Random set of the day: Chopper Force
Posted by Huwbot,
Today's random set is 8232 Chopper Force, released during 1997. It's one of 15 Technic sets produced that year. It contains 289 pieces and 1 minifig, and its retail price was US$25.
It's owned by 744 Brickset members. If you want to add it to your collection you might find it for sale at BrickLink or eBay.
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27 comments on this article
And we all laughed at Space Force when it was created...
Gotta love that old fashioned Technic brick construction--and populated Technic sets (not gonna lie, I haven't bought a Technic set since about 2002, and I'd probably buy them for the figs... which I'll admit is not really the Technic way).
The very simple background looks different to me? Unique? Or just the way Technic backgrounds looked in 1997?
I think I used to have a salad preparation kit called Chopper Force.
A man has fallen into the river in LEGO Technic City! Start the new Chopper Force!
The system activating the rotors on this model is simple yet extremely well done. This is a very fun model to play with if you can get past the its crude but not all that bad look. This is a little gem that I discovered many years after I bought the set (remained unopened for many years as I was more interested in bigger sets). And it has a technic fig - which I miss a lot.
Red technic bricks. Some of my favorite parts!
@Harmonious_Building said:
"I think I used to have a salad preparation kit called Chopper Force. "
Did Vince of “ShamWow” fame sell that?
I miss that guy.
Forceful Chopper
Toothed Technic bushings are the best!
Press and play!
Is it just me, or does this set have military vibes?
I think one of the reasons they dumped Technic figs was that they were treated as a single piece. No interchangeable body parts for these guys, so they tended towards jumpsuits, and a single broken component pretty much spelled the end for Combat Carl...er, I mean Technic Timmy.
Having lived through 80's and 90's, the model looks reasonable to me and it comes with a nice looking Technic figure. I'll take it.
So do we have a fan name for technic figures like the pilot here? Got bigfigs and nanofigs, are these techfigs?
Can you really call it a “force” when it only seems to consist of one chopper?
The proportions just seem off. I don't really have any objections to the larger minifigure but the vehicle just looks strange.
C grade. This set is a miss in my book.
Looks like the small cousin of my treasured 8856 from several years earlier. What an awesome set that was.
@PurpleDave said:
"I think one of the reasons they dumped Technic figs was that they were treated as a single piece. No interchangeable body parts for these guys, so they tended towards jumpsuits, and a single broken component pretty much spelled the end for Combat Carl...er, I mean Technic Timmy."
The funny thing is that the Technic fig parts are actually at least partially interchangeable. You can remove the arms and head without any issues, not so much the legs though. They do come pre-assembled in the same way minifigure torsos do, but they are still interchangeable.
So, if anything, I think the reason why they got dumped wasn't so much that they were just "one piece" but rather the fact that the molds required to produce them were super expensive, and they weren't used frequently enough to justify their cost.
Curious what the Danish translation is for Chopper Force?
"hakker kraft"
That's some deep level support for developing computer engineers.
@LegoDavid said:
"The funny thing is that the Technic fig parts are actually at least partially interchangeable. You can remove the arms and head without any issues, not so much the legs though. They do come pre-assembled in the same way minifigure torsos do, but they are still interchangeable. "
For myself, I found the legs the most easily interchangeable part. The hips didn't detach from the torso like your normal minifigure, granted, but the joints at the hips popped apart pretty easily, if you were careful; I got 8712 in a used job-lot, and their legs were pretty much the only part that I ever swapped around between them. I guess I could have done the same with the heads, too - but when all three had the exact same head, it seemed a little redundant!
Never tried with the arms... one of my ones had an arm broken off already when I got them, leaving its pin still stuck irremovably in the torso; seeing that they were fragile enough to be broken made me wary of trying to remove any of them. Because of that, I'm not sure that they were necessarily *designed* to be interchangeable, the way minifigures are; just a by-product of their style that they could be, even so.
Neat looking set, in any case ^^ I don't usually go for Lego helicopters, simply because there's so many of them that none of them stand out any more; but this one's more uncommon technic mechanism for making the blades spin makes it more interesting to me than most.
As well as the additional expense, I always thought the Technic figures reminded me of crash test dummies, which maybe wasn't the use TLG wanted them put to.
From the instructions one end of the gear rack is attached to an elastic band, which stretches when you push in until you let go, and the gear rack shoots back turning the gears really fast!
I'm sure it wouldn't have been that hard at the design stage to add a retractable undercarriage?
Luckily there are 4 and not 3 wheels to allow the amphibian racer B model, but shame just missing the two connectors so that the gear rack could have been used to give you steering?
@CarolinaOnMyMind said:
" @Harmonious_Building said:
"I think I used to have a salad preparation kit called Chopper Force. "
Did Vince of “ShamWow” fame sell that?
I miss that guy.
"
You're gonna love his nuts!
@ThatBionicleGuy said:
"Never tried with the arms... one of my ones had an arm broken off already when I got them, leaving its pin still stuck irremovably in the torso; seeing that they were fragile enough to be broken made me wary of trying to remove any of them."
I used to swap all the pieces around on mine. The upper and lower arms are the exact same piece so you can actually chain the arms together and give them super long arms lol.
@Drzhivago138 said:
" @CarolinaOnMyMind said:
" @Harmonious_Building said:
"I think I used to have a salad preparation kit called Chopper Force. "
Did Vince of “ShamWow” fame sell that?
I miss that guy.
"
You're gonna love his nuts!"
Thanks. I was waiting for someone to quote that.
@CarolinaOnMyMind:
Geez, by the look of him, I figured that guy died of a drug overdose years ago. Turns out he’s still alive. Keith Richards would be shocked. And impressed.
I loved this set. The mechanism was simple but clever, and really fun to play with; a nice departure from turning a crank to spin the rotors.
Get to da CHOPPAAHHHH!
Anyone else notice that some Creator Cars are lowkey techfigs-scale? The old Campervan 10220, the Lambo 8169 and the Cruiser 5767, in particular.