Illerejug

I've been gathering up a list of resources for minifig-drivable 8 wide automobiles (MOCs, official TLG sets, design advice, etc.), and I'm not sure where to post the consolidated info: Here (the Town subforum) or in the Action Themes subforum? Where would the info be most useful and/or least obtrusive? The MOCs seem to be split between the two subforums. I've been putting my own 8 wide automobile MOCs in Action Themes, and there are one or two other similar MOCs there, but most/all of the rest are in Town. Most of TLG's 8 wide car designs end up in Action Themes, because most have been part of themes like World Racers, Speed Racer, and so on. (But not all. Creator has some relevant sets.) Certainly the resources are mostly generic, in the sense that the design info isn't inherently Action-ish. However I'm also aware that many Town fans aren't thrilled about the scale of 8 wide automobiles, and so I worry about adding unwanted noise to this subforum. Opinions? Objections to posting the list in the Town subforum?

Hello again! Today's 8-wide vehicle is a restored 1950's era passenger car. Warden Jones collects and restores classic vehicles. Today, he drove his restored 1957 coupe to work at the State Prison. Little did he know that today was the day of the big prison break. Unfortunately for the Warden, a pair of convicts spotted it in the parking lot after they busted out, and hot-wired the classic car for their getaway! (Most pictures are clickable for larger versions.) Stats: 179 pieces (not including minifigs); 8 studs wide; 22+ studs long; 153 grams; Click to download the LDD file. (edit: link is dead now, sorry.) Design Goals: - Overall design of a passenger car, instead of a racer. - Fully enclosed cabin with nice looking interior accessories. - Seats for 4 passengers. (I gave up on this goal; it only seats 2 minifies.) - 2-1-2 hood stripe pattern (via jumper plates) that I had previously prototyped in LDD. - Solid and playable for my 5- and 2-year old kids. - Mechanism for attaching weapon systems to be play compatible with World Racers. The 1950's style was initially unplanned, and only came about due to my struggles with finding an acceptable roof design. I prototyped many roof designs using all sorts of pieces – standard 4 x 6 car roof pieces, plates, slopes, and so on – but none of them looked good. Finally I stumbled across the 6 x 8 x 2 shell piece in LDD and realized that it solved the roof problem nicely *and* suggested the 1950's styling. From that point, it was easy to build toward that style. Front & Back The very front of the car doesn't strongly resemble a typical late 1950's era vehicle, but I like it anyway :) The technic holes in the front of the roof were intended to be the mounting location for any weapons I designed for the vehicle. As with my Can-Am Racer, I never ended up designing a weapon system for this car. Side Top Cabin / Interior I tried to keep the dashboard fairly simple (based on the era) and give the interior a decent color scheme to contrast the body color. This view also illustrates how I used the same door design as the Street Speeder; the design is decent, but not great; I came up with a better door design on my muscle car, which I'll post probably in a week or so. Doors Open + Roof On Enjoy!

Up to this point, I had been designing with an eye toward incorporating weapon systems in my 8-wide vehicles: The Can-Am Racer and the 1950's Car (not yet posted, but visible in the background of some of the images below). It turned out that I never actually incorporated weapon systems in those vehicles, so I decided to design my next one without even thinking about weapons. This would be a pure racer. While playing with LDD, I found a particularly good purple + blue + white color combination. Because this was a relatively feminine color set, I tried for a curvy design. As with my other designs, playability was also a major factor. My two young boys need to play with this car without it falling apart accidentally. Unfortunately, after finishing the basic design in LDD, I discovered that some of the major pieces weren't available in purple or in the light blue that I had intended. So I had to tweak the color palette to incorporate black (instead of some purple) and blue (instead of light blue). And then, for no particular reason*, I used LDD's color change function to switch the colors of the pieces to match those available on pick-a-brick. The result was a bold use of red and black; it was so striking that I wanted to make two cars, one with the purple+blue color scheme, the other with a red+black scheme. * I say no particular reason because I planned to buy, and eventually bought, the pieces on bricklink, which isn't as limited as pick-a-brick. Each is 123 pieces, not including minifigs. The front section is 8-wide, while the back section flares out to 10-wide. TLG did this with some of their 8-wide vehicles, so it's still within the scale I was trying to match. Here are links to the LDD file for the purple+blue version and the red version. Pictures follow; many are clickable for larger versions. If you click on the first picture, the larger version shows off my other 8-wide MOD/MOC vehicles pretty well. Enjoy!

Thanks for the feedback! Yes, some of them are. The red/black car in 8898 Wreckage Road uses the same bracket-over-the-axle-assembly design as the Speed Racer cars in sets 8158 (Speed Racer & Snake Oiler), 8519 (Racer X & Taejo Togokhan) and 8160 (Cruncher Block & Racer X). It's a very solid design, so I used it in most of my custom vehicles. The white/lime F1-style car from Wreckage Road uses a different sort of design, but is still at the same scale. The white/lime car's design isn't as good, IMO; it can come apart during heavy play because the central floor area of the car doesn't rest on any other lego pieces, and so direct downward pressure on a few areas of the model (including the minifigs) can pop that bottom plate out. Nevertheless, I think Wreckage Road is a great set overall, even if the weapon systems aren't the same as they're advertised to be on the box or on lego.com. The other World Racers cars are built differently from the Speed Racer cars. But again, they appear to be roughly the same scale. (I don't own any of the other World Racer sets with cars, so I can't say for sure.) Here's a picture of two of my custom cars next to Speed Racer cars, World Racer cars, and one Agents vehicle to give you an idea how well the scales match:

After modifying the Street Speeder to fit minifigs and studying some of TLG's 8-wide action vehicles (mostly Speed Racer and World Racers cars), I was inspired to create my own 8-wide vehicles at the same scale. To start, I wanted to do a type of vehicle that TLG hadn't really done before at that scale, so after a bit of googling, I settled on a Can-Am style race car. My goals were for the vehicle to be as piece-efficient as TLG's similar models, and also for it to be strong enough to withstand the aggressive play of my 5-year old and 2-year old boys. No pieces could pop off when zooming it around with a heavy hand in the center, and it needed good rigidity from nose-to-tail and well as laterally. The 112-piece (including the minifig) result is quite zoomable and very structurally-sound despite its light weight. I didn't originally want to use green as an accent color, but my design options for the cockpit were somewhat limited, so I embraced the green and used it in several places on the finished model. Anyway, here's a link to the LDD file, as well as a bunch of pictures. The pictures are all clickable and most lead to larger versions. I originally planned on taking advantage of the technic bricks as a means of attaching various optional weapon systems as a way for this vehicle to fit in with the World Racers, but I didn't ever follow through with that plan. My inspiration instead pushed me to design 7 more vehicles after this one. I still liked the look of the holes in the side of the vehicle as added visual interest, so I kept them. In the background of the above photo is the Street Speeder MOD, as well as the 7 other similarly-scaled racers/vehicles that came out of the bout of inspiration. I plan to post details for the other vehicles in the coming weeks. Unfortunately, I used a very low angle when I took the photos, so the top details got kind of lost. Here's a screenshot from LDD that gives a better overall view: Here are more pictures from various angles: Finally, I was designing this around the time of the Lego Design Challenge for the 2010 holiday catalog, so I squeezed the concept into 100 pieces by removing a few embellishments and redesigning the axle system. This is what I submitted to the design challenge: Enjoy!

Check out the instructions for 8159, the black/red car from 8898, and 6743. Yes, those are all cars, but the techniques are still valid for trucks. Those models show techniques for making rock-solid wheel housings & lower chassis areas that are able to bear the weight of the rest of the vehicle. I've used those techniques on a bunch of other 8-wide vehicles, including an 8-wide tow truck. The results stand up very well to the rough play of my 2- and 5-year old boys.

M1A2 Abrams tank by Zackhariah - 1 point Phoenix Corp. Fireball by vynsane - 1 point Winny Pooh by private_lego - 1 point

On the first version, does the minifig sit directly on the bottom-most gray plates? If so, how does that sort of bottom plate arrangement respond to direct downward pressure, such as when putting the minifig into the car? Also, I haven't noticed a problem with the structural integrity of the original model. Despite the use of lots of 1 x 2 plates, the model doesn't seem flimsy to me. Can you elaborate on what you experienced as flimsy due to 1 x 2 plates?

Thanks for the feedback! I finished updating the original post with the a bunch of detail photos. Anybody with this set ought to be able to build this minifig-capable version by more-or-less following along with the original instructions, but making a handful of changes as they go.

I modified the 6743 Street Speeder to hold minifigs in what I think of as the Action Scale – the scale for 8-wide cars in World Racers, Agents, Speed Racer, and so on. Using only the pieces from the set (plus a couple minifigs), I removed the roof, extended the front by one stud (sliding most of the hood pieces forward one stud), repositioned the door hinges, and made a few other minor adjustments. I'm very pleased with the result! All pictures are clickable for larger images. The original model is too cramped for minifigs. The roof is too low, and the cabin space is only 2 studs long, with the steering wheel overlapping one of those studs ... any driver would need to be both very short *and* footless! Yikes! The roof issue is easy to fix: Ditch the roof entirely! Most other action scale cars are roofless, and this one looks really good as a sporty/racing convertible … permanently with the top down! :-) The cabin space issue is harder to fix, but still relatively easy because the original model affords 6 studs of length to the middle of the vehicle, which is perfect for minifigs so long as the body of the car doesn't use up more than 3 studs of that length. Summary of what to do: 1) Remove the roof entirely, reconfiguring the rear roof support slopes to be more of a wide headrest or roll bar. 2) Remove the front wall of the cabin, giving the very important 3rd stud length of space to the interior of the cabin. This includes re-mounting the steering wheel in what becomes the new front wall, and also "swinging" the door hinge support plates (the black & brown plates visible just under the rear-view mirror) out to become part of the left & right sides of the vehicle. 3) Lengthen the entire front of the vehicle by 1 stud, which gives the car a more powerful look (i.e., space for a bigger engine), and allows the windshield and gray & white stripes to be slid forward by one stud so that the windshield doesn't overhang into the cabin in an (IMHO) very ugly way. Some pictures (click to enlarge) that help explain the changes: Completed Model – Top View You can see the new front "wall" of the cabin (which isn't completely solid). The original model had brown 1 x 2 plates on the inside of each door, but these get removed and used on the floor of the cabin (for attaching minifigs to their seats). Two more brown 1 x 2 plates (originally from deep within the bowels of the interior of the vehicle structure) support the cabin-side of the windshield. The view from the front also shows where three of the original roof tiles get re-used: The two white 1 x 4 tiles become stripes on the rear of the car (replacing the white 1 x 3 plates that used to serve this role, but which are necessary elsewhere). The green 1 x 3 slope bricks move to form a headrest. A green 1 x 2 plate rests just below those slopes and between the ends of the white tiles; this is from the bowels of the original model. A gray 2 x 2 tile rests beneath the gray brick just behind the seat backs (replacing a red 1 x 2 plate). Completed Model – Bottom View The bottom gray 4 x 6 plate is one stud further forward than on the original model in order to support the longer front of the modified version. Hood The underside of the hood shows all of its significant changes. Green plates of various sizes are reconfigured, and augmented by two new 1 x 2 green plates (from the original cabin front wall), allowing the hood to be longer. The adornments on the top of the hood do not change. Front Fender Holder The front fender holder is now part of an 8-wide structure that replicates the vehicle's body color scheme when viewed from the side: A gray plate at the bottom, a white plate above that, then a green brick above that. One of the gray plates was already present on the original model's fender holder structure, and the other is from the original rear fender holder, while both of the white plates come from the original model's rear white stripes (now implemented with tiles, as mentioned above). The brown plate at the top of this structure was from the original cabin front wall. It supports the hood and connects exactly between the two 1 x 2 green plates mentioned in the previous photo. Under the Hood The red 2 x 4 brick turns 90 degrees and moves to sit off-center to support the full length of the hood. Since the red brick no longer holds the passenger side front wheel brick in place, a brown 1 x 2 brick (from the original cabin front wall) now performs that duty. The second picture shows a view from the front with the fender holder removed. A red 1 x 2 plate (just below the red 2 x 4 brick) replaces the original model's green plate of the same size. This green plate now sits underneath the center part of the headrest as seen in an earlier photo. Rear Internals The only difference to the rear that hasn't been previously mentioned is to the rear fender holder structure. The original model's gray 1 x 4 plate is now a black 1 x 4 plate (originally from the front fender holder structure). You can also see the previously-mentioned gray 2 x 2 tile in a couple of these shots.

I just checked my 6105 Medieval Knights (never mixed with other sets), and it has the softer swords. So indeed the time-frame is probably is 1993-1994. I'd love to hear from anybody who has a 6090 (or other Royal Knights set) and is confident that they have not intermingled their pieces.

Out of curiosity, which of your 1993 sets have soft / dull swords? My 6048 Majisto's Magical Workshop has a rigid / shiny sword, and it's from 1993. I'm the original owner of that set, and its pieces have never been mixed with other sets. It's either been on display or in storage. I also have a 6105 Medieval Knights from 1993 that hasn't been mixed with other sets, but it's in storage and I won't be able to check it until later in the week.

Hello! I'm a few weeks out of my second (!) Lego dark age, and I recently bought a used 6090 Royal Knight's Castle that came with a mix of rigid and soft dark gray swords. I'm curious which type of sword is correct for that set. I know for a fact the rigid (and more shiny) dark gray swords were still in use as late as 1993 in Dragon Masters sets, and I also know for a fact that the flexible (and less shiny) dark gray swords were being used in 1996 in Dark Forest sets, but I don't know when the transition happened, or what sort of swords the Royal Knights sets should be expected to have. Unfortunately the set inventories on both Peeron & Bricklink are not reliable on this point. Do any of you know when the switch happened? Or more specifically, if you have a 6090 that hasn't been mixed with other sets' pieces, can you check whether it has the rigid (more shiny) dark gray swords, or whether it has the flexible (less shiny) ones? Thanks!