Emerald Night, PF receiver sticking out.

[hoeij]

As I'm sure you know, the PF receiver in the Emerald Night has a serious aesthetic problem. It sits one plate too high, and you can see the light-gray of the PF receiver sticking out above the Emerald green of the boiler of the locomotive. It doesn't look right, and it's hard imagine that this was the original design for the PF version of EN.

The problem is that there needs to be some space to run a cable underneath the PF receiver to the lights in the front. The cable should not touch the gear you find below the PF receiver.

My guess is that the lights in the front were added as an afterthought, after the locomotive and its gears had already been designed, and that this afterthought caused the PF receiver to be placed one plate higher. One obvious solution is to simply not bother with the front lights, I'd say that's preferable over the current setup where the light-gray of the receiver sticks out above the Emerald green. However, it turns out you can have both.

You can lower the PF receiver by one plate. Replace two 3x1 black plates by 2x1 black plates, remove the two 4x1 green tiles under the receiver, use one to fill up the one stud that was in front of the receiver, take out the 2x2 tile underneath the receiver and replace it by the other 4x1 green tile (so that the cord can't sit in the middle, but has to be on the side, sitting on top of a stud, which is just enough to keep it away from the gear), and take out a few green cheese-bricks too. This way, the power cord for the lights gets very close to that gear, but it does not actually touch it. I verified that by removing the PF motor and the pistons mechanism, and check that what's left turns smoothly without any additional friction from the cord.

Doing this makes the EN+PF look *much* better. Looking at it now I am convinced that this must have been the original design of the EN+PF, because it looks perfectly designed, the green 1x4 tiles on top of the PF receiver are at exactly the right height, and what little bit of the PF receiver that otherwise would have been visible is perfectly covered up by the tubing that's in front of it. Wonderful design. Should never have been messed up by what I'm sure is a last minute decision to raise the PF receiver by one plate to make extra room for the cord to the lights.

But, you don't need this extra room, and you can restore your EN+PF to its wonderful glory that it was meant to be!

Edited July 9, 2010 by hoeij

[BrickStorm]

That sounds promising, but doesn't then then prevent the centre part of the IR receiver from jutting out the top like it's supposed to?

I haven't gotten around to implementing the power functions into my EN yet, but I planned on sticking the IR receiver into the rear section of the tender, thereby preventing the whole issue of the abnormal centre boiler. The only problem with this is that the power cable might not be long enough - is this kind of setup possible?