bonox

yep - but if you were playing the house on fire game properly you'd get the photos and/or computer backups, since all lego is replaceable - even the #3 red connectors and black 19L flex axles.

the 8466 has no equivalents (and when buying second hand make sure you get the proper wheels with it - I see some sellers putting the 9398 type crawler wheels on instead). The silver champion is pretty much identical to the licensed williams and ferrari F1 sets (8461 and 8674) Mind you , this is 3-4 years after the original request. I'd have said if you can find an 8466 for reasonable money, go with that one, then think about the F1 later if you want it. If you have both, you can put together NK's most awesome supercar too!

Looks great - wonderful effort as a C model; very clean lines, love the dual rears.

an example from nerdzforprez I believe you can put something like 150-200psi in those smaller plastic bottles before the bottle fails, however there won't be anything like that in these ones given the tube attachments. His is throttled through the valve and essentially unloaded, so the run time is probably a fair bit longer than if you wanted to actually drive it around. At any rate, how keen are you on dragging a few 2 litre bottles around with your MOC?

the little crane truck has dual rears as well doesn't it? 8436? the model team units often had dual rears as well, like the 5580. The issue, on the 8285 especially, is the axles bending!

One of the main tenets of lego for me is the alternative models - at least two ideas from someone else, before you start making your own. It's a fundamental reason behind a modular building toy, otherwise you might as well just glue the bits together like an airfix model. I keep a few that I really like 8053 - the harbour crane. sort of similar to the 42009 stacker. 8880 - the original F1 car 8862 - combine harvester - looks much better than the later A-model one. I have quite a few of the racers, but one of the major things I don't like about them is it's always a 1 model event. The silver champion for example came with two but the williams and ferrari F1s, the 599 and the enzo were all one model only. It's not just the licensed stuff - the 42030 has an alternative!

damn - just lost a large typed reply because I wasn't logged in. SUmmary: energy storage requires pressure and volume. Lego uses plastic at, what, 40psi guage, before the hoses pop off nozzles and the little plastic tanks start trying to become spheres. The examples given use pressure at least an order of magnitude higher than that. A baldwin low pressure steam locomotive works at about 350psi and LMS made a prototype with a high pressure boiler running at 1800psi. Consider how much air you get out of a scuba tank - 11 litre stores about 2300L of atmospheric air at 3000psi, giving you about an hour of use. (I picked that example because you can get an hour of use from lego batteries). Now the regulator pressure of a scuba tank is approximately 0 psiguage at the surface, not a high working pressure, so your usable working time at 40psi would be much much less. A scuba tank is also very heavy and in scale terms, and this will not improve. pressure doesn't drop just because you store it in a smaller tank. Let's continue this idea with an example: In scale terms, a lego cylinder might use, say, 4mL of swept volume. To get 100 strokes out of it would require 400mL at 40psi. This is already much much bigger than the largest TLG set of two storage tanks (the blue tow truck). Consider also that to keep 40psi at the end of the run, you'd need a much larger storage volume, and/or higher storage pressures, meaning you'd now need a regulator. Carrying milk bottle sized air vessels doesn't really fit in with most models. You could improve this slightly with air re-use (ie multiple expansion engines) however this gets complicated fast. Finally I have some other points - air receivers of all types are: 1. expensive 2. require identification - eg serial numbers that the manufacturer needs to keep track of 3. require periodic testing in accordance with local legislation and work health and safety requirements. 4. turbines are loud and high pressure air release at the end of a cycle is also loud - you'd have to consider supressors and what it would mean to the company image if kids didn't use them. The brake air release on heavy trucks is loud, and they're often throttled! 5. Support equipment - high pressure tanks need high pressure valves, fittings and pipe and/or regulators and with high cylinder seal pressures comes a need for lubrication as well. If you want long term use, you'll probably also have to consider water drains as well.

it's not far out of 42009 territory.

i've always loved this model team version http://www.mocpages.com/moc.php/300596 And there is a car transporter from TLG - the 8109 innit?

at its most basic, a 'real life' item can make use of any device required for the job - an arbitrary gear ratio, friction materials (the limited slip diff example), custom housings, offsets, materials etc to get the job done. ANY product made using a limited selection of COTS parts (which is fundamentally what LEGO is) may be able to manufacture a range of outputs beyond the available inputs; it will naturally take many more parts to manufacture a 12.66:1 gear ratio out of stock 8/12/16 etc cogs than a custom single pair set. Same argument goes for configuration - anything not built on square lattice or multiples of available angles through type 1-6 connectors, axle/pin connectors etc will naturally be more complicated if you have to built it using more than one custom part. I'm not sure about the hydraulics argument either - fundamentally a motor directly coupled to a LA is very simple and probably less so than the equivalent real life unit of a motor, hydraulic pump, valving (distribution and check), filters, couplers, piping and cylinders. The real ones will also use bearings instead of letting fixed parts slide inside other fixed parts. Same argument with seals. I'll give you a super simple example - make a G-clamp out of two parts in lego - ie the real one is essentially a shaped frame and a screw. There's no way you can beat that in a system of straight or straight plus angle arrangement of parts that doesn't include any screw mechanisms. That's not to say it can't be manufactured, like a multi-part frame and LA for example, but it will always be more than two parts custom made for the job. different one - a sequential drum style gearbox shift mechanism. An interesting detour on this conversation would be "using a limited array of parts, how would you create the same result". The answers can look very different to the 'original' but work nonetheless. This question after all is why we now have a palette of hundreds of parts when Expert Builder started out with, what, six? Gear, axle, rack, pulley, bearing/plummer block (the brick with holes) and the bush.

i've a feeling that the designers are doing all sorts of things from tiny to huge - but only some are picked for production, giving the impression of big steps.

Would it not become hard to synchronise multiple LA's without mechanical linkage? If one of a pair slips on its clutch, it'll be permantly out of sync with its mate. Would seem to be a much more elegant solution to torque limit (white clutch gears) the source drivetrain of the LA's than trying to get a bunch of individual motored LA's to stay together. Different torques will also give the same problems if, for example, your digger bucket is asymmetrically loaded.

does anyone have a source for alternative springs that fit the 6.5L units? I have a huge collection of grey units with soft springs. It'd be nice to know of a supplier with hard spring equivalents I could substitute. Should be much cheaper than the going BL rate of about 2-3 bucks for a complete yellow assy.

you're not actually listening to what is being said. The only way to do what you've asked is to overdrive the motor - in a DC motor, this will be increasing its working voltage. You'll also have to do this without being current limited (or the voltage will fall again). Neither of these things can be done with the factory battery box. You'll have to plug your own battery or wall powered supply into the motor, acknowledging what everyone here has said about the risks of letting the smoke out of the motor. Again though, all products fail at the weakest point and as countless people like Jeremy Clarkson have proved over and over is that "more power" is often not the smartest way to improve performance - thus the comments about simplifying your drivetrain, checking you don't have binding parts, ensuring you don't have competing gear ratios on different axles etc.

i'll be curious about how you mount them. Unlike tubeless car tyres, you can't just push them over the lip of the rim and then expect them to seat themselves - you've got to get the tyre 'bead' into the wheel groove. Best wishes with it - I love seeing support equipment being made :)

8479: Barcode Truck 8880: Supercar 8455: Backhoe or 8480: Space Shuttle - not sure which i'd pick here 8868: Air Tech Claw Rig 8485: Control Centre II i'm curious about age groups and whether i'm the only studded collection in the list

at a basic level you will need IR receivers (with hand controllers), additional motors (either plain or servo) and a collection of bits from your imagination to couple the whole lot together. Have you seen someone else's RC Mog that you wish to copy or are you asking how to do it from first principles? If the former, please post a link or ask the original posted for the parts he/she used. If the latter, how long is a piece of string? I would suggest that you would be best off beginning with LPEPower's steering modifications which will make motor control of it much less harsh. perhaps try these for inspiration

If you use bricklink, brickset etc, put in a factory set number and the catalogue will tell you the parts requested. eg http://www.bricklink.com/catalogItemInv.asp?S=8868-1 If you are talking about making a custom design, you'll have to find a parts list from them, or a list uploaded to rebrickable.com for example. Either way, the process is the same.

They are all 9V with the IR receiver adding PWM for speed control. The battery boxes are also current limited to about an amp - much of the data on Philo's site is unlimited current and some values are elevated voltage as well. There has never been a problem applying high current third party motors to lego - the question is "why would you bother ripping up the plastic components to do so?"

I think it's especially telling that what you think you see and what is actually true can be quite different, particularly if you are familiar only with one theme. This one links nicely to this post: http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=103267entry2074566 where the Technic guys may think some part or class of parts is unused, but they show up by the squillions in other themes.

very clever, some great little details and a great look - lovely model.

Cardboard with holes? www.science-sparks.com/2014/09/01/easy-lego-filter

Thanks to your fabulously eloquent comments plethora, i'm off to investigate a bunch of themes i've never considered before.

what does the permutation say? 10E8 ways of putting six 2x4 bricks together? On that basis alone, it'd be hard to put a cap on 'ideas'.

perhaps a better way would be to say that power is the product of torque and angular speed. (P = T * w) For any given motor, power (P) is always fixed, but you can get more torque (T) by gearing down (ie you can get more twisting 'force' which is called torque) but at the penalty of lower speed (w). Or you can get higher speed by gearing up (more output turns for a given number of input turns) at the penalty of reduced torque. The downside of changing the gearing is a loss of power which goes into friction of the gears/axles etc.