mgmchenry

Yeah, I haven't thought about buying those in a while. I think I bought 3 of those around 10 years ago. I'll call that Plan B for now. I'm really looking for something more like: http://cgi.ebay.com/5-LB-LEGO-LOT-pounds-bricks-pieces-parts-random-mix-lbs-/200321257595?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2ea413d07b#ht_1889wt_836 I know that I can keep a kid busy with only a few bricks, but I'm still working out what I'm going to do. I have to keep 12-15 kids busy. If no more come... I was hoping having a pile of new elements in front of me would give me some ideas. Last time I was in walmart, they had a lot of different mini sets in plastic bags like this 30051 here: http://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Exclusive-Building-Starfighter-Bagged/dp/B0038RL2IQ for just $3. I might get those for giftbags. You got me really excited for a minute there! I've been waiting for a Lego store to open around here for a long time. I'd make a 1.5 hour drive a couple of times a year for that. Unfortunately, Elmhurst is about as far downstate as you can get. It's at least 6 hours from Buffalo. Next time I'm in NYC, though, I'll think about making a stop.

My son is having a "Lego Birthday Party" this Saturday. He'll be 6. We're having about 10 kids over to do typical birthday stuff, but also planned to have themed lego centers scattered around the hosue for the kids to play with the bricks. I only have a few thousand bricks that are not tied up in some way or another. I had meant to get a few pounds of mixed bricks of EBay, but life got crazy as usual. Can anyone recommend a good deal on around $50 in bricks that I could get to Buffalo, NY by Friday? I appreciate any feedback. (Except for pointing out how I should have done this two weeks ago...) Thanks! -Mike McHenry

Thanks, Claus! I couldn't be happier! I had given up on seeing this any time soon. I'm praying for improved hinge tools, then maybe I can rebuild my Venator model and *enjoy* the process. However, I'll be content if half the stuff I've seen in the videos work. The only problem is that a new Minecraft patch is coming out the same weekend... I'll have to take Monday off.

I like it. I've been playing some CIS vs. Clone Army war games with my son and I could really use some decent droidekas.

Yeah, I'm still learning bricklink. I've only placed two orders there so far, but I've discovered it has some interface issues. For instance, say there are a few critical parts you need. It's not too hard to find the best price or to see what else the seller has to offer. But somehow there always seems to be another $50 in parts in my shopping cart by the time I check out. I'm not sure how that happens... :) In all seriousness, I just meant ask whether there is a kit that is the most economical way to get the parts, or are they cheaper parted out. $200 excavator... I'm not going to get that past the wife any time soon. parted out on bricklink... $8 motor x4 + $6 battery box + $10 control unit x2 + $15 (what the? why?) receiver x2 = $88 All of a sudden, $200 for an excavator sounds like an excellent deal. But still too high. If I found it for $50, I'd probably buy it, but I'm not holding my breath. I've looked at some of the other sets the motors come in and they all look over-priced to me. Lego makes a high-quality product, so I'm not going to complain. I'm just going to accept that someone has decided the power functions parts are for people with way too much money. Fifteen dollars for a receiver that probably cost one or two dollars to make? Lunacy! How is the bulldozer $300? Meanwhile, I got my son a refurb Dell 3.2Ghz P4 that runs LDD very nicely for $100. That's value.

That is amazing. I have to build one! Incredible work! Very impressive. So, what's the cheapest way for me to go about getting the power functions I need to drive that thing?

16% refers to the total CPU usage across all cores. For a 6-core hyperthreaded system - that's 100% of one hyperthreaded core. sub-core? I don't know what they call that. What I can tell you is that writing parallel algorithms for most things is quite hard. A lot of the time it's not even possible. Since the program is responsive under most circumstances, I seriously doubt anything will be done about this. Edit: Also - most requested feature for me right now - A ship date.

Just let me know when it's September. :) I wonder how I can become a beta tester...

Maybe we should post a bounty for anyone who can come up with that info. I still don't think we'll get an answer until they're ready to ship.

I would love if I could just totally disable that rightmost pane permanently. Lego gives us a pretty awesome product for "free". I think we're just going to have to put up with their obnoxious adware.

Don't listen to the haters. The cockpit is awesome. I actually think that was the most impressive part of the ship! Nice work. It perfectly fits this ship and shows a lot of creativity and willingness to think outside the box. After that, the engines are most impressive. I wish I had the lxf file to dissect those. Very nice!

It feels good, strangely, to know I'm not the only one having trouble with this. Did you publish the lxf files somewhere? I'd like to spend a few minutes applying what I've learned to someone else's problem. Thanks a lot. Better than the UCS? Only because there is a lot left to the imagination! It's very nice of you to say. I probably wouldn't have the two separate a-frames for an ISD. It's actually a take on the Venator. I've just been prototyping the front two thirds of the craft while I nail down the scale and shape. There has to be room for an open hangar bay along the top ridge of the hull. It won't be a scale model of the Venator as seen in RotS. It's primarily a toy, so I'm taking a lot of artistic license.

Thank you. I have much to learn, apparently. I think what I might want to do is make a video showing how I put the model together to see if I can get any feedback on easier ways to get it done. There are still a lot of tricky connections coming. I'm actually not sure I'm going to stick to that 1/9.95 slope. If I have to redo that... bah. Since LDD doesn't give you anything resembling a protractor, I think I'm going to start building more jigs to get pieces where I want them.

Wow! That was fast! How did you do it? That took me hours to get to that point! Amazing. Thank you so much. But seriously... how...did you...do that??? I noticed the lxf upload thing as well. I thought it was because I was new or something. luckily, the zip was accepted. Believe me, I'm holding my breath for 4.0. I try not to check for the update more than once an hour, though, because that would seem a little over-obsessive. Because I can easily calculate the angles and distances, it's actually been easier to model parts of it in sketchup. I haven't gotten far with ldraw or SR3D builder. I just want to get the frame completed and purchased as soon as possible because I have so many other problems to solve like the specifics of the landing supports, the sliding hangar bay doors, hanging the decks parallel to the ground, the carry handles, the specifics of the top hull hinges to allow easy access to the interior. And the entire interior...

Welcome. Let me know if you want me to fix any dimensions or if you just want to go at the file yourself. I pretty much eyeballed it, and even then, I know I got the proportions way off on the right side. Looks like you found my LDD post.

I'm doing some prototyping for a fairly large project. It's not large compared to some, but at over 80 studs long and 60 studs wide, it's the biggest Lego model I've ever undertaken. It started innocently enough. My son told me what he wanted to make and I threw together a perfectly play-with-able model in about an hour. But I just couldn't stop refining the design. I've found it pretty helpful to model it in LDD because I can export to brickstore. When I'm through, I'll probably buy the whole set of bricks because I'd rather not deplete the overall lego collection by much. I don't have nearly enough legos to finish the project and I anticipate it will remain assembled for several years. I'm finding some of the technic connections hard to make. Take this segment of the model, for example: Literally, hours and hours have been spent getting that into the right shape. Once or twice, I rebuilt the model from scratch to deal with rounding errors causing parts to not quite line up. Even now, the hinge align tool does some hilarious stuff. This setup has been very difficult to get: Seeing it put together, it probably doesn't look that hard. I've had to refine my LDD techniques over and over again to get this. I can't even describe the pain. I use a scaffolding to get the pieces into basically the right position: The slope of the ramp is about 1/9.95. That is, for every 10 studs along the hypotenuse, it rises one stud and travels 9.95 studs horizontally. The goofy scaffolding is so I can place the vertical beams 9.95 studs apart while keeping them vertically centered. The green post on the nose is to place the model flat on the building surface again when it gets jarred away from being level from time to time due to using the hinge align tool or something else. But I still haven't gotten it on the other side: I'm using a blue pin here because I can't fit a regular black one in this spot. Which is ridiculous because I'm pretty sure it's just a copied and flipped version of the other side. And that's just scratching the surface. The whole model is quite a bit larger and contains many other difficult-to-represent connections. Any ideas out there? TechnicFramePuzzle.zip

I tested my sketchup skills to see if I actually could do your desk in 30 minutes. I've really only been using this program for a handful of hours now (granted, I've used a lot of other modeling tools...), and this is what I got in 30 minutes. Also available here: http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=3bc5d0999dea6ffa59717a8b6a0e480b I'm posting the LDD issue now. ZbljDeskTry.zip

Ha! Nice work. I *really* think you should give Google sketchup a try. I've been putting it off for years and it finally clicked for me this week when I spent some time with the Toolbar tutorial series: http://www.youtube.com/user/SketchUpVideo#grid/user/E480605E31C66C19 Maybe if I teach you Sketchup, you can have a look at some of my LDD nightmares. :) I can probably model your desk in Sketchup in about 30 minutes. maybe less. I have a technic model that I have spent hours tricking into the right shape and I still don't have all the pins in place.