bonox

I found them a little while ago looking for some classic space monorail stuff, and the scam adviser stuff gets pretty deep, ending up in China with a creation date a couple of weeks ago. From what i've read, someone has a quick way of generating a site with lucrative sounding stuff and prices on it - they take a bunch of orders and then disappear. Something new pops up shortly after. If you were desperate, you could try an initial order of something tiny and see what happens, but it's a gamble you should be prepared to lose.

I think it is more like I said. Ford = MOC designer. Car = lego parts. TLG has no more right to, or control over, the parts any more than which ever third party company made the bolts, castings and metal sheet that Ford used to create the car. The OP isn't trading in the intellectual property of creating the design, merely the set of parts required to construct a design. Just owning all the parts of a car doesn't get you anywhere near being able to assemble that car, nor just ownership of lego parts. Many of us already own the complete set of parts required to build any number of MOCs. Trading them in whatever collection/combination you like doesn't make you responsible to anyone. What happens for example, if you include one extra 'spare' part. It no longer becomes the exact list of parts required for anything! Comparing aftermarket parts for a car is the same as talking about Firgelli linear actuators or any of Efferman's 3D printed parts, which is not an issue here. TLG has no rights of sale in the second hand market either - they don't issue software style license agreements with their parts. Final point is that a lot of MOCs (no comment here on these particular modulars) have parts lists in the public domain even when the BI have monetary values attached to them. To the OP, as a designer, I would believe that custom sets of parts would actually improve your sales of instructions, especially when collections otherwise involve many orders from parts stores, or you are attracting a market that either knows nothing of BL/brickowl/etc or couldn't be bothered learning how to drive it, or perhaps doesn't want to type in a wanted list of parts where no existing catalogue exists.

If you bought and disassembled a car and then advertised it as a pile of parts suitable for building that car, would you expect to have to get permission from Ford etc to do so?

I used third party 19L axles for mine - it could do with a few more than 27 plates to cover the axle though. I'm happy with mine, but I would agree with BB about using plain tube instead. It's a small pain to trim the ends off another set of softies.

I'd love to tell you that it's a stunning model, but my jaw is still on the floor!

chewed bricks

i'm sure we'll find out soon enough :) I'm going for option 2 or 3 though. As a general building technique, I disapprove because it's hard for people to follow you. I'm not against part mods, but it's much easier to cut down a soft axle for barman's engine extractors than to glue up a set that probably requires a jig to get accurate. For you to make something yourself, I do approve :) I'll be curious to see where it goes that couldn't be achieved with a pair of 3 bladed propellers with holes cut out couldn't.

congratulations. And now you've got more spare cash to spend on lego

couple hundred ebay buys and 40 bricklink orders and i've had more problems with BL! Three issues with ebay, but all got solved by talking to the seller. The BL issue is more of a 'take the money and run' kind of scam I think. Still working through that one. In the end though, you're not missing much and you don't seem all that worried about every part being identical period, so just bricklink the missing bits and get on with your life. ebay as a second hand trading bazaar means you're dealing with many sellers who don't have a clue and, perhaps more importantly, don't really care. That's one of the advantages of places like BL, which are more likely to be run by those who know a thing or two and can at least check a set against an inventory and recognise the difference between a 4x10 red plate and a grey differential. That's one of the things you pay a premium for. On the other side, ebay can be a great source of surprises and bargains. Given the ad said 100% complete, you stand a good chance of having it dealt with - perhaps you might suggest a partial refund to the seller equal to the missing parts list from BL. I've got a long way using that approach in the past.

how many combinations did you ask brickficiency to check? How many combinations did you find by hand?

Having driven a couple of link rod steered B model Mack's I would beg to differ. Even freshly rebuilt with a new steering box and all bushes replaced you could get nearly a quarter turn of the wheel either side before taking up all the slack. Do any of the euro trucks use rack and pinion steering? The link style steering of this model is always sloppy compared to cars. Not as much as the model appears to display, but significant none-theless.

have you managed to spot a niche where current crane designs don't work? I'm intrigued! I'm sure Mammoet, Liebherr, Grove etc would all be interested too if you can demonstrate a prototype.

yes. Also worth noting that the same mistaken arguments pop up in a different thread I found today http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=83788 regarding the Control Centre. The same issue was addressed, but not accepted by some parties. Your post in that thread even stated what you repeated here. I have no basis for claiming what TLG's design decisions may have been at the time. You could certainly postulate that for an international market, a product that will accept an AC or DC input is likely to be more robust in the hands of consumers. Extra low voltage AC inputs used to be fairly common (hands up if you ever had a hornby train set or an analogue computer modem) but seem to have died out, probably because it's cheaper/smaller/cooler to put the conversion and regulation circuitry in the plug pack than have to handle it in a small device like a mobile phone for example. Whatever the real answer is, your last sentence is certainly true. On a great plus note, I'm getting a second train controller today, so I can leave it bonded to the engine. Really looking forward to this one

I think i've managed to get enough scraped together to start building and looking forward to it. I can't see why a cam alignment procedure from any real engine wouldn't work with this one, but you could begin by putting cylinder 1 at top dead centre, aligning the cam to have closed valves at that point and then turning it over to see if the rest of the bank lines up. I even have a 12V AC power supply to plug into my controller.

In a different thread someone made a comment about TLG buying up all the great theme ideas, leaving none for the clones. I'm so glad the fans of the world prove that wrong by coming up with brilliant innovative designs like this to keep us all wide eyed like kids again. Great effort and please take a video at some point. I bet it's poetry in motion

That's obviously a great deal of work to produce that video. Just wanted to express my appreciation for your effort and I learnt a few new things as well as enjoying some of the old footage of the real things.

total weight doesn't matter except on bridges. Most roads are limited to tyre pressures or mass grouping by construction (surface, base, drainage and effect of waves moving through the substrate). In my part of the world, less than half of our roads are paved, and many residential streets have 50-60psi limits. In fact we have 40km of road per capita (Netherlands has 7km/capita) This is one reason our axle group loads are much lower than Europeans and we therefore tend to run 10 tyre prime movers and 12 tyre trailers. When you're talking about running on dirt, you get even more rubber on the road - you'd need a lot of sets to build one of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_countries_by_road_network_size This is one of my favourite side loader sets - perhaps a mercedes could be modded up as a prime-mover for this one. It'd have to change colour though :)

a ZX9 cafe racer would take care of the first two points. The third might just be parts that the designer had on hand. I certainly applaud the effort

Phone call might be the best way to find out if some part is end of life, however BnP and PaB are often out of some parts (or parts of a specific colour) that will reappear over time. I don't know how they're stocked (ie left-overs or special spare parts runs after sets are put together) or whether they keep allocations in reserve for broken/missing corrections from current sets, but you may be stuck either waiting a while or having to go to bricklink/brickowl instead.

on a different note and back to the moc, is anyone else having trouble finding 1x6 thin liftarms south of the equator?

would you like an answer, or is it going to be treated as a 'lecture' like posts 29 and 37? The input value is a maximum and may not be what it draws at the rated output. It may also include an inrush current component, however this is unusual and tends to appear in specification sheets for supply installations of large units, not little wall warts. You also state above that transformers are close to perfect because they have no "moving parts/friction/losses". That's not quite right as there are losses involved in quite a few ways in transformers - type, construction, material, frequency etc - and there's a valid reason for transformers carrying cooling jackets or otherwise getting warm. If there were no losses, they wouldn't heat up. Sadly they do (but the new switch mode units much less), which is why they get warm, even when not actually loaded. One of the biggest losses comes from lower quality materials and or construction (where you get significant loss in the core from hysteresis or a poorly constructed laminated core having the plates move around and the friction between moving plates causes heating and noise losses). A big power distribution transformer can exceed 95% efficiency because they are made well with good materials and tend to have fairly tight operating criteria. In this case, the plug pack may be expected to deliver anywhere from 1 to 800mA; at some point in there, it'll probably draw up to 14W. That doesn't mean it'll draw 14W at every load (or even at maximum load). Also keep in mind that if this is an unregulated pack you'll get perhaps 15V out of it with no load. You'll get losses from voltage drop in the rectification diodes, plain winding loss from relatively high resistance wire, core losses, resistance at internal connections (it's a small cheap transformer after all) and if they're a really conscientious designer, they'll account for loss in the wire all the way to the plug. You'll find the new switch mode units have much better performance, which is one reason (along with universal input voltage) for them pretty much replacing all the old linear units. I note from wikipedia that http://en.wikipedia....pter#Efficiency edit: whilst not disputing the rest of your argument about providing external power to something running on batteries, expecting an output frequency would rarely to never happen on a transformer since output frequency is always the same as the input (and the input is specified). You can get lead/lag issues with regard to when the maximum rise and fall occur, but the frequency will always match. The only exception would be a frequency converter or inverter, but if you want to focus on lego, this is getting way out on a limb. also not sure where this is coming from, but all transformers output AC. As far as providing AC to a control box like the lego 'regulator', are you aware of whether the thing has a diode bridge as its input stage? If it does, it would enable it to cope with DC polarity reversal or also accept an AC input, which would match the pictured transformer and not "instantly fry your regulator". I'm aware of a large number of older train power controllers that use 18VAC inputs. edit2: There also seems to be proof of this: http://bricks.stacke...speed-regulator which even has the plastic body with an 9-12VAC input cast into it which would imply that the prior statements about incorrectly labelled supplies is not quite correct. ie, if you have a train controller, you don't need a DC power supply for it.

hey, it's an explanation of something you said is suspicious and misleading. It's neither (both input and output are specified in this example at post 26) and applicable to any power conversion device, whether team america believes in it or not! I'd have thought that was fairly obvious to an engineer and that transformer is not (to my knowledge) advertised as a 14W output device anywhere. Whether it will blow your supply breaker is irrelevant - you're still getting confused by what the nameplate on the device is telling you, whether it's for lego or not.

have you not had much to do with linear supplies? Old laminated core transformers in plug packs were often that poor, especially the unregulated ones. The newer switch mode supplies are much better, but still rarely exceed 80%. The input is also very relevant. There's no point basing your input power requirements on an output without knowing the efficiency of the device. In leiu of efficiency, they will commonly have an input power specified. Probably quite meaningless for tiny output devices, but when you're talking about 1200W (output) computer supplies there's a great reason they tell you that you'll need a 16A circuit if you're running on less than 200V input! Other examples:

the input is 14W, the output is 7.2W. 50% efficiency

it's expensive, yes, but not too expensive. At least as far as new stuff. The second hand market is all over the place - $1200 for an 8275? Obviously there is a limited market for sellers at this level, but nevertheless, stuff does seem to move at prices way beyond the original suggested retail price. IMO, it's only that market that could be deemed 'too expensive', but that's not really of TLGs making.