Moz

Since I have more money than sense I've been collecting cheap round bricks for some time. Partly for building trees, but also so I have something for excavators to dig in. But looking at the BWE, I think it's going to need quite a lot of re-engineering to be capable of digging while slewing. I suspect at least one XL motor one the end of a shaft made of 2x2 round bricks, or hopefully a 32 axle, then geared down a chunk at the drive connection. But I've shifted from being on the fence about this model to being quite keen to get one now that I've seen Sariel's review. In many ways it's my ideal model - a giant parts pack with a decent number of a new, useful part. And only one motor, of a type I only have a couple of (I bought several 8043's for the motors a few years ago when they were cheap... cheaper than BL'ing the electric bits).

That's really impressive. The combo of finally a decent propeller and the high speed motors is genius. I like that you have a decent steering angle too, so you can get the maneuverability.

with point 12: always on, I am less of a fan of that. The gap between a couple of microamps to keep the switch sensing circuit alive, and a few milliamps to keep the BLE module listening is often significant. I have some SeeSense lights that do this, and they run flat in a week or so if I don't use them or charge them. Admittedly the battery is much smaller, but it's worth keeping in mind that people will not be using every BuWizz they own, every day or every week. Quite likely a lot of them will end up in the back of a box somewhere for months at a time, to be pulled out when a model is finished. It would be annoying to have to charge them before being able to connect at all. I'd rather have six months life and a button than one month and not have to go to the enormous effort of pushing the button. A "24 hours then it goes to sleep" mode might make the "deep inside my MOC" people happy, or make it yet another user setting :)

That's pretty impressive. I've always struggle with trolley rope tension and your solution is nicely elegant. And the half width liftarms make it all quite compact too.

Yes, but it's much easier to cut half a stud worth off the end of an axle than to join beams together. I've done that just to get black axles in whole number lengths cheaper than I can buy them, and I suspect that's going to become even more necessary now that colour vomit has infected axles.

I didn't even realise they'd been bought out. Any idea when TLG is going to integrate them with the main Lego line?

It looks interesting, seems you traded speed for traction? And a lot of the effort is getting the code to work, based on the number of fails I saw :) I can't find it on YouTube, but there's this and a

And most tracked cranes and excavators use hydraulic motors the same way. Mining trucks are usually diesel-electric like trains. Doesn't stop Lego from putting shaft drive setups in them. I agree it would be odd, but less odd than if Lego built a model diesel-electric system. What they could do is a set of wider curves, which I reckon the train guys would love, but make them so they stack next to the existing ones. That would give us three gauge options and really open up what you can do with train models. Well, that and some 6-10 stud high train wheels :) Something like that would mean you could use the inside or outside of each pair of tracks to get a slightly wide gauge, or the inside of the inner one + outside of outer one for really wide gauge. With current parts that would be ~10cm I think, or 12-15 studs. Wide enough for some really detailed models!

I keep thinking about where the money comes from. With Star Wars there's a big fan community of geeky types who will also buy Lego. With Technic we're seeing a lot of cross-marketing as TLG build sets that will sell to overgrown man-children with money, branded "big boys toys". So the obvious step is to first look for a market like that, then work out how TLG could sell to it. Think broad and sub-$US1000, not super-yachts. So some kind of music maker might work, but it would want to be a copy of Brian May's guitar or a Daft Punk helmet. Maybe an animatronic Freddy Mercury? I do wonder whether a larger scale railway might work - maybe take the Duplo track width but run on the top edge of the sections rather than in the grooves, add some more features, build trains that run on it and start with a Model Team/Technic ultra-detailed locomotive, but also build something like a remote controlled crane carriage, or a container loading setup. That might work in the "new theme" sense because they could obviously just keep adding new stuff, and could tie in with people like Maersk or whatever. Another option is dinosaurs. Sure, they're usually a fascination for the 5-10 year olds, and the walk rather than roll, but animated dinosaurs would be cool. It's something that could be done without programming/Mindstorms, and I suspect very few new parts would be needed to make a couple of walking chassis 20-40cm high, and with the plethora of plates and panels available now skinning them wouldn't be too hard. The big issue is colours - bright orange or yellow dinosaurs are going to look very weird. But Lego doesn't really do a lot of shades of green and brown (especially in Technic!)

I'm with the people who would like to see a return to functional models. Even the really early "big car" models had more functionality than the UTC, and they had hardly any parts to use to actually build the model with. Compared to something like the 8880 the Porsche is more like "ultimate model team" than Technic. I hope the designers can surprise us all, like with the bucket wheel. A cable car or a working boat, or a mechanically programmed cookie decorating machine. Even a new rail gauge, which might sell in giant piles to all the train people, super-accurate model people *and* the modelteam/technic people. I dunno, I'm kind of "anything but yet another car". I realise they don't sell, but that's what I want :)

Yeah, I'm all for locking them. It was funny once. What's to stop anyone else creating a mess of similar junk, encouraged by the moderators saying "if you don't like it, don't look at it". It would quickly turn this sub-forum into a mess of hundreds of "threads" as people competed to post the longest shaggy dog story or whatever... told with Technic to make it on topic. Can we at least try to keep the sub-forum usable to people who don't have the "hide this thread" and "hide all from this poster" plug-ins?

I have done this in the past just by linking the steered trailer wheels to the angle between the bogie and the trailer body. In the crudest case, a pin down from the trailer body attached to a leading steering arm will turn the bogie in the direction the trailer is turning, but with the lag you want. I used something a little more controllable but that is the basic idea.

I've been thinking about rebuilding my quad bike with MTB fat tyre wheels so it performs better off road, but yesterday I was looking at pics from a friend who's been riding around Australia on a DIY solar power assisted trike. He's just switched to a fat tyre MTB with a trailer carrying the panels. So I started redesigning the quad in my head, from scratch, to have two suspended live axles, big wheels and a bigger but lighter bin on the back (current one is rotomolded plastic and is 12kg with the lid). Then I thought I'd better see whether the ideas worked at all, so I made a Lego "sketch". (website) I've used beams to get lateral stability rather than panhard rods, because for a bicycle-based design that makes more sense. You can see where I fitted a panhard on the front, though. Live axles rather than independent suspension because I have a rigid rear axle on my current quad that I will move across, and it's easier to make the parts in my workshop. handlebars come straight up off the front axles because it's mechanically simpler than a series of linkages to bars on the main frame (my current quad does this). Total build time about an hour :) This is more me thinking out loud than a proper MOC at this stage. I just wanted to see whether the idea would work.

Sorry, I meant 7 long, should have looked it up. 7 long... 15 under $1 each, then $2.36 each and climbing. But I note I can get black axle with stop now, which is nice. And the axle pin part that's usually blue is widely available in black. Provided you're willing to pay more than $1 each, or $2 if you want more than 100 of them. {cough}

This. It seems to be getting worse, they appear to be going to red and yellow axles to fix the "is that grey or black" problem. I pay quite ridiculous prices for some rare parts because I am not a fan of the blue pins, but there are now so many that are never made in black, and there is no colour that they're all available in. Fortunately I think I have enough 3 long pin friction in black now. I also gave up a while ago and bought a pile of 12L axles and cut them into 5/7 and 3/9 lengths, because 5 long black axles sell for silly money but 7 and 9 long just don't exist. At least with axles I *can* cut them down. But if TLG did decide to offer "parts packs" of black pins I would be thrilled. Expensively thrilled, but thrilled. Just sell me these parts in black in bags of 1000 already :)

I threw together a quick copy of the axle/suspension and it seems pretty reasonable. There's enough space to add extra gearing or twiddling, and it's an easy way to get two driven axles into a suspended axle. I don't really see the problem. In a way it's more elegant than my "keep the lowloader straight using string" design that I came up with to avoid the saggy look you get with long Lego beams (like the "tow haul" trailer in the current list). This is all Lego, and the attachments even meet the LGM rules AFAIK. Generally an argument from authority is the posters way of saying "I don't have any actual reasons, but I think..." If they had reasons they'd post those instead, and people would respect them for the quality of their argument rather than the size of their embellishments. I still regret that I didn't change universities between my degrees so I could legitimately call myself "MOZ, BE ME" in these situations, rather than "Moz, ME BA" which isn't nearly as amusing. Is there a degree that's just "A" and outranks an ME? Coz then I could be "Moz, A ME BA" (amoeba).

Does Lego have a giant automatic parts sorting machine to deal with the debris from designers, or do you have to take things apart and put them back in the right bin like us normal mortals? Are you ever tempted to "go back in time" and build a set that only uses parts available 10 or 15 years ago? Do designers have little internal contests to use parts in unusual ways? I'm thinking of specialised parts like the "Light Bluish Gray Technic, Pin Connector Block 1 x 5 x 3" which I have seen a couple of times outside the one thing it was designed to do. (and in answer to "have other sets been cancelled"... yes, a few years ago a few lucky people/LUGs got piles of one set that was cancelled after production, without instructions or stickers. I suspect the pain of manually opening bags and sorting parts far exceeded their replacement cost, and melting them down would have been a waste)

Too many - you'd end up with a lot of spare track, battery boxes and assorted bits. If you're in Europe better to order from Lego spare parts hotline, or for the rest of us bricklink from someone in Europe. For my road train I bought several copies of 8043 for the motors and LAs (cheapest way to get them), plus some 8258 when they went on discount (for wheels and red parts), but the bulk of it came from Bricklink. Especially for stuff like bulk long liftarms, there's no way to beat the Bricklink price by buying sets in Australia (where I am) or NZ. Even buying sets cheap in EU via Bricklink or online shops/Amazon, you can't do it.

Your problem is not current, it's voltage. You're right about the 1.2V being the issue - Lego motors are designed to take 9V, from 6 1.5V batteries, and the IR controllers will take 10V or so without problems. The difference between 7.2V from the NiMH and 9V from disposable batteries is significant, you get less power at the same current (and are actually fairly close to the P=VV/R law that applies to pure resistors), so the motors spin more slowly and have less torque. The "1.4V when fully charged" isn't very useful, it will drop to 1.3V or less very quickly when you start discharging the battery. I am starting to experiment with 14500 LiIon batteries (AA sized), because 3 of those in series is a bit over 11V when fully charged, so if I charge them to 3.5V I can safely use them in the Lego battery pack (I short one side of the pack and fill the other). That gives me about 800mAh of capacity, but the LiIon cells are happy to deliver 3A or so and that will power 2 IR controllers with XL motors on them (just not for very long). I'm tossing up using a 3S2P setup with 6 cells, but charging becomes more tricky as the paralleled cells have to be very tightly balanced when I connect them. I looked at NiZn batteries but they're really unreliable and even the good ones tend to fail quickly (to get 6 that work you really need to buy 12, and to have 6 working after 100 cycles you may need to start with more than 12). Likewise "rechargeable alkaline" batteries don't work very well in high-current situations like this. So I've stuck with LiIon 14500 cells. The advantage is higher voltage, of course, but in a way that doesn't visibly modify the Lego. It's not 100% purist, but it's very close and IMO no worse than using disposable batteries.

I suspect that the Technic designers are committed to keeping the steering setup fairly simple, with mostly right angles and avoiding the 8880 style "these five parts only work with each other and only do one thing". It's also fairly tricky to get all the odd angles working together to produce smooth, easy steering while keeping the wheels flat on the ground throughout the steering and suspension travel. I think a lot of people would be unhappy if the new Porsche had VM Bug style "wheels go all over the place when the suspension moves", and it'd be really, really obvious with a wide, flat wheel profiles that go on this car. So we're unlikely to see a new set of special steering parts to give angled kingpins. But given their apparent ability to make new, specialised parts for every darn thing I could easily be wrong. What I'd like to see are a few more of the new connectors. We have been seeing quite a few of them, and it'd be nice to keep adding to that.

According to their website those are actually 3.7V liIon cells with a tiny DC-DC converter in each one. I can't help but think you'd be better off with one converter jammed in the pack. I've been playing with that, but it's tricky to find a pre-made DC-DC converter that does what I want so I'm thinking I might build some of my own. But not right now. There are a few converters on eBay that are cheap but they're physically quite large and because they're adjustable, not especially efficient. But they do work for putting 3 LiIon 14500/AA cells in the battery box, the converter on the other side, and getting 9V out of that into the battery pack so it'll run a motor or three. Capacity is reduced, obviously, you get ~900mAh @ 11.1V = 10Wh compared to six AA eneloops at about 2000mAh @ 7.2v = 14.4Wh, but you get 9V the whole time so better performance from the motors.

That's been my experience. Made worse by them deciding that posting the Volvo loader to me would cost too much so they offered me more sbricks or a (partial) refund. Yay, now I have lots of sbricks that more or less work some of the time but can't be put too deeply into a model because I have to be able to pull them back out easily. It's such a good idea, and so annoying that they don't work properly. That's fine, as long as we're not trying to have a competition. Then you needs rules, and someone has to judge people. I'm still kind of annoyed at Brickvention for their unofficial "looks like Lego" policy that means the winning models every year include non-Lego parts. You just can't build a winning model with only Lego parts because of how the judging is done. A couple of years ago the winning "Technic" model was stunning... until I realised that it only worked because of the non-Lego metal parts and lubrication. I'm inclined to forgive the non-Lego PF extensions because getting a metre of cable out of PF extensions is so unreliable. But "this works because I cut, drilled, made metal parts and glued them in place"... nope.

Yes, those keels fell off if you were not careful. The double-height studs grip much better than normal studs, but tend to split normal bricks, so really only work on the bottom of boat hulls. I would not want to use one in "real water" because they would be hard to find when they fell off. If your boat hit plants or any other obstacle it would probably be the weight that hit.

Bring back the air tank! I think the air tank makes pneumatics much more usable, and for that matter makes it more worth while to have a manual pump as well as the compressor.

I would rather use the slug (a mass that accelerates at 1 foot/sec when one pound-force is applied = ~32 pounds). That was the abbreviation for the system is the apt FFS. But so few people have heard of it that it just causes blank looks.