Mobile Recovery Vehicle - 6926

 

After returning from our Christmas/New Year vacation, I received a small manila envelope in the mail that allowed me to complete my first Space LEGO project, the Mobile Recovery Vehicle. The instructions that came with the set don't have a name for it, just the set number 6926, but online sources have it listed as a Mobile Recovery Vehicle.

I started this one first for one big reason. Of all the build instruction booklets I have, the one for this set was in the best shape. I also remember it the most from the all the sets so perhaps it was a favorite of mine when I was a wee boy. I'm guessing I was drawn to the beefy large tires which were a novelty for LEGO at the time. All my other sets had much smaller tires which when you are tearing them apart and creating new vehicles, means one must design a much smaller vehicle. With big tires, one could build vehicles that were quite large and more fun to design and play with.

After doing and initial sort of the LEGOs to get the Classic Space ones separated by color, I printed off a part guide for this set which I dutifully identified all the individual pieces in the set and segregated them into a large Ziplock bag, that is all but one. Going into this project I expected that young me lost some of the smaller pieces but was hoping that I could rob newer non-Space related sets for them. The reason I suspected some might be missing is because I distinctly remember the sound of a vacuum cleaner sucking up small pieces no matter how carefully my brother and I tried to pick them all up out of the living room carpet. Ironically though, I wasn't missing any small pieces but was one tire short. I'm not sure how that happened as it would be quite impossible to vacuum up.

So I did some searching and found www.bricklink.com where I downloaded the part guide, also allows you to input your missing part and then order them from one of hundreds or perhaps thousands of stores/individuals around the world selling them. I found a U.S. company here in the Midwest that just happened to have the missing tire priced very reasonably for $0.39. The catch was that there was a $5.00 shipping charge on all small orders. After the fact, I have since discovered that you can list a long list of parts and do a search for stores that have them all so if I run across more missing pieces that I can't substitute, I can just get them all at once and pay only one shipping charge.

I think one of the selling points for Space LEGOs was the fact that they were interactive and often came apart. In the case of this set, there was a unit that presumably could be set down on the surface of the moon and then a small space ship detached allowing you to fly away and not be bound by land. This evidently stimulated my imagination for awhile so that I remember playing with it nearly 50 years later but not enough that I didn't eventually tear it apart and combine it with other sets to build houses, race cars, semis and other things I have long since forgotten.

One mystery remains for now. When I said I started with this one due to the instruction booklet being in great shape, I also found that I had all the pages of another instruction booklet for the exact same set but in two or three different clumps of pages. I don't remember if we had two of these sets or not, but if we did, we managed to lose not just one tire, but five tires. I probably have most of the parts needed to build the second one, minus the tires, but probably won't solve whether we just ended up with two instruction booklets or actually had two complete sets until later when all the other sets have been built.