Graydingo

Never got a chance to use this.

The top down view is stunning. You captured the shape beautifully. I bet it does perform well. I've been wanting to try the xl plus L motor setup as well. I'm not keen on the wires running underneath. I know there is often little room to run above the chassis. You nailed the overall shape. I've got mixed feelings on gapless as well. On one hand its the only way you can really get specific shapes of a specific car. If you go with the limited panel shapes, flex axles and other, you get more of a representation of the car it seems. Love to see a video of it in action! So many super-cars lately! It's awesome.

Thank you! Roofline mock-ups (ignore the 4X4 Sticker, that will be gone ) Front raised: Rear raised: Weeds: Get on up:

Wow! I really like what you did with the manual pneumatic pump. And the small assist cylinders. That's a clever idea. I don't recall another supercar with a v-12. Kudos on cramming that in there! What a work of art. Needs more hires photos of the int and all the functions. Video please.

Posting in a thread. Been looking for a solid 3 plus R! Thanks Piterx

Nice! Same motor setup as I have in my impala.

2/2 on the cars Erix! Got any pics? Would love to see it. Have you heard of the Impala z-11? We were thinking of making our 63 a replica of this car. It has an aluminum front end. Yes, in real life I would never put hydraulics on a car. But in Lego...why not? The new air ride tech is legit. A lot of the uber cars at SEMA are on bags.

Hello everyone. Update on the ......Impala, if we can still call it that. Not sure I can pull of the wild angles of the Impala now that I've delved into some bodywork. My white pieces are quite limited as far as small white pieces. I mostly have beams and panels. We'll see. I spent a lot of time building out a pretty detailed front seat. The Impala that we have in the family has the half bench. It's a bench on the bottom and has the two flip down passenger and driver sides, this allows passengers to climb in the back seat. It's really quite a stunning design as far as how the doors function in real life. Those long glorious 1960's doors allow for passengers to step into the back seat more easily. The windows go down and you have this massive open air tub inside. Ah nostalgia. I think one issue I'm still struggling with in my builds, is embracing Technic as a representation of a model, and not a complete realistic model. You know, the whole HOLES thing. I start to build all these crazy solid items out of technic beams. Then I look at it and I've got too many beams. It's lost some of the aesthetic that makes it a technic model. Anyway, that's the story on these seats. They were solid beams and weighing my ride down. It's low enough! They reclined via a friction gear which was kinda cool. But ultimately I ripped them all out. I also had this idea I could lift the body off the top, so I built these ugly rails for the body to sit on (White). Those got tossed too. The reclining system when it was still in: Moving onto bodywork before going back and ripping out the seats: And...countless fender iterations later...I'm at this design Finally when I was satisfied with my 100th rear fender version, I moved on and spent a long long time working on a door. I really wanted to use the dampener shocks to make the doors pop open in smooth motion. I also wanted to put them in the door itself, instead of somewhere in the body. I've got limited space with the lowering mechanisms of course. I'm pretty happy with the doors. They have a few bugs, but the dampener works awesome. Might be cool to remote control pop open the doors when you slam it down on the pavement. You can see a video of the door and latch system here http://www.brickshelf.com/gallery/Graydingo/Impala63/img_9054.mov next up I'll reinforce the door, then work on the front fender. Once I get that where I want it, I'll match the other side then work on the front and rear-end. I test fit some red large fairing panels for the top and it looks really killer. It starts to look much more like an impala with even a rudimentary roof in place. Cheers

The differential 'easiest' method is mind blowing. I'm going to have to watch this a few more times.

I wish they all could be California girls. Awesome T - and surfs up!

Dope!

Well for what it's worth, I've purchased two of your books Sariel, and I plan to buy any new ones as well. I like the hard copies. you're right DRM is terrible and typically only hurts the actual paying consumer. I think as an artist, piracy comes with the territory. Take it as a compliment and just hope that you can sell enough legit copies to offset the piracy. I wouldn't do the digital copies personally, too easy to pirate there. As blackbird mentioned, you are likely preaching to the choir here. For every pirate out there there are a thousand people inspired by your amazing creations. Don't get discouraged. Also, this isn't meant as mean, but take an honest look at your PC. Any pirated movies, music games or other expensive software (Adobe photoshop etc) ? I try to keep my PC 100% legit, but last week a friend brought me two movies for a research project. It's all too easy to be hypocritical.

Featuring "Hand Of Air God" or HOAG. Totally awesome man!

Looking good grum! Making me miss my ultimate! I built the extended boom too. The metal hook is ridiculously rare/expensive, so I skipped that part, but the other parts were common and thus inexpensive.

Fun! Can't wait to see it in motion.

I wasn't happy with the dual motors on each axle. The original idea was that I could do some crazy 3 wheelin' like you see in some vids with hydraulics. The lift height of the wheels and the chassis stifness just wasn't there to achieve this. Although I was satisfied with how my final engineering worked, it was just pointless to continue on one M motor per wheel for raising lowering action. So I rebuilt the front and rear end nearly from scratch. Here's the new front end. It's incredibly compact. Considering I can't go beyond the bottom of the frame, and I wanted to stay lower than the top of the liftarms that raise and lower the wheels. I also only had some 9 studs or so from the front axle to achieve all this. I would prefer to use a smaller drive gear, but with the S brick, control is pretty accurate. I can choose specific ride heights. I'd show you video, but ...my only vid is on my phone, where the s brick app is, so I can't control and vid at the same time lol. Is the s brick app on the ipad? hmmmm The two 24t gears actually work very nicely. The motor can lift the heavy chassis without the clutch engaging. here's the rear-end. The red 2's are the stops that engage the clutch. Top o' the hydraulics: Gettin' LOW baby. Here's a VIDEO of the shocks. They function nicely in all positions. This was something I wanted to do on my TC6 truck, but just didn't pull it off. The entire chassis is really designed around the ability for the shocks to work at any ride height. Might be an odd question, but is anyone a good coder/app designer and interested in making me a custom profile for the S brick? I would like a gray lego steering wheel on the left, two vertical sliders labled "front" and "rear" hydraulics - in the middle for my front/ rear raising / lowering and a gas pedal on the right - and maybe one headlights button I'm satisfied with the axles. Now its on to the drive train. I'm really struggling with this part. I can't seem to get decent performance out of my rudimentary gear box. I'm not looking for anything complicated. I just want it to freewheel a bit after the motor shuts off. And I want it to be a bit faster. If anyone has a good 2 XL motor used together for RWD only robust gearbox, or ideas I'd love to hear them.

Thanks. The servo setup is like this: (pretend that its a servo motor and that the two 8t gears are aligned) It's not ideal, but it fits. i think it might be a moot point, since I've decided to go a different direction...but first: Here's a video of the prototype chassis It's too heavy already and too pointlessly complex. I think the better route is to try to manage either 1 motor for each axle, or one motor for all 4 that is centrally mounted. back to the drawing board...

Very cool Paul. As someone who is very interested in the Raspberry Pi and also owns the 8860 as well I loved your blog. What a fun project for your and your family. I think that 'adding the motor' bit in the instructions was more than a tease for those of us who grew up in the early 80's but didn't really have access to the motor kit. It seemed impossible to get at the time. The whole tease with the third gear being blocked off entirely was sort of cruel and confusing too. It would be awesome to see what you could do with a mindstorm kit.

Love these 60's bubble hot rods. I wonder how motorcycle tires would would look? You can get that skinny tire look.

Congratulations to the winners! Thank you Jim and Eurobricks!

Well I hope everyone is having a great weekend. I've made some progress on the chassis of my 63. It started with a mock up of the front end. These A-arms really make the front end easier to put together. It almost feels like cheating. I have a lot less space up front, and I also had to account for the servo motor going in there somewhere. My first plan was to mount one lowering mechanism on the bumper side of the axle and one on the cab side. The front one went in after a few hours and worked OK. The problem was that I forgot about the servo motor and I wanted to keep the design simple. Mounting the second one in the same manner would have blocked the servo motor. Also the whole thing just didn't have as slick a mechanical function as I liked. The frame was too low and there was some funky things going on. So I took the whole thing apart. It's useful to go through these types of processes. You just start building. Stuff works or it doesn't and you tear down and begin again. My big plan was to get the front end tech all squared away before my wheels arrived on monday from Bricklink. They surprised me and arrived today and luckily I had spent the morning and late last night getting the new front end lowering / raising system implemented. The servo just happen to mount nicely in the front end and should fit within the allotted space to make the scale right. I've only got 9 studs beyond the front axle for the front end. The servo had to be offset by one stud, but no problem for the 8 tooth gears. Here's the approximate length axle to axle - 41 studs. The XL motors will be mounted up higher by 2 studs. as for controlling it. I have one S brick for drive, steering and possibly 2 other functions. And for now, I'll be using two additional IR receivers to run the hydraulics. If I want, I can tie the front / rear hydraulics into the S brick but I think 4 way action is more fun.

^Agreed. And if you use only kit parts you could market this as 42030 C model.

Well done. Especially the negative camber solutions. I want to build this in black/black/black.

8860 owners in the house. Sound off. :-D

Looks great! I love the back. I think if anything, the front needs something. Maybe a grill or the front reshaped a bit.