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Captainowie

Eurobricks Knights
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Everything posted by Captainowie

  1. Captainowie
    I think that the original mechanism doesn't sync up exactly either - you can see the white clutch gear that allows the whole mechanism to continue operating when the tilt arm is at the bottom position.
  2. Captainowie
    I may not have the skills to build beautiful MOCs, but I think I've got just about as good a setup as anyone here - I've moved house since I took this photo, and now I've got a whole room dedicated to this hobby. 160+ plastic drawers and buckets of various sizes, as well as 6 super-sized drawers to hold everything that's not studless technic (and a few things that are, like PF stuff). Also 7 generous overhead display shelves for finished models/works in progress, with integrated LED strip lighting, and more bench space than you can poke a stick at. Just waiting on some drawer handles!
  3. Captainowie
    You may also want to consider looking into LDCad. It's got nearly everything SR3DBuilder has (and a few more things) and is still under active development. One downside (from your point of view, coming from LDD rather than an older LDraw program) is that you'll need to separately download the LDraw library. See http://www.melkert.net/LDCad and ldraw.org to get started. Owen.
  4. Captainowie
    If it's 10 bricks high and at least 10x10 studs in size, they shouldn't have too much of an issue! Lovely piece of work. Owen.
  5. Captainowie
    We can't show the pictures here, because they're too sensitive. But if you post your email login and password, we can log into your account and save a draft email containing the pictures so you can see them.
  6. Captainowie
    So I finally got a chance to use this in an actual GBC circuit (the event I had designed it for forbade it on safety grounds). It worked pretty well with an accuracy of approximately 98%, and was a bit hit with the crowd. However, I'm going to disassemble it for a few reasons: I need the parts for other modules; it's just a fraction slow and would occasionally back up with balls; and it puts too much stress on the shocks!
  7. Captainowie
    I would consider that designing a suspension system that relies on the slack between parts is potentially more impressive than a sturdy one. It's taking some secondary effect of the LEGO system that is mostly regarded as a negative, and turning it into a positive. I claim that it's similar to someone designing some mechanism that relies on the non-linearity of a U-joint. In fact, it's exactly the same concept, albeit in the opposite direction, as those cheese slope mosaics that you can get by shoving the small bits into a fixed frame and using the tension to hold it all together.
  8. Captainowie
    I think that the only answer to ANY question of the form "Why would LEGO do X?" is "We don't know", unless of course TLG come out with a statement explaining why they did X
  9. Captainowie
    I will second the Isogawa reference. He also makes a pay-if-you-like-it copy available from his website http://www.isogawastudio.co.jp/legostudio/toranomaki/en/download.html If I understand correctly what you want, I think your best course of action is to have one motor driving a 'backbone' mechanical power distribution system - a long axle that goes reasonably close to all your functions (or two parallel axles, mechanically connected together) driven by the motor. Then you can just pick off the motion from the closest point. I hope that makes sense. Don't forget that as well as the motor you're going to need a battery box, and possibly a switch depending on how accessible you place the battery box. If you're not terribly interested in the Technic theme, I wouldn't recommend getting your motor from a set, as generally only the larger more expensive sets are motorised out of the box. I'd suggest getting the Power Functions Motor Set http://brickset.com/sets/8293-1/Motor-Set, as pretty much everything there will be useful to you. Finally, don't forget to post pictures of what you've done!
  10. Captainowie
    When I replaced the wire in my cables, I found that if I shaved some of the insulation down I could use the original crimp connections - no soldering needed!
  11. Captainowie
    It's your invention Rohan, you go ahead! (But I have one or two ideas for improvements!) To clarify - we only had a couple of non-functional modules on the table; most of the difference between what we were expecting and what we had were no-shows.
  12. Captainowie
    I do this quite often with 8t gears meshing slightly off-axis with the 24t crown gears (that aren't really used any more since the advent of the bevel gears)
  13. Captainowie
    Wow, that's intense. I have done that a couple of times in the past, but found it just too time consuming. Me either. I have a container filled with broken bits, hoping against hope that TLG will start buying up broken bits from fans ("Send us 1kg of old/broken bricks and we'll send you 1/4kg of new bricks" or something) as a way to source ABS. Of course, transporting and cleaning old stuff will likely make it more expensive than brand new ABS anyway. But I still can't bring myself to throw them away.
  14. Captainowie
    That's another use for the really old, thin, flimsy 14-tooth gears - they make it easier to get something in step with a 56-tooth turntable.
  15. Captainowie
    At the GBC wiki we've been toying with the idea of having articles dedicated to specific modules. Admittedly progress has been somewhat slow of late, but I think this project might provide the impetus we need to kick back into gear. If I can get a template made up, what would folks say to putting the content there instead of (or as well as) here. I can see two advantages: Forum threads eventually leave the front page and fall into obscurity; and forum threads get filled with posts containing nothing more than "This is a great idea" sentiment - which, while good for fostering community, can get in the way of having a consolidated resource. Thoughts?
  16. Captainowie
    If you're going to use furlong and fortnight for your distance and time units, then surely surely you should be using the firkin as your mass unit!
  17. Captainowie
    Ah, so what you're saying, is that because it's metal and not plastic, then it's all right to go 3rd party. So 3rd party pneumatics/linear actuators are OK? The pistons in those products are made of metal. As are many of the components in the various motors. Again, where do you stop?
  18. Captainowie
    I don't like your chances too much - all the modern pneumatics comes with large/flagship sets, and all the old pneumatics are from ... well ... old sets, where part quality can vary considerably. Your best bet if you don't want to pay too much is to buy a couple of parts individually from Bricklink. Owen.
  19. Captainowie
    Ah, so what you're saying is that it's all right to go a 3rd party solution because the LEGO solution is too big? But where do you stop? For pretty much any mechanism you can imagine, a brickbuilt version will be larger, or less efficient, or less robust than a 3rd party solution.
  20. Captainowie
    Having recently taken delivery of a 9V speed regulator and a PF servo motor, I can now confirm that the speed regulator won't make the servo turn.
  21. Captainowie
    Is there a hidden ratchet in there? Or are you relying on the resistance of the motor to not have the spools back-driven by the weight of whatever you're lifting? Owen.
  22. Captainowie
    That's what I thought, but I couldn't find reference to that in the Rules and Regulations (either the contest-specific ones or the general ones) so I assumed that requirement had been relaxed.
  23. Captainowie
    Why can't you still use the battery box as a counterweight on the manual version? I'll also add my support behind the "good job" sentiments! Owen.
  24. Captainowie
    That really depends how many of the 10 cylinders are moving at once, how often, and what their loads are. The set 8455 has 10 cylinders and uses two large pumps (hand operated).
  25. Captainowie
    I don't think anyone here can answer that for you. As you've seen, different builders go a different rates, so that translation factor will be different for everyone. If you really want to know, you'll have to time yourself doing a couple of models, and work it out yourself. But even then, presumably the best you'll be able to do is get an approximation, as the translation factor is probably different for each model as well as for each builder. I'd suggest the best thing you can do is look at the time posted by the reviewer, compare it to the other times posted by the same reviewer, and think "It's a long build", or "It's a medium build". I also agree with what others have said - it's not a contest. It's completely irrelevant whether you build faster or slower than someone else, unless you want it to be. If it makes you happier to be able to say "I built 420xx in only 3.5 hours", then more power to ya, but I doubt you'd get much praise from the rest of the community. For what it's worth, I'm on the slower side. I think it took me three evenings (about 15 hours, maybe) for 42009. But that just means I got 50% more enjoyment out of the build than rollermonkey :-P. Owen.
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