Thunderthumbs

I'm sorry to disappoint you: my first big LEGO-mosaic was a portrait of Level 42, my favourite band of the eightees. The nickname of bass-player Mark King was "Thunderthumbs" because of his special "slap-bass" technique.

When I was 16 years old, I reverse engineered the large truck model that can be found on pages 38 to 41 of LEGO Technic Idea book 8889. It had to be built with elements from sets 8860, 8859 and 8848, but I managed to build it even without set 8859... My biggest builds are mosaics (e.g. this one) but my main interest has always been LEGO Technic. When Akiyuki released a video of his " " back in August 2014, it definitely triggered me to finally do something with my huge collection of LEGO Technic parts. During my Christmas holidays in 2014, I watched the video over and over again until I figured out how it was built. I tried to build it with parts in my own supply (I even used an old style turntable in the ) but decided quickly to try to approach the original as much as possible: I still didn't buy new parts but had to take apart another creation to come to the second version: I showed it on an event where it ran continuously for about 4 hours before starting to show first signs of unreliability. So I took it apart again... very slowly to make an MLCad-file of it. It is not a perfect approach of the original, because Akiyuki mentioned that ball spill was not zero... However I haven't found the time to turn it into actual building instructions. A few months later Blakbird announced the release of an MLCad-file of Akiyuki's Ball Factory. With a few (lots of) modifications I still have this model running (e.g. two parallel motors hidden underneath the bucket wheel): Thank you for all the hard work! I'll definitely make some more modules. Maarten