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Set #9735 - NYFD FireTruck

I had heard about this set, but hadn't seen one in the stores, or thought much about whether or not I would buy one. However, I was in a Toys 'R Us looking for some on-sale stuff and spotted this. Decided I wanted one. Lots of chrome!

The front of the box says: "A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this FIRE ZONE product benefits the FDNY Fire Safety Education Fund." Does that mean more fire department related products coming from Megabloks? Could be. About a quarter of the back of the box is occupied by some fire safety information, including the URL (http://www.fdnyfirezone.org) of the FDNY Fire Zone Fire Safety Learning Center. (You have to turn on Javascript to get anything except a blank page.)

This set, unlike most (all?) other Megabloks ProBuilder sets, does not have pictures for any alternate models. Also, this set has two instruction books rather than the usual one. There are 91 construction steps in all. Also, the inside front cover of the first book is an inventory of the parts in the set, including official Megabloks part numbers.

I quite enjoyed the steps in the first book. The fire truck is solidly built, and the silvery grey used for the metal parts works well. There are a number of new parts (new for Megabloks as far as I know) in this set, including 1x2 tile in several colours, special ladder and ladder base pieces, special chromed decorations (including two chrome fire-axes!), 1x3x1 red dual inverse slope pieces, etc. The cab interior is mostly detailed, including a total of 7 reclinable seats. Some of the pieces, including most of the chrome ones, will definitely be desired by fire engine fans!

Also in the set is a large light-and-sound unit. It comes with the needed 3 penlight cells already installed. The unit can be seen in the photos, on the right-right hand side of the truck. It has four buttons on it, disguised as firehose connections, which yield four different siren/horn combinations. Each also triggers a pair of flashing lights which are in a separate light unit which attaches to the top of the front of the cab. Normally I would consider the unit a bad part of the set, but the sound from this one is pretty good - likely due to the reasonable size speaker used.

There are some bad aspects of this set, unfortunately. One is the instructions - it is quite hard to tell some of the colours apart. Chrome versus white versus silvery grey versus transparent can be difficult to figure out, and I once spent a few frustrating minutes searching for the wrong colour parts. Also, the pictures are washed-out somewhat, making it hard to tell the shape of some of the smaller pieces. The last bad aspect of my set was some missing parts - likely one small bag. The chrome something-or-others that go in the rearmost compartments were missing, along with 4 gems (1 x 1 x 1/3 round) of one of the confusable colours. However, there were 5 spare gems of random colours, so I just used those.

Starting Out

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