2GodBDGlory Posted June 30 Posted June 30 So earlier this year I decided it was high time I actually build another 1:8 car MOC, which is a territory I used to build in an awful lot, but hadn't done for a while. I then looked back and found that the last proper 1:8 car I had designed was this Ford Mustang: Spoiler Anyways, I wanted to build something with interesting mechanicals and a simple enough body to model. I was looking at sporty '90s Toyota Corolla models when I came across an image of this custom build: It's a 1989 Toyota Corolla GT-S owned by Randy Wimenta, and extensively modified to have AWD and a desert racing setup, which you can read more about here: https://www.treadmagazine.com/buyers-guide/awdrola-the-remarkable-transformation-of-a-toyota-corolla-gt-s-into-an-off-road-beast/ Anyways, it was a model of a car I was already interested in building, but with even more mechanical functions to emulate, and some great style! Aesthetics: I didn't have the white parts to build the car in the original color, but my trusty LBG looked about close enough. I used some red parts on the rear, and then finished the yellow, orange, and red stripes with electrical tape (and orange marker on labels for orange). I was pleased with the way the look turned out! I think it's way better than my old 1:8s, though not at the level of other more appearance-focused builders out there. The rims are some 3D printed "steelies" I had lying around from a Toyota LC70 trial truck project last summer. The license plates are 3D-printed as well, and are replicas of Idaho license plates. Why Idaho? I'm honestly not too sure. I think my criteria were that the location's plate look ok, have both front and rear plates, be a place I like, and have some level of desert for the car to drive in. Neither I nor the real car have any connection to that state, but that's what I did, for some reason. Spoiler Functions: Opening doors, hood, and trunk AWD with 2x PF L motors and an I4 piston engine Steering with PF M motorAWDrola 6+R joystick manual transmission with 2x PF Servo motors and moving cabin joystick Clutch with PF M motor Central differential lock with PF M motor Pop-up headlights with PF M motor Rear pneumatic drum brakes with moving handbrake and PF M motor "Super Strut" front suspension 4-link live rear axle Torsen rear differential Opening Stuff: The doors opened with a fairly basic manual latch. The hood opened with a rudimentary strut. The trunk opened, and had quite a bit of space inside, but no way to keep it open Spoiler Drive: A big priority for me was to have a fully transverse drivetrain (until getting into the rear axle driveshaft), just like the real car. The two L motors always drove the piston engine, followed by the clutch, transmission, and central diff lock. Planetary hubs were used on the wheels. Largely thanks to those, it was actually able to drive! Not fast, and both fifth and sixth gears were starting to get crunchy, but it did move! Spoiler Steering: Steering ended up being hard to squeeze in after building the drivetrain, and had some issues. It was using a PF M motor through a small linear actuator, with a working steering wheel. Unfortunately, the small LA's clutch tended to kick in, so steering didn't work very well with weight on the car. It was never really something I was going to drive around, though, so I didn't mind too much. Spoiler Transmission: This was definitely the highlight of the model for me! This car has a fully transverse 6+R transmission shifted through a realistic manual transmission joystick on the remote control, with a corresponding joystick moving around on the interior! The working principle uses two PF Servo motors, each shifting a separate transmission. The first shifts a 3+R transmission through gearing such that its natural 180° of motion create 270° of motion in a wave selector to shift through all four positions. This is controlled by left/right motion of a proportional joystick on my MouldKing 6.0 controller, allowing for it to land in all four of the acceptable positions. The second transmission is a close-range 2-speed, with 24:24 and 20:28 gearing to split in between the ratios of the 3+R. This one is controlled by a servo that just rotates 180 degrees, and is controlled by a PF IR remote clone connected to the remote control's joystick. Forward/reverse motion of the joystick shifts this into either the high or low gear, as in a 1-2 shift on a manual transmission car. You may notice that this isn't actually a 6+R, but rather a 6+2R! I didn't need the second reverse, though, so I'm ignoring it. Realistically the car should be a 5+R, but I couldn't think of a way to build that on this working principle, and from my research the original Toyota gearbox did have a 6-speed variant (used in some Lotuses, or something), so theoretically I think a real one could be built that way! As mentioned before, there is a moving joystick in the cabin, with transverse motion hooked up to one servo, and fore/aft motion hooked up to the other. I was really pleased with the gearbox! Spoiler The 2-speed part ^ Clutch: The clutch was a pretty basic affair, with a PF M motor switching a transmission driving ring through a custom slip clutch, to disconnect the drive motors from the transmission. It didn't have any practical purpose, and wasn't the most reliable, but it was there, I guess Spoiler Central Differential Lock: The central diff lock was run by another PF M motor, also tucked in the front, through another custom friction clutch. In the picture below (spoilered out), it shifts the driving ring on the right of the image. Behind it is the central differential, which has a 24T clutch gear permanently mated with its case through a driving ring. The one output of that central diff then drives the two DBG 24T gears, but if the right driving ring is engaged, the red 24T clutch gear and the DBG 24T gear on its axle are joined, forcing the case to rotate at the same speed as its output, locking it. I was rather pleased to have this string of three 24T clutch gears, all being used to mate with driving rings! (The left one is part of the 2-speed transmission, with the other side of it driving the central diff through its 28T side) Spoiler Pop-up Headlights: Everyone loves pop-up headlights! The ones on this car were flipped up and down using a PF M motor running a rubber band, which then drove an axle with two small linear actuators on it. These were tucked just below the hood and just above the rims, but worked pretty well to raise and lower the lights! Unfortunately I didn't bother to work in any LEDs. Spoiler Brakes: I wanted to have some kind of brakes, but I didn't think adding front ones would be realistic. In the end I decided to just simulate the parking brake operation, with two small pneumatic cylinders mounted on the rear axle to press rubber parts against some drums. These were mounted inboard of the planetary hubs, so they could take advantage of the gear reduction to have more powerful braking! They were controlled by a PF M motor under the trunk running a pneumatic autovalve/compressor, with the motor's rotation direction determining which way the valve opened. There was a third pneumatic cylinder to move the parking brake lever up and down. Spoiler Super Strut Front Suspension: In doing research on Toyota's of this generation, I came across an interesting Toyota suspension design, called "Super Strut" suspension. It's a variant of a MacPherson strut, designed with more of a focus on handling. I'm not sure if a stock '89 Corolla GT-S like this one would have had it, and I'm pretty sure this real-world custom build was using Rav4 MacPherson struts, but I wanted to add this more interesting design: Just like the real one, I had two bottom links (creating a bit of a virtual pivot), a ball joint connected to the strut, and the extra camber control link connecting the strut to the transverse suspension link. It used two 9.5L hard shocks per side, tilted on an angle, and had pretty decent travel. It wasn't the most durable suspension, but I'd rather it be interesting than durable! I'm also not sure I could have fit a traditional double-wishbone setup with the transmission, so doing some strut type was rather beneficial. Spoiler Here you can see the transverse and longitudinal locating links ^ This image is sideways, but you can see the shocks rigidly mounted to that 5L LBG suspension arm, which then connects via a rotating link to the lower suspension arm to help control camber change. Rear 4-link Floating Axle Suspension: The rear axle was a relatively basic solid axle with a triangulated 4-link setup. (The real custom car was using the rear axle from a Toyota Corolla All-Trac Wagon, which had a solid axle, unlike other Corolla variants) I had two soft 9.5L shocks per side, but one per side was using a little 3D-printed clip that precompressed the spring to be close to the hardness of a hard shock (because I had run out of hard shocks). This suspension was simple and reliable! Spoiler Torsen Rear Differential: The rear differential had a limited-slip Torsen-style differential. It really wasn't needed for performance, but I like Torsens, and I had room to put one in! This isn't my design--I can't remember where I first saw it, though. I was rather pleased that I was able to use these curved Bionicleish parts to trace out the front and rear of the axle, sort of like a real car's differential carrier! Spoiler Other Notes: Another thing I challenged myself to do was to make the A, B, and C pillars structural, which I was fairly successful in doing! The A pillars would pop out of the roof, but the B and C ones were quite strong, and I could lift it by the rear of the roof, with no roof supports other than those six pillars! The electrical setup was nine motors on eight channels, powered by the six channels of a MouldKing 6.0 battery, and a clone 2.4 GHz PF "IR" receiver run off that same battery I was quite pleased with the model! I liked the looks, and it had a lot of fun and interesting functions to engineer, which worked fairly well! I don't know when I'll build my next 1:8 car, but it was a lot of fun to get back to the genre with more developed skills and a modern parts inventory! More images at: https://bricksafe.com/pages/2GodBDGlory/awdrola Quote
Jurss Posted June 30 Posted June 30 Don't know much to say. Gearbox implementation is really impressive. Also all other functionality. Exterior design also is on the same level. Quote
lmdesigner42 Posted June 30 Posted June 30 Great write up for a great model! It's nice to see transverse engines getting some love, reminds me of Sheepo's old Mini. You know it's a large scale when two small LA's are used for the pop-up lights. Quote
Jude Posted June 30 Posted June 30 This has blown my mind and i need a day to re-collect myself and really see what you have done, but this caught my interest becuse Corolla was most popular "teen car" here in late 90's/early 00' :D Quote
Kamil Posted July 9 Posted July 9 I see a very sophisticated dream car having insanely packed features here ! Thank you for sharing ! What caught my attention here is the use of the Torsen differential. Because I was dreaming to build an off-road 6x6 having Torsen differentials many years ago after discovering a variety of Lego Torsen's on the internet. I copied and built a Torsen differential similar to yours. After testing it, I concluded that, the Torsen differential can not be used for today in a 1/10 Lego Technic crawler. Reason is, too much pressure was being applied to the eight-toothed gears which are used for occasionally locking the axles. So even if I use the reinforced versions of these gears, I think at some point, crawling forces would break one them. After making some 6x6 and 4x4's based on instructions, seeing how a normal open differential decreases off-road performance, my final MOC came out by using no differentials at all. I am happy to see here a Torsen differential working lively in a real Lego vehicle ! Quote
2GodBDGlory Posted July 9 Author Posted July 9 On 6/29/2026 at 11:52 PM, Jurss said: Don't know much to say. Gearbox implementation is really impressive. Also all other functionality. Exterior design also is on the same level. Thanks! On 6/30/2026 at 4:02 PM, lmdesigner42 said: Great write up for a great model! It's nice to see transverse engines getting some love, reminds me of Sheepo's old Mini. You know it's a large scale when two small LA's are used for the pop-up lights. Yeah, the transverse build was a big priority. I guess those LAs do feel like a pretty heavy-duty solution for just headlights! They seemed to fit the available space the best, though. On 6/30/2026 at 4:34 PM, TLCB said: Featured at The Lego Car Blog Cool, thanks! On 6/30/2026 at 7:17 PM, Jude said: This has blown my mind and i need a day to re-collect myself and really see what you have done, but this caught my interest becuse Corolla was most popular "teen car" here in late 90's/early 00' :D Thanks! Interesting that the Corolla was the "teen" car there. Over here I'd say the Civic has a huge advantage over the Corolla in teen appeal. 4 hours ago, Kamil said: I see a very sophisticated dream car having insanely packed features here ! Thank you for sharing ! What caught my attention here is the use of the Torsen differential. Because I was dreaming to build an off-road 6x6 having Torsen differentials many years ago after discovering a variety of Lego Torsen's on the internet. I copied and built a Torsen differential similar to yours. After testing it, I concluded that, the Torsen differential can not be used for today in a 1/10 Lego Technic crawler. Reason is, too much pressure was being applied to the eight-toothed gears which are used for occasionally locking the axles. So even if I use the reinforced versions of these gears, I think at some point, crawling forces would break one them. After making some 6x6 and 4x4's based on instructions, seeing how a normal open differential decreases off-road performance, my final MOC came out by using no differentials at all. I am happy to see here a Torsen differential working lively in a real Lego vehicle ! Thanks! Yeah, I don't think I'd ever use a Torsen differential in a performance-oriented Lego model, since it's just too big and inefficient. And from your testing, perhaps not durable enough either! They are still fun to include on large-scale models that aren't really about performance, though, and do work Quote
Kamil Posted July 9 Posted July 9 8 hours ago, 2GodBDGlory said: Torsen differential...that aren't really about performance, though, and do work Maybe it is time for Lego to introduce a real Torsen differential like the ones built by using 3D Printers. Then many gearing and axles for differential locking would be eliminated. Quote
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