Next to the the big trucks (cfr. #382 Breakdown Truck and Car and #383 Truck with Excavator) Lego also had vehicles in a smaller scale like this one. It's probably from these little vehicles that the cars in minifig scale evolved as the first minifigures came with such small cars, for exampe the ambulance in #363 Hospital with those early, static minifigures or even the car in #377 Shell Service Station with the minifigures we still know today.

Box/Instructions

I've never had these as it came as a hand-me-down (I did not even know I had this set), thanks to the wonders of the internet my children are the first to see this set built in over 30 years. If I even had had a photo I would have been able to build it though, instructions are really superfluous here. But back when I was a kid all you had once you lost the box and the instructions was a tiny picture in the yearly catalogue, and since I only started getting those in the eighties I never even had a picture of this set.

Parts

A few plates and standard bricks, an early, smaller windscreen and three wheel bricks (one with single tyres and two with double tyres, I was always quite partial to these tyres but I never liked these wheel bricks as much as the wheel plates). Nothing exceptional, were it not for that blue tipper bucket, countless factories have been built around this part through the years (although we could have used some more of those)!

The build

As mentioned already, this is just too easy. I do like how the fuel tanks are created by leaving a small gap between plates, but the tipper bucket is just resting on two 1 x 2 bricks, so if you even slightly tilt the truck to the side it falls off which gets a bit annoying. I like to think the solution I had worked out as a kid (I never knew the 'official' connection as used here) was better, by resting the ends in the hole of a 1 x 2 technic brick the bucket could not fall off.

The completed model

It's a small truck, you can't go wrong with that as far as young boys (5 & 6) are concerned. And it can be used alongside those newer, flashy Tiny Turbos as a vintage truck (or even next to your Matchbox cars, I've seen it happen) so really, it does its job and it does it well.

Overall opinion

When we built all sets we have with 21 to 25 pieces and I let them have only one set, this one was almost taken over all others! Though in the end they went with #6806 Surface Hopper, I was still quite surprised to see this set from 1974 being chosen over many a more recent set...

Wow, I remeber this set.
So simple with a revolutionary tipper mechanism, as long as you didn't go across bumpy ground or upside down. Turned out useful if you made devices (machines/factories) to rattle bricks down tubes and collect in the hopper or to use as a start point by loading the tipper full of 1x1x1 bricks