Is Technicopedia Still Relevant?

[Toastie]

16 minutes ago, Erik Leppen said:

I still use MLCad to this day for my digital Lego models. It looks ancient, but it still looks and works exactly like it has done for years and I find that very comforting.

I am with you on everything you said. But now I also know that I am not alone. MLCad gives me a feeling of control, adjusting this and that to make it fit. It also allows cheating, impossible things in digital world, but surely in reality. I could not care less about that. The digital world that is. 

MLCad is a tool Michael gave me; my father and my father-in-law gave me some other. Technopedia is a tool, a repository, and a tool that @Blakbirdgave me. These are all people that I respect - for different reasons, but I find all this, as you Erik, very comforting!

Best
Thorsten 

[Blakbird]

1 hour ago, Erik Leppen said:

Edit: there's one little thing though that has always bothered me. The 20t and 40t gears on the animated icon don't actually mesh. If you could change that, that would be great :D

In all these years, I think you are the first person to actually notice that!  Of course I realized this when I made the logo, and you may notice that I carefully placed the text over the top of the gear teeth so you can't see that they don't mesh.  I chose those gears because they look good and have distinctively different styles.  Very non-Technic of me.

Thanks to all of the responders.  Sometimes I forget that there is a big difference from how I imagined Technicopedia in my mind and what it ended up being.  When I started it, I imagined fully cataloging all the models right up to the present (which was 2007 at the time) and then keeping it up to date as new models were produced  What I ended up with was a resource that was always historic in nature.  I started it when Technic was 30 years old, and when I stopped updating it 10 years later, the newest models documented on it were 15 years old.  At no point was I ever writing about models in current production.  I did do some of that right here on Eurobricks when reviewing new models, but as some have pointed out, a "review" is somewhat of a different animal than what I was doing on Technicopedia which was to document history.  Again, in my imagination I would have eventually incorporated some of that EB review material (I did lots of CAD pictures of how various functions worked) into Technicopedia when/if I got to those models.  So it may not have turned out exactly like I intended, but the response to it was more significant and positive than I could have imagined, and it opened me up to a whole new community.  My very post on EB was for introducing Technicopedia!  I don't regret any of it, and I'm proud of what I produced even if it stays just like it is now forever.

And by the way, it is very nice to hear from some of my old friends again.  Glad that so many of you are still here and remember me.

1 hour ago, Toastie said:

I am with you on everything you said. But now I also know that I am not alone. MLCad gives me a feeling of control, adjusting this and that to make it fit. It also allows cheating, impossible things in digital world, but surely in reality. I could not care less about that. The digital world that is. 

MLCad is a tool Michael gave me; my father and my father-in-law gave me some other. Technopedia is a tool, a repository, and a tool that @Blakbirdgave me. These are all people that I respect - for different reasons, but I find all this, as you Erik, very comforting!

I never graduated beyond MLCad.  Looking back through my posts, the last thing I modeled myself was the Lamborghini Sian, and I did it all in MLCad in a week with perfect alignment on everything.  That takes a certain amount of planning and skill that is very different than what is needed for a newer relational tool.  It's good for the brain!  Sadly, I no longer have a computer with any of that old software installed and it is a bit daunting to think about trying to recreate it.  I had all kinds of customization in my part library, my POV-Ray color palette, and my MLCad part sorting categories.  I probably have backups somewhere....

[allanp]

It's awesome to see you on hear again Blakbird. I still have fond memories of your visit to my house! I'm also horrified to read about the fire, and can only imagine what mental and financial turbulence such a life event would cause. I can only hope and prey you and your life are fully recovered.

I still love technicopedia. It documents sets from Technics beginning through to it's first golden era in a way that is unparalleled and unique. They weren't reviews as much as they were a full showcase of every aspect of every set, where the reader was given all the information they could ever want and then left to make up their own minds. 

I do still visit from time to time. Your coverage was so accurate and complete that it almost feels like revisiting the set itself in physical form, which is great for sets we own but even better for sets we don't.

[howitzer]

On 7/13/2026 at 7:49 PM, Blakbird said:

Hi all.  Those of you who have been on here for a long time may still remember me.  I created Technicopedia in 2007 and worked on it on and off until 2016.  In that time, I wrote about all the models from 1977 to 2001, and then at least cataloged the new models from 2002-2016 even though I never wrote about them individually.  The intervening 10 years from 2017-2026 are not addressed at all because I don't have them (and because of other reasons including life changes and moving onto other hobbies).  I lost what was left of my original collection in a fire in 2022, so now I have the original four 1:8 cars which were hanging on the wall and the supercars which happened to be in storage in a different location.  Over the past few weeks, I have reassembled those cars for display (956, 8860, 8865, 8880, 8448, and 8070) which got the old juices flowing again so I went out and bought the McLaren P-1 and the new Koenigsegg Sadair's Spear.  In doing some research on those newer cars I finally went down the rabbit hole of YouTube reviews, and that got me thinking about Technicopedia.  I originally wrote that site in a text editor using HTML 1.0.  It uses nothing more complicated than tables and hyperlinks.  My "video" is just crude stop motion animations.  I did eventually graduate to CAD pictures of the models, but only using the oldest LDraw tools which are now archaic.  I can't help but notice that the site is hopelessly outdated, both in content and appearance.  It doesn't hold a candle to the content which is now available on YouTube.  Some of these reviewers are really good!  The long form video and audio with demonstrations of each function and the whole build process is just another level that Technicopedia doesn't have and can't compete with.  The domain renewal for my site recently came up and I found myself wondering if I should keep the static site going for posterity or just let it fade into the sunset, archived by the Wayback Machine.  I never put any advertising on the site so it was never monetized like YouTube videos.

As an aside, it has been interesting to come back to this forum and look back at some of my old topics and posts.  I really posted a lot and was deeply involved in the community back in the day!  I heard one of the YouTube reviewers use the term "color vomit", and it made me wonder if anyone remembered that I originally coined that term right here on this forum in my 42000 review back in 2013!

Anyway, it's nice to be back looking at Eurobricks again.  I have about 100,000 posts to catch up on reading.

Welcome back! Sorry to hear about your loss :(

I think Technicopedia is still invaluable reference in older Technic, and while I can dream of it being updated for modern sets, I completely understand your unwillingess to put work into updating it. Still, I don't think there is anything quite like it anywhere in the internet, at least not to my knowledge. Yes, Rebrickable and other sites have part counts and release years and all such stuff listed, and you can find Youtube videos on almost any set, but I appreciate Technicopedia above all because it presents the content in a clear no-nonsense fashion, concentrating on what's relevant and important and with no fluff whatsoever. It's easy to read and you can find what you're looking for very quickly - something a Youtube video will never be able to do as well. Of course the expertly written descriptions of the sets are also a big part why it's so great of a site, even if the stop motion animations really are quite crude.

Anyway, as I said, I understand why you won't continue updating the site, but losing it would be a big loss for the Technic community. I hope it stays!

Edited 12 hours ago by howitzer

[TheLegoRoleplayer]

I really appreciate the site. I go to it all the time when I want references for older Technic sets rather than YouTube or places like Brickset. Gives me a quick and comprehensive view of things without needing to jump around in a YouTube video. It was especially helpful when I was making a MOC based on the Arctic Action line, so I'd hate to see the site go.