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.

Okay, I have backed away from the ledge but my tinfoil hat is still on because that kind of stuff has already happened. The lack of a physical and kid-resistant controller is still a big turn off for me though. I'm not going to freak out and assume that one set is the direction they are going, but necessity is the mother of invention. When you can just throw as many motors at the problem and let the app solve the control issues and the sky is the limit on prices, well you get really cool mocs not Lego sets.

If I understand correctly, there is no handheld remote in the box? The only way to operate the motors is through an app on a smartphone? Count me out of this system. S-brick and buwizz are one thing as it's an optional thing you can do instead of the normal controls. But a system that depends on an app is a system that Lego can decide to no longer support at any time in the future. When technology has moved on eventually they aren't going to want to have to keep updating the software for the hardware they aren't making any money off of, and then eventually you won't be able to install the old app on your new phone and the whole system is bricked.

18: 10 9: 6 12: 4 15: 3 2: 2 20: 1

Love it

3. Regicide Cat B - PF IR Signature Move: Kingslayer - From the mightiest king to the feeblest peasant, they were all brought low when hit hard in exactly the right spot. Dimensions: 45 x 44 x 35 Regicide uses a horizontal spinner directly driven by four XL motors on two battery boxes in the superstructure. The XL motors are geared up 2:1 before reducing down through the turntables. The spinner is supported at the top and bottom by turntables. The spinner has two loaded battery boxes for extra mass. The entire superstructure can be tilted by being raised at the back by two linear actuators driven by an M motor. This allows it to target specific areas of the other bot and reach within 6L of the ground. The bracing at the back pinches the spine of the superstructure so there is not very much more flex at the top of its range than at the bottom. It uses skid steering with four L motors on another two battery boxes in the center of the base. The two motors on each wheel pass through an adder. Regicide has a bulldozer-like blade on its heavily reinforced front with 8lbs/3.6kg of high speed lego and batteries behind it. Link to discussion topic

There has to be some amount of resistance that will make it stop but it's hard to tell how much force you are using to stop it. I would suggest you try removing the gears from 4 of the motors and try the same test to see if takes less force to stop it. If it doesn't then the clutch is too weak to be making any use of the other 4 motors.

Ha ha ha! Yes, this is going to happen. I think I have fully addressed the speed issue and now have the opposite problem of it being so fast that it's hard to control. My only experience with RC technic was 8043 and 42030 which are both slow so the bot didn't really seem slow to me before. Now it is fun to play around with. I have been through a few revisions on the chassis. It's hard to do this backwards and change out the guts from the inside rather than build around them. Moved the two battery boxes in the base into the middle which made room for two sets of two L motors for the drive through adders. There was no room for any gear reduction after the adders. The two BBs in the base are now just for the drive and raising of the superstructure. Which means there are now two more battery boxes hanging off the back of the superstructure to power the spinner. It did not turn well until I switched the front wheels to not having tires. The weight is up to just over 8 lbs / 3.7 kg. The back end of the chassis drags slightly on the ground because the drive wheels are moved forward but it does not impair the performance. I moved the spinner up one stud which allowed closing in of the top side and a much better looking bulldozer style front end. The receivers are no longer sticking up at the back. You can't see the two in the base, they are in the opposite corner. There will be one more in the corner that you can see for raising the superstructure. I tried using the small turntables for the superstructure to pivot on but that relied on pin connections to stay together and I had trouble bracing it so it wouldn't come apart. I ended up going back to the pins. I will get proper pictures once I get in my Bricklink order with the extra receiver I needed, that one black #3 connector I was short on, and the skeleton king :) Otherwise I think it's just about done.

8043 is the only official set I can think of that uses remote control to switch functions. The gearbox takes up more space than the motors do so if space is the problem you are probably better off just using motors directly.

Nah, smoke em if you got em. I've got 9 motors and 6 battery boxes (4 for power) total. I was able to run 4 XLs for the weapon off one battery box but it likes two better. I wasn't able to run 4 Ls off one battery box for the drive. They were under too much load. You may find if you go up to 4 battery boxes that 2 Ls are not enough for the drive anymore without making it slow.

And here I thought I was going over the top using 4 motors :) How many battery boxes is that taking?