Dutchiedoughnut

It's geared down 8/20. So its not going to be a speed demon, but it will pull a few carriages im sure.

Lets ask James May to help us then :D.

Do you have any way to measure voltage at the electrical contacts?

Haha well I'm sure we all know that feeling!

Actually a lot has happened since the last picture of the 2-6-4 earlier this thread. The train motor is out of the design now, and a single M motor took its place. It had a huge impact on the design. Nearly as significant is the choice to make the engine dark green. You don't have as much parts available in dark green, so I had to rethink various parts of the design. Here is the updated drive train: And the new exterior: To the left is the tank engine I tried to build. The light green parts weren't available in dark green. The headlight bricks in particular posed quite a problem to get right for a dark green tank. As you can see - in the tank engine to the right - I had to rethink the side panels completely. I think the old side panels look a little better, so I would go with them for a black engine. But the dark green looks great! I love the size of the engine. It appears to be rather short and stubby on the computer screen, in real life it looks a lot longer. It is 32 studs long and 7 studs wide which should give you some idea about its size. I love the cab and boiler design. The boiler is a little bit smaller than the Emerald Night boiler. Combined with the 7 studs width, it is a good size for this engine. The articulated chassis seems to work really well. I couldn't get the gears I needed so it doesn't run right now. Pushing it through a series of S curves worked really well. I'm also pleased with the drive train. All six drive wheels are driven because I had binding issues when I tried to drive only one axle and connect the others with the cylinder rods. Some other things didn't work so well. The front boiler design turned out to be really fragile. In fact, I drove myself nuts trying to put it together. It used a whole lot of 1x1 bricks and a single 2x4 piece which required too much force to fix it to the 1x1 pieces. Each time I tried I would destroy my attempt. I decided to change the 1x1 bricks to 1x2x2 bricks. It also allows the smokebox door to sit flush to the smokebox. My biggest issue is that while the cab as a whole is pretty sturdy, the cab assembly pops right off from the chassis. There is no strong connection between the firebox and the cab which causes the fragility. The boiler is 4 wide while the cab is 7 wide, it's not easy to connect the two unless you use some technic bricks: There were no other structural issues, just cosmetic. I am experimenting with a chain coupling rather than Lego's magnets. I can't recall huge magnets hanging off real trains ;), and I can't buy the separate magnets from my local stores. Here is a quick view of the coupling. The main coupling would be a 3 studs long half-width Technic brick. I'd love to use Lego chains as secondary coupling. Real examples would have those just in case the main coupler fails.

Well yup. I had half-built it but I was missing some parts and some elements didn't quite work. Soon I will take an inventory of the parts I have and which I have to order. And there will be pictures of the current design and the changes in LDD :).

Oooh! What MOCs can we come up with to run on narrow gauge? And will TLG provide the wheels required?

Well, I cant fault it ;). Maybe a link to the picture?

Cool! Just the thing for my basement layout ;). Tonnes of rusty narrow gauge track... I can probably fit 5m in my basement?

Perhaps we should hope Lego makes a 4-4-0 and a 2-8-0 to solve the wheelset problem ;)

Cool and great scale, too. Those engines do seem massive for the little gokarts!

Cool! Quite like home ;). I'm so glad you have 95 petrol, my car won't quite run on 92!

While I cringe at the thought of adding vinegar to chips, its a nice chip shop! Right across the North Sea we like to add mayonaise to our chips :).

That's just amazing and inspiring. I'd love to build a roundhouse and something of a service yard, but not to this massive scale. It just looks amazing :). The only bad thing about it is that it is in the USA so I can't go see it in person ;)

That's a good looking crane and steam engine! (I must've missed the topic for that engine, oops!). I would love to mod my crane so it'll be remote controlled, but I have yet to work out how exactly. Shouldn't be overly hard though!

I get the feeling that certain aspects of running a business are being overlooked. From looking at your reward system, you value a straight piece of monorail at 3 dollars retail. Versus 25 dollars as sold on Bricklink. That'll mean that if everything goes perfectly, your turnover will meet the Kickstarter budget years from now. Even if your Kickstarter project is succesful, you will have saturated your market. And I need to raise serious concerns about that price. At those few dollars you will need to factor in the cost of a mould, price of materials, shipping, and so on. Do not forget you need to make a little profit to deal with contingencies. I cant see that for a 3$ product where the market is about 100 units each month. You also need to factor in prototyping. Most likely the first mould will have fitment issues and you'll need another mould. And so on. The best advice is to talk to someone that knows your market and the difficulties in dealing with Kickstarter. I'd talk to ME Models.

All the best! But I dont have a monorail running, so Im not backing.

Im imagining the train has cut its own little tunnel and is still chugginh about ;). I hope the weather improves for you. People fighting over bread doesnt sound good...

We use them to work and weld at a height of 4 meters. Great tools.

I am thinking of something similar for PF trains, since my intended layout doesnt loop around

Im thinking 9v battery in the back, IR receiver up front and a minifig and nice cab in the middle ;)

You should be able to build a shunter like that with a 9v battery :)

Could you do the top and bottom in the same way as the bottom? Or even use 3-wide slopes?

I use a boiler design close to the EN boiler, but with a smaller diameter.

Thank you for building my car! (An e30 :) )