DanNeely

While that drew blood, it was less painful than stepping on any old regular brick; never mind the various caltrop pieces other people have shared.

I was building my Colosseum and when I went to press a brick into place felt a sharp pain on my fingertip. It didn't feel like a normal pinch, and where I was working one shouldn't've been possible. Taking a closer look I saw a piece of wire sticking up from one of the studs, and it had drawn blood. The wire itself is short enough not to have came out the back side of the brick. Because of it's stiffness my guess would be that it's a fragment from a wire brush/etc. Does anyone know how I can contact LEGO about this? I've put photos of the brick in an Imgur gallery because my attempts to attach directly are failing. https://imgur.com/a/2SOhIJ9

I did get a call from a LEGO Customer Service (Support?) Supervisor yesterday. In addition to a replacement brick, they'll be sending a prepaid envelope for the brick with the wire in it (so sorry to anyone who may have been hoping to buy a dangerous brick from me for their collection). They also credited my VIP account with 1950 points ($15 worth of discounts); option B here would've been a random small set. I'd rather have a discount on something of my choice. The manufacturing code someone upthread said I should save my packaging for was printed on one of the pieces of tape I cut to open the box and then pealed off it, so their traceability was limited to whatever they could get from my order number. The delayed response hurt them here, if they'd called 2 days sooner I could've dumped the small trashcan next to my desk and probably found it; but I emptied it for collection Wednesday night.

It's been 10 business days (16 calendar days), the number of days wait listed when I sent my message; I finished my build - other than the defective brick - last night; still no word from Lego. They're only claiming a 7 day backlog in email now though, which has me half-wondering if it was escalated above front line customer service and they're trying to decide how to officially respond.

If it's a systemic problem - ie affecting multiple batches of plastic - it's probably not limited to just tan. Base plastic beads are normally uncolored/white; with the manufacturer mixing colored beads in as needed to get the desired color. A company I worked for 16 years ago did their color mixing in 55 gallon drums (I suspect Lego would make larger batches). Not getting the colored beads mixed in well enough results in the sort of variable color problems we occasionally see.

it was at the injection port, but the back of the brick is unblemished so it didn't hit the back of the mold. It probably stopped where it did because it started in as the mold was being completely filled.

It looks clean, it is, and I did before posting here. Message sent but: Fortunately it's a common part in the set, so I should be able to find one that's easily accessible to leave missing for however long it takes them to get back. If don't want it, I'll try extracting the wire with a pair of vice grips. I think I should have just enough to hold onto for a good yoink.

I haven't. I'll admit I'm mildly surprised I haven't heard of any enterprising designers using the time since the lander was announced to have on designed and ready for release day.

Practical or not, there is at least one minifig scale Saturn V and LUT in existence. At least as of last year it was short a few service arms though

If I'm building with a white tank, what should I leave in its original color and what should be replaced with white? All the orange/beige/brown parts get whited out I assume, but what about the gray panels at the top or the yellow/etc fiddly bits at the bottom?

A bit of an old comment, but I'm revisiting it because it's part of the ongoing headache I'm having with the crew access arm. After the previous go around I've got all of my decks within a plate or so of the correct 110:1 height; and the bottom 6 arms are all where they're supposed to be relative to the rocket. Based on that I'm assuming the S-IC and S-II stages are both about the right height. Arm 7 is at the right height on the LUT but about 1 brick high relative to the black ring at the top of the S-IVb. I'm not critically concerned there, although I might lower it a plate or so. Trying to tweak the height of the rocket stage is more complex than I care to think about doing anyway. The bigger problem is arms 8 and 9. The full impact of the 2 brick too tall launch escape system is weighing in here. Arm 8 should centered halfway between the two decks to reach the service module, and the bottom of arm 9 should be slightly below line with it's deck. But what I actually have is arm 8 aligned with the bottom of its deck, and arm 9 aligned with its top in at deck height. I'd been semi-aware of this for a while, but until I started trying to build the scaffolding to access the arms it hadn't really mattered. At this point I don't see a good way to make it work without adding 2 bricks to the upper part of the rocket and redoing the launch escape system to be shorter. As I commented earlier, adding an extra brick of height to the S-IVb stage is way more work That leaves the payload fairing, service module and command module as places to add additional height. The easiest spot to do so would be the bottom of the fairing by adding 2 more rows of macaroni bricks (and with the black ring at the top of the S-IVb a brick low, probably at least half the height adjustment should be done here). I'm going to hold off doing that until I can hunt down heights for the manned parts of the rocket because if I can justify it, I'd rather add it to the manned section instead. My current LUT (complete with backing around the arm pivot). Apollo 13

This project's sort of blown up on me. At the start of the month, I was intending to only make a few minor tweaks to an existing design before building it. But one change became two, which became 4... and at this point I've redone most of the tower's structure and am planning to make modifications to most of what's left before I finish. This's where my initially intended tinkering expanded into a top to bottom effort. I've got all the multi-directional cross braces that went here in place, although the hinge based ones are only connected on on end each. I'm still debating what I want to do with the remaining axle based cross beams. Visual consistency suggests changing them out as well similar to what I did for the ones above. The main counter argument is that by being connected top and bottom they're adding a good bit to the structural strength. I might hold off judgment here until I have a test build of the a-frame portion and can see how stable the elevator shaft and main legs are on their own.

I started building up the outside walkways to the arms, went to test how arm9 would swing to see where the limit needed to be and disaster struck. In it's fully built up state it won't pivot past 90 degrees. And stripped fully bare and with the access way removed it still won't fold flat. I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do, Reasonable options seem to be moving the axle a stud farther out, or reworking the arm so the pivot point is on the interior side not the exterior.

I was able to work another round of tapering into the back of the white room. It ended up working better than I expected and allowed a closer alignment with the command module than I had before.

9th arm is done along with an initial version of the white room. I'm probably going to keep tinkering with the latter; I'd like to try and get the taper on the rearmost segment to be symmetric.

8th arm is done too. Really wish I had some better images for how to color this one though, but the 9th arm was always in the way.

Arm 7 is done.

Here's a gallery with 4 very tall images of the current LDD, one from each side. https://imgur.com/a/oO0PYJR

I decided to review my TODO list from early July to see where my progress has gotten. 1) The platform walls (waiting to see how exactly eiffleman did them for his space shuttle launch platform) Not done, still waiting on Eiffleman's MLP instructions to copy his design. 2) Find a way to fit the gearing to connect the two sets of control arms that's out of the way. Won't be done. Not enough room to fit them in the machine room. 3) piping from the sides of the tower to the arms Done. 4) Piping on the arms, along with tweaking their appearance slightly. Probably not to the same level of detail as NathanR's design, partly because the box trusses leave me less freedom to route piping, and partly because I find some of the more tortured construction needed to match the convoluted piping designs rather ugly and am willing to sacrifice realism for aesthetics. Half to 2/3rds done. I ended up doing the first 6 arms in rather more detail than I'd originally intended, and still have the top 3 to do. The first 6 will need a bit of tweaking because they've got a few white axles in non-available lengths that'll need something done about. Either design tweaks, or gray ones I can paint I guess. 4.5) Access walkways to the arms. Todo. 5) Make the crane functional. Done. 5.5) Final decision on functional elevator, and implementation. Not being done for the same reason the two swing arm shafts aren't being joined. A properly sized machine room doesn't have the internal volume needed. 6) Redo the tail masts to be retractable, better adjust the hold downs to fit with the larger 14x14 opening (vs the 12x12 they were designed for). Done. 6.5) Add camera platforms (have design, so just need to insert them). Done. 7) Misc external piping. Done. 8) Misc control boxes. Todo, other than the LoX valve complexes. 9) Something to simulate the cable runs? Todo Anyway, adding it up, of the 12 items on the list, 5 are done, 1 is in progress, 2 were dropped, and 4 aren't started. A bit disappointing considering I'd hoped to be done by now, but only 2 of the remaining items are substantial amounts of work. On the more positive side, I've managed to avoid any scope creep, so my analysis of what still needs done was solid at least.

I figured out how to get the piping attached. 18677is just short enough to fit in place without interfering with the clips holding the crossbeams in place, using those let me secure the zigzags in multiple locations going down the tower. At the bottom I ended up attaching the outside pipe directly to one of the plates serving to anchor the outside beam into place. On the other side I couldn't do that because I needed the bend to be occurring at the same level as the deck, not several bricks below. I was able to work out an alternate way to attach the outside beam through so I could slip this through behind. The only other update I've done has been to redo all the decks to be solid going through the elevator shaft instead of keeping it open for the car it's now clear I won't be able to do. Also, I did cross the 6k brick threshold with this update. Bricklink's still putting the total around $700.

It's been a relatively slow week and a half, mostly I've worked on secondary items. The first one is adding a second row of 1 stud wide plates to the bottom of the crane to give it a little more strength. The next 4 things I did were all related to the swing arms (next 2 pics). I replaced the 32m axles holding the main swing arms with shorter ones. I tried to stick to cheap 12m's but ended up having to use 16's twice because there wasn't anywhere among all the pipes and arms to fit a coupler. I finished the arm attachments by using a technic beam with a cross hole to rigidly anchor the arms to the axles (vs the existing anchor being a freely turning hole.) On the other side of the arms I built the wrapping bricks to be 3 bricks tall instead of 2. Arm 2 with a pipe connection in the way is the only one not updated yet. I need to look more closely at pictures to decide between raising the pipe and lowering the arm as a fix. I also redid the ends of arms 3 and 4. For Arm 3 I was able to eliminate the half plate gap I had previously due to snot alignment issues. For arm 4 I made the structure a bit less massive and increased the separation between it and the rocket body slightly, there's still a small gap I was unable to work out. Also visible here is one of the camera platforms I added. After that I ran into a bit more trouble when I tried adding the gaseous nitrogen pipe immediately behind most of the camera platforms and the zigzag pipes on the other side. In both cases I ran into major conflicting problems with all of the other cross braces/etc I had on the lower levels. You can see here that I had to take out one of the 4 short cross braces between the main l60 platform and the outer part of the a-frame. It was a bit worse below the diagonal piece highlighted in purple would need removed as well. For aesthetic balance reasons that would require removing all 4 of them. That said, I probably will if I can figure out a way to attach them. The problem is that the fences mean I can't directly attach them to the top of the deck, while the angle clips slightly overlap the blocks they're hooked onto meaning I can't fit a bricks directly under either unless I offset the entire assemblage by half a brick. Doing so would have it in the way of the bricks holding the outer crosspiece of the a-frame in place and would make simply connecting them top and bottom instead of passing through a lot messier at best. I'll need to play around with this a bit more, I'm not sure if I'll end up keeping it or not. I haven't had time to check yet, but I'm hoping they connect to boxes on a few decks, if so I could potentially use those as the primary attachment points instead. I don't have a picture handy (I did the experimenting in a separate file from this one), but ran into similar problems with the attaching bricks being in the way on L60 and crossbraces on L30. If I can get past that though, at least I won't have problems with attaching the pipe to the tower. In somewhat unrelated news, after discovering that the water based ink in the first set of paint pens I bought remained sufficiently non-permanent after drying that slightly damp fingers would end up stained by touching the bricks it (the maker suggested setting it by baking in a 350F/175C oven, obviously not reasonable for me) that I tried a set of oil based pens. The color matches were almost identical (despite different branding I suspect the same manufacturer is behind both sets), but the oil based ink made a much thinner layer and was closer to the gloss of normal Lego bricks. I also found pictures of another persons MoC LUT. He used flex tubing for all the piping on the sides and by using the gaps between adjacent clips as extra holders, which is a major design win. He also used them for piping on some of the arms, and there - as I feared when asked about the possibility earlier - they tended to flop around and poorly hold to expected shapes/routings. Depending on how tightly they can bend, it might be possible to do better with a larger number of anchor points. Making it work would definitely require a different style of arm build than I've currently got though, so at this stage it's a non-starter to change over. http://www.moc-pages.com/moc.php/443614

For most MOCs doing so is a non-starter from a manufacturing/economics perspective. Injection molded parts are dependent on large production volumes to keep the individual prices down, the fixed setup costs would make any (much lower sales volume) mold/color combinations in MOCs but not current retail models far more expensive per brick than the new parts they currently sell which're either being made in mass quantities for current sets or are leftovers from completed runs they're hoping to unload to fans instead of recycling internally. Unless 3d printed bricks ever get to the point where they're comparable in quality and price to mass produced injection molding being able to order arbitrary bricks from Lego is probably never going to happen.

I'd never thought to try using one as a pry tool for electronics, but the narrow edges on dedicated tools for that tend to get beat up pretty fast too. My biggest concern trying to use a brick separator for that actually would be that it's too hard and rigid a plastic, if something's really stuck you want the plastic tool to fail before the metal/plastic/glass you're trying to pry open.

That's disappointing, I've never used anything longer than a 12 before though. Not really any other options for the crane, but I might be able to swap in shorter ones for the arm mounts... The only arm at risk I can yank a plate from if needed. Trying to get it in place in the first place was enough of a nightmare I've no desire to ever screw with it again. Not sure. Going through my collection again I found at least 5 variations. Apollo 6 - white lozenges: https://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a410/ap6-KSC-68PC-30HR.jpg Apollo 12 - black boxes: https://c8.alamy.com/compde/khr4mr/die-nasa-apollo-12-von-raumfahrzeugen-und-saturn-v-tragerrakete-lassen-sie-das-kennedy-space-center-vehicle-assembly-building-in-der-vorbereitung-fur-den-start-und-mondlandung-mission-am-8-september-1969-in-merritt-island-florida-foto-nasa-foto-uber-planetpix-khr4mr.jpg Apollo 14 - white pyramids: https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dRMmDtzKP7U/VX7Y_oTmz_I/AAAAAAAAXuU/aWrAdWqLZ4k/s640/A14%2B2.jpg Apollo 15 - gray and yellow boxes (trusses?) : https://archive.org/download/S71-33781/S71-33781.jpg Apollo 17 - smaller white lozenges rotated 90*: https://i.redditmedia.com/weg7bBy2kS8rP-RvRx78AdfoyS6X5S9V1cyM2yNaDW4.jpg?s=6bb16cb259ca073d2509b37fa6fb665c yup. Not sure where I found the diagrams, but I reposted them here: https://imgur.com/a/vsNV0bG

Not sure why I didn't use it to be honest. They're right next to each other in LDD and in addition to everything else, it'd be more discrete. Now that it's grown no reason not to I suppose. I considered both of these while building, decided to hold off until doing the initial build test on both for aesthetic reasons. On the former because I don't see how to extend the crane down without it looking like I just added something to dangle down and make contact. I've similar issues with the latter because the crane looks extra spindly in pictures so I'm trying to avoid excess bulk anywhere. The design I started with had a single 92593 centered connecting the two plates from underneath. The pair of axle's running the length of the crane presumably add more overall strength so I'm hoping I won't have to. I had 3 long pins there at one point, swapped them out because 18654 doesn't come in red or yellow. I'm not above painting bricks if I have to but would rather not and 6541 does come in both. I wouldn't be surprised if that does end up being changed for at least the forward most axle though. I can't take any credit for the holddown arms. They're unchanged from Bailey Fullerton's design, they work a lot better on a 14x14 opening than they do a 12x12 where they extend too far onto the platform. I'll worry when mounting it, in LDD all I need is a surface to measure against to make sure everything is the right length. Do they? The few pictures of the white lozenge version (i've got pics of at least 3 variations, the others being a small solid white box, and a wire/truss looking small yellow and gray box) looked symmetric toward and away from the rocket. I considered making them 2x3 using 50746 mini roof tiles, but decided that made them look a bit too large in both length and width instead of just the latter. I added one other change since the my last update, I found a few diagrams I forgot I had for the lightning mast and discovered it needed to be able to fold down (presumably to clear the VAB doors). At the moment I'm using old fashioned 2/3 finger hinges, but am debating switching to the type that's a 1x2 brick. That'd look better folded down, but would be less stable erect.