interest in this conversion process I will write up a series of articles on how I did mine. This will be some work on my part and will take time. If you want to see how I went from this:

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to this:

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Let me know. Yes, it's now blue because a) I had 3D printed parts that needed to be painted and I don't know of a good paint match for Bruder's red, b) a lot of the piggybackers I see around here are blue, and c) I really like blue.