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BestLock Construction Sets

A few weeks ago, I first noticed that some of the Bay stores here in Edmonton had a few BestLock sets for sale. I resisted trying them for a while, but eventually the Bay had one of their 20% off all toys sales, so I bought some. The sets are regular Cdn $40.00, and the boxes indicate that they are made in China and imported by the Hudson's Bay Company. What I got was 3 of the construction sets listed as having 350 pieces each:

#4327 - Backhoe Loader
#4328 - Dump Truck
#4331 - Front End Loader

All three sets are of yellow construction vehicles in larger-than-minifig scale. Each comes with minifigs, however. The boxes say there should be 2 minifigs in each set, but 2 sets had 4, and the other had 3. Also, each set includes a couple of complete bags of unused parts, with a couple dozen extra parts. The minifigs do not disassemble at all, but can be posed like Lego ones, except that the heads do not turn.

The parts are arranged into a few larger, numbered bags, each containing some large pieces and a few other bags. Each such bag will have the exact pieces for some number of steps, headed by the corresponding number in the instructions. The instructions are all done from the exact same point of view, and the building is often not symmetric, to avoid blocking the view of back areas with front area building.

The bricks are not the same material as Lego, and so may not last as long with multiple use. The piece consistency seems quite good, however - they fit together accurately. The fit is noticeably looser than with Lego or Megabloks, however, and the construction of these sets compensates for that by using lots of highly connected plates.

Although it is possible to connect BestLock and Lego bricks together, most people never would - the BestLock configuration has a plate being 1/2 the size of a brick, and the bricks are shorter than Lego bricks. A Lego brick on top of a BestLock brick fits tightly, but a BestLock brick on top of a Lego brick fits the same as BestLock bricks on each other.

I am not disappointed in these sets - all three are interesting to build. I prefer the Dump Truck of the three I have. The sets have lots of tiles, thus giving a smoother overall appearance than similar Lego sets usually have. As someone inexperienced at MOCs, I wouldn't be ashamed to claim any of these as my own.

The selection of pieces is all "standard Lego" in nature. There are no Technic-equivalent pieces. Because of that, actual operation of the models is not as good as Lego could achieve. For example, none of them have steering. The tracks on the Front End Loader fit nicely, but some of the wheels are very tight, and so the tracks hardly turn at all. Likely some study and some slight carving with a knife would fix that.

The buckets on the Backhoe and the Front End Loader are identical. Each is built from 3 separate bucket pieces and a pair of bucket-end pieces. The smaller backhoe bucket is the same, except it has only one bucket piece. This scheme works better than I would have thought it would - I class it as a good idea. See the image below for a closeup.

All Three Sets

Minifig closeup