(Written by Geneva – gid617)
Cars are challenging to sculpt in LEGO bricks – in fact, they’re part of the reason we’ve gotten so many new curved slopes in the last decade – but the farther back you go in car design, the closer you get to the straight lines that LEGO bricks do so well. (Arguably the same could be said about the future, if Cybertrucks are more than just an unhappy blot on the design landscape.) Many of these older cars are also iconic, which makes them a great choice for a LEGO set, and the #77984 LEGO Jurassic Park Jeep Wrangler is a perfect example that had me instantly excited.
With 1,924 parts, there’s a lot inside this set, including a large cloth piece for the back of the Jeep that’s black on one side and dark tan on the other. The building process is a bit long, but not repetitive, and it’s really fun to see the various functions coming to life: front wheel steering, opening doors, and a lifting hood.
The set includes enough extra pieces and stickers to turn it into any one of four Jurassic Park Jeeps. I went for the iconic cloth-covered Jeep as I think it looks the most complete, but the car does also look really good without the roll cage. There are two small side builds: a stand for the one minifigure in this set (Dennis Nedry), and this little East Dock sign.
The car is loaded with details: windshield wipers, Jurassic Park plates, a dinosaur in the rearview mirror, and even pedals for the driver.
Under the hood, there’s a lovely little engine which can be removed. The front section of the car is where most of the angles and interesting building techniques can be found, including a few sideways windows for the large headlights.
The Jurassic Park Jeep had actually caught my eye as a good car to build in LEGO a couple years ago. I am very much not a car builder, but I was trying to use a few red cauldrons as wheels (because of Iron Builder – I’m not that crazy on my own), and this was one of the few well-known cars with red wheels. So I built something a little larger than minifigure scale, and I loved it so much that I’ve kept it around for two years. Naturally, when this set came out, I instantly wanted to see the Jeeps side by side. I was expecting the LEGO set to be larger than mine for sure, but I was astonished by just how much larger it is – it’s huge!
The difference in scale means that Dennis, who looks totally absurd by the LEGO set, almost looks right in my Jeep though objectively he’s still much too small.
The LEGO set may have size on my Jeep, but it doesn’t have speed. I built a pull-back motor into mine, because I thought it would be kind of mindblowing to see red cauldrons (which have no attachment points inside) actually spinning and supporting the whole car.
After that success making my own Jeep move, naturally I couldn’t let this big hulk of a Jeep just sit around on a shelf. That said, a pullback motor was quite an achievement for me, and I know nothing about LEGO _ower Functions. So here is where things get interesting.
I found a move hub at a fairly good price on BrickLink (batteries included, score). It turns out this was probably not the best choice of motor for a project like this; it does have two independent motors on either side, but it’s huge and bulky. I went with it because it’s a single piece, so I wouldn’t have to worry about finding a place for two motors and a hub. I still don’t really know if that was a good call or not.
My first attempt was a flop. I tried placing the hub underneath the floor of the Jeep toward the center and working out from there with axles and gears to get the motion to the wheels. I focused first on the simple linear motion of the back wheels, planning to make them do the driving and worry about the steering later. Well, my nightmare of gears snaking around the back of the chassis worked in the air, but the slightest friction from the floor and everything would get out of line. Back to the drawing board!
Of course I went from one extreme to the other. If seven gears was too many to keep straight, no gears must be ideal. I attached the hub’s right motor to the right rear wheel and called it a day. What could possibly go wrong?
Quite a lot. For one thing, everything was now off by half a stud. I moved the other rear wheel to match, and hoped that there would still be enough clearance under the wheel wells (there was, thankfully). Then I started bringing the motion from the move hub’s second motor to the front of the car. Here too, I kept to as few gears as possible. There’s an additional problem with steering, however; it’s a movement that stops after only about a quarter turn. You can’t just have the steering axle go round and round in a circle. I tried to discover a mechanical way to solve this, but promptly decided to push it back into the programming stage.
When I got to the programming stage, I decided that after all, I’m the one driving this, and I know not to just let the steering motor spin, but to instead nudge it bit by bit until the wheels turn as desired. Not exactly a solution, but it was a problem I could live with. I stabilized the chassis with a few plates, and ran it around the room feeling immensely successful.
Then it was just a simple matter of rebuilding the body of the Jeep on top of the chassis (whoops, it’s one stud too short), and we were off to the… races… or maybe just delivering snail mail. It’s slow. Horribly slow. Honestly, it barely moves at all going forward, I suppose because it’s hard to push all that weight in the front of the car. And turning the wheels in front is hit-or-miss at best, as the car moves so slowly that the wheels have to turn under the full weight of the hood, and the gears are not quite tight enough to handle that consistently. To be fair, that looseness was a little intentional, because I don’t want to be destroying my gears if I run them a little too long, but now it works once, maybe twice, and then I have to push things around.
As far as the speed is concerned, I expect that could be increased by adding a large and small gear. The steering is a larger problem that I think would be best solved with another small motor in front and some programming. In general, I’ve concluded that next time I should start with a very robust chassis optimised around the motors instead of vice versa, and then build on from there, carefully testing weight and what it does to the movement. It was a good learning experience anyway, even if mostly I learned how much I don’t know.
The #77984 LEGO Jurassic Park Jeep Wrangler is a super cool car chock full of details and movie references; any gearhead or fan of the franchise would love this set. The building experience is solid, and the set goes above and beyond by including stickers and pieces to change the Jeep’s skin and make it a different one of Jurassic Park’s Jeeps. When it comes to motorizing the set, that turned out not to be as easy as I had hoped, but it’s for sure possible, although if (like me) you don’t know what you’re doing, you may want to try to find a tutorial somewhere or instructions on Rebrickable!
If you want to check out the set yourself and maybe experiment with motorizing it, it is currently available for $199.99 at the LEGO Jurassic Park section of the Online LEGO Shop.
What do you think? Have you tried motorizing the Jeep Wrangler? And what do you think of my attempts? How can I have done it better? And how do you like my smaller custom version? Feel free to share and discuss in the comment section below!
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Wow! I like yours so much! It’s impressive that it’s so much smaller but still has all the iconic characteristics. Nice work!
Thank you! I thought it was funny that despite the difference in scales, we both used T bars along the front of the hood!
I wonder if one of those alternate motors I see Technic builders using would work. They are smaller thus take up less space. But yeah, motorizing a set is not easy! Especially when steering is also involved.
Yeah, I’m sure there are less clunky options than the official LEGO motors. I especially would like to find a good rechargeable option if I keep motorizing MOCs.
Do you have instructions for your small version? It looks so good!
No unfortunately I don’t.