Among the great new sets released for the 1st January 2024 wave was 60404: Burger Truck from LEGO’s City theme which mostly deals with vehicles and buildings you’d find, well, in a city. The Burger Truck features a modified flatbed truck done up in black and red hot rod colours – complete with flame printing – and a back section of a building made to look like a large hamburger where the food is made.

While I originally wanted to use this set as the basis for the hot rod we saw in Iron Man 2008, another idea sprang to mind: the Patty Wagon from SpongeBob SquarePants.

This vehicle has popped up several times throughout SpongeBob SquarePants and it’s essentially a giant Krabby Patty on wheels.

Despite its simplicity it was not the easiest thing to make as this project is an alt build. An alt build, short for “alternative build” is a new and custom creation which uses only the pieces from one set. You can see another example of an alt build in this X-wing I made recently that only uses pieces from LEGO’s Galaxy Explorer Class Space set.

While this does introduce many limitations to custom LEGO building, it does open the project up to anyone who wants their own. All they need is the set itself and instructions to follow and, for the Patty Wagon, I again have made free instructions for you to follow which are available at the bottom of this page or on Rebrickable, which is the site that popularised alt builds and acts as a repository for them.

You just need to pick up 60404: Burger Truck from any toy store or online retailer and use my instructions to make your very own Patty Wagon.

Making this alt build had its challenges given the limited pieces in the donor set. One of these was the hamburger itself which forms the main body of the Patty Wagon. You may think that this would actually be easy given that the donor set is also a kind of hamburger on wheels, but this wasn’t the case.

The problem was that the donor set built its burger with huge gaps. These gaps were a door and window for LEGO minifigures to use as intended – as a food truck. The other two sides simply filled these gaps with large black panels to match the black of the carrying truck.

I had to fill these gaps and it was a challenge, especially with limited pieces of the correct colour to make the distinct layers of the hamburger. I had to take some shortcuts like adding extra “cheese” on the sides (there weren’t enough brown pieces for the patty layer) and substituting some of the lettuce layer with purple pieces that are meant to represent onion.

On the back of the Patty Wagon, I also made a bumper of sorts to further make up for the lack of brown pieces. This let me add in backlights, a licence plate and even an exhaust that is meant to look like a tomato sauce bottle (that’s ketchup for the Americans).

You can see the final result in the gallery above along with some other limitations of the donor set, such as the windscreen not really being the best shape and the Krusty Krab “KK” flag being on the thicker side.

The real bodge job was underneath, for the wheels. The specific wheels that LEGO used in the donor set are made to only work with a select and specific kind of dedicated axle. This is a rather un-LEGO-like thing to do as it limits how you can use these wheels.

That’s a problem I ran right into with the Patty Wagon as the axle for two of the wheels was far too short to connect the wheels where they’re supposed to be.

I had to resort to some rather illegal building techniques to connect the back wheels which turns the door pieces in the set into axles. Good thing this is a Patty Wagon, and not a paddy wagon, otherwise I’d be right off to LEGO jail.

It also comes with the unfortunate side effect that the back wheels don’t roll. Less unfortunate is the slightly higher positioning of the wheels which, while not accurate to the Patty Wagon, does give the vehicle a forward rake and is a nice nod to the hot rod inspiration of this entire project.

The finished build is 11 centimetres tall, eight centimetres long and nine centimetres wide. That’s 4.33 X 3.14 X 3.54 inches for the Americans.

Those who really want four rolling wheels, or want green ones to mimic the pickle wheels of the original Patty Wagon, will have to use pieces from outside the donor set. For now I love how this turned out and the fact that it’s an alt build.

As a reminder, the full instructions are free in the embed below and on Rebrickable. If anyone makes their own I’d love to see it, so please upload a picture to the “Photos” section of the Rebrickable page.