krtwood

I thought I would share a comparison with this set's spiritual ancestor 5540. We've come a long way in ~40 years, with one glaring regression.

That's the throw off lever that I talked about in the missing functions.

Yeah, they are really elegant machines. How the rollers do what they do with just one extra linkage is so clever. A few system parts makes all the difference! It did start out as a bunch of technic bricks and wasn't much to look at. Well it's up to them to decide if it can be a profitable set. Getting people to actually take action to support it is my task. I think it would be really cool to see what the professionals would do differently. It's the first moc I have done that feels to me like it could be an official set. There's a level of elegance and part usage efficiency that I expect from TLG.

It was good timing for this moc with the non-vehicle contest, but being Model Team I can't enter it. But that's okay, at least it fits in with what people are working on! If you don't know, a letterpress is a type of printing press. The functions of the real thing are quite interesting. At the scale I was working at, determined by the size of the largest gear with outward facing teeth (the turntable) I wasn't able to do all of the functions and had to do some of the major functions in different ways. Here is one of the drawings I used for reference. Functions: Drive axle, driven in the model by the flywheel (there would be another pulley on the other side or a treadle in the real thing) turns the large cam gear. On the real thing this gear does three things. 1) Gear reduction 2) Crank for the bed 3) Internal cam drives the platen holding the paper. This platen needs to dwell in the open position so the operator can insert and remove the paper. Since I could not create a cam profile inside the gear, I used a cam on the axle and a rubber band for the return. This cam unfortunately gets in the way of where the lock is supposed to go. The bed, holding the printing block, rocks forward and back The roller arm is connected via a link to the frame which causes it to pivot back and forth from the ink disc and then across the print block. This was the tricky part to get the geometry close enough and so that the rollers don't get caught but still look like they are making contact. I'm really happy with my solution for mounting the rollers. On the real thing, the rollers are mounted on long shafts that are spring loaded to maintain contact with the ink disc and print block. Ink disc rotates. On the real thing, this movement is intermittent driven by a pawl that is activated by the motion of the roller arm. I connected it via a chain and some gears meshing at an angle. Missing Functions: Throw off lever: This should be connected through a complex series of linkages to the shaft that the crank arms attach to and the roller pivots on. The end of this shaft is eccentric, so by rotating the shaft it effectively changes the length of the crank arms and causes the machine to either make a print or just come very close. If the operator can't keep up with the speed of the press to both unload and load a paper in one cycle they can use the throw off lever to unload on one cycle and load on the next. I really would have liked to have the lever at least connected to something but the drive for the ink disc is in the way. Lock: The lock is a frame at the front of the machine that is supposed to be driven by another cam on the left side (where I just have a crank) which causes the lock to tilt in and take the force of the print impression instead of it being transferred to the cam gear. I had to move his down lower than it should be and just make it look like part of the frame. My biggest regret with the design is the way the bed is constructed. There is an inner frame and outer frames and these are only joined by a single pin connection on each side through a 3L liftarm. I was hoping to get another pin connection at the top but I couldn't get it to work out so there are just system parts up against each other with no actual connection. You can see little gaps open up there as it flexes which is annoying. But it is solid enough. If you think it's worthy, you can support it over on Lego Ideas.

In the US, you can get an Amazon Visa card (issued by Chase) that gives you 3% cashback on Amazon purchases and it goes up to 5% if you have Prime. So if you align it with one of their free Prime trials you can get it for 5% off.

As long as the sets are worthwhile on their own, you don't have to make the way they combine together have to accommodate people who only buy some of the sets. For example, I remember the Transformers sets from my youth where some of them could combine together to make one big robot. If you didn't buy all the sets then you couldn't make the big robot, period. Another example is what Bluebrixx did with their Castle Blaustein sets. There you couldn't even build anything else with the expansion sets if you didn't have all the previous sets, but you could stop buying the sets at any point and still have something complete. But it wasn't modular at all and they still sell the base set as fast as they can make them. It's a way of making a really huge set (25,000 pieces) without selling it as one massive set. In the Technic lineup, Lego has made sets where if you buy 2 or 3 sets it's possible to build a larger set out of the combined pieces that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the smaller sets. It's just something extra you are able to do if you buy them all and a bridge towards having larger sets for someone who maybe otherwise wouldn't spend that much all at once. So there's more than one way to break up big sets into small sets.

My guess would be the seams in the background are the problem. Pretty easy to fix in post.

Lego knights with their faces eaten by bananas. Pleasant dreams!

I wonder if Viva La Dirt League's Epic NPC Man would meet TLG's standards. Probably too adult. But it could be a nice little medieval village, though Greg the garlic farmer is the only one who really has a house. Most of the other buildings where they film are too modern. For those who don't know, they do comedy sketches based on a fictional MMORPG where some of the NPCs have become self-aware.

Official sets do the pieces in a bag not used until a later step thing too. The shuttle 10283 has some parts in one of first bags used for the Hubble that don't get used until way later in the build. It would be nice if they did something to actually indicate those parts are supposed to be left over at that point.

There are gloves that work with touchscrreens.

Looks great! So much more pleasing than TLG's cheesy solution.

Is the motor working? If the motor works, does the alternate function of that motor when the lever is flipped work properly? That would help to isolate where the problem is.

I know I am very late to the party, but I finally gave in and purchased this wonderful set. I just finished building the first stage and I was looking at where the fins attached and thought it was a shame the base of it has to straddle the line between the black and white stripes. Then I thought about cutting up some unused stickers I have that have black parts to cover up that side of the base. Then I got to wondering if perhaps that entire side of the tail might also supposed to be black. Well, from what I can find, I think the fin are actually dark gray. The part, 6239, is available in dark bluish gray. So I'm really curious why they chose to make them white! base of apollo 11 saturn v

I didn't buy 8043 for my nieces and nephews, but being able to hand them the set and remote and let them have at it without having to worry about anything is part of the appeal. Those teens have siblings and adults have kids and family.