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Captainowie

Eurobricks Knights
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Everything posted by Captainowie

  1. Captainowie
    I particularly liked how the functions were put together in the instructions - you had to wait until each function was nearly complete before you could see how it worked - for example, there's one spot where you shift one 16t gear one stud along its axle, and all of a sudden two separate drivetrains become one function. There was no reason for the build to do that, other than creating suspense for the builder, and it was wonderful!
  2. Captainowie
    Nice. Some old favourites in there. Surprisingly large layout, given that the concept was only a couple of years old at that point.
  3. Captainowie
    To me, "flying" needs to involve generating lift by passing through the air. A rocket "flies" in the same way that a skimming stone "floats". I also feel it's problematic to allow rockets but ban spaceships.
  4. Captainowie
    Ah yep, that'd do it. Thanks.
  5. Captainowie
    It's neat, but poorly named - a scissor lift is one of these and that's not what your mechanism does - the pivot point of the arms is behind the point of application of force. Your machine is more like tongs than scissors! The gears on the back stabilisers of the arms; are they just for decoration? I couldn't fathom their function. Owen. (NB I pulled the URL for this image as a result of an image search. I make no promises that the image will be available at any time into the future. I didn't even look at what website it was from.)
  6. Captainowie
    There were a bunch of topics early this year by someone building something similar, you might take some ideas from there.
  7. Captainowie
    Somewhat expanding on the Aircraft suggestions, an idea I had recently is "Machine you'd find at an airport". So if you want to build a plane you can, but if you want to build a road vehicle you could do a terminal-transfer bus, or a baggage cart (either the small push-ones that you use directly, or the larger trolleys that the handlers use to get the bags out to the planes). Or you could do a less conventional vehicle, like the tow cars that they use for push-back, or something with a raising platform to load catering supplies. Or you could do a non-vehicle thing, like a baggage carousel, or an extending airbridge (I've often thought that the new small turntable would serve as a great mount for the wheels).
  8. Captainowie
    How big are the loads you're expecting this machine to lift, compared to the weight of the machine? The lifted weight is always well forward of the front of the tracks, so the back had better be damn heavy if you don't want it to tip over. Even so, that's a large amount of force on the (relatively small) front sprockets. Also, you say that the tracks are to "roll over bumps", but bumps imply that this will be used off-road, where you're unlikely to find a nice level spot to set up your lifter. I expect a forked lifter like this won't like not being level.
  9. Captainowie
    I searched high and low for pliers with rubber-coated jaws. In the end, I made my own, with a small, cheap pair of pliers and a couple of layers of heatshrink tubing.
  10. Captainowie
    I'm hoping for some details on the "Functional speedometer built entirely from LEGO Technic elements". Did they just shove a https://brickset.com/sets/5206-1/Speed-Computer in the dashboard with a long drivetrain to the ... uh... drivetrain? I would love to see a mechanism that can compute rate of rotation, and be accurate over a wide range of angular speeds. Owen.
  11. Captainowie
    I normally don't like to reply to posts just to say "that's really cool". But I felt I had to make an exception in this case. This is incredible. Owen.
  12. Captainowie
    Rohan you forgot the most important thing - we won second prize in the beauty contest exhibitor's choice awards! Here's the graph. The vertical scale is in Balls Per Second, averaged over 15 minutes, and the horizontal axis is in 15-minute tics. Since annotating the graph, we've identified the second mystery Friday dip as the time I made a modification to one of the modules just upstream of the sensor. Owen.
  13. Captainowie
    A small gear on a locked axle might also work. Page 116 of Toranomaki (http://www.isogawastudio.co.jp/legostudio/toranomaki/en/) has some examples.
  14. Captainowie
    I usually do that if I ever find myself building a Mixel. It's surprisingly challenging.
  15. Captainowie
    That's going to be tough! :-P
  16. Captainowie
    Yeah, all of my modules are too - they're GBC standard apart from where they deviate! :-) I look forward to seeing it run all weekend. Owen.
  17. Captainowie
    Needing to use a screwdriver to change out the batteries seems like a poor move here, LEGO. On a remote that's just sending BT signals or lighting up an IR LED it's fine, but for a battery box that's powering motors we really should be able to change the batteries without tools.
  18. Captainowie
    They certainly don't. I know from sitting behind them on the road in Western Australia that the last trailer flaps back and forth quite noticeably.
  19. Captainowie
    Also the wheels with the white trim on the rims.
  20. Captainowie
    That red tower at ~3.5 minutes looks mighty familiar!
  21. Captainowie
    That's true, but when you have two of them joined together like you have, you can arrange them so that differences cancel out: the input axle is at the same angle as the output angle, but the intermediate shaft is different (but you don't care about that one). When you join the two U-joints with the 2L axle, make sure that the slit in the connectors line up. Hope this helps, Owen.
  22. Captainowie
    That's partly true. With just one joint, it won't even work theoretically. But you can use two U-joints end-to-end to move rotation 90 degrees just fine, and in situations where the axle needs to be right up against a wall through the whole of its length (i.e. no room for bevel gears) that's probably the best solution. Owen.
  23. Captainowie
    I don't think you can expect even identical cylinders to be synchronised unless you connect them together mechanically. Even allowing that they're identical in every respect, _one_ of them is going to start moving first. The air pressure in that cylinder only has to overcome dynamic friction within the cylinder (in addition to whatever load is on the cylinder itself) while the same pressure would have to overcome static friction (which is always greater) in the other cylinder. The result is that the cylinder that starts moving first is going to keep moving. You can, however, use multiple switches to pneumatically synchronise the cylinders. There was a good resource about this on the Internet many years ago, but all I can find now is a page on the Wayback Machine, which has the text but no pictures. http://web.archive.org/web/20100124210053/http://www.kclague.net/Sequencer/index.htm If anyone knows of a better location of this information, I'd be very interested. Owen.
  24. Captainowie
    The wire I bought when I did this was slightly too thick to reattach the connectors, so I used a sharp knife to take out some of the insulation at the top and bottom of the wire so that you can bend it into the cavity of the connectors. Just be careful not to take so much off that you get a short between the two halves of the wire cable.
  25. Captainowie
    I have not found that to be the case. I have a list of ideas as long as your arm. Rather, I've found that the hardest bit is making those ideas standards-conformant and reliable. Of course, if you're doing standalone things like this one, then standards conformance is not an issue. Owen.
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