Moz

My worst ones I don't have photos of, and even today I rarely take photos of things are are obviously too awful to be useful. So my "worst MOC I have photos" of still has useful features. And some of these are just "MOC built when there weren't a lot of pieces available. My first MOCs were built using the 854 go-cart and no other Technic, because that's all I had. Which meant there was some awful stuff, I built a jeep model but the colour I had most bricks in was white, and I only had enough of that for ~1/3 of the outside of the model. So it was done in "dazzle" camoflage, meaning "random colours", since that's what I had.

Have completed it, and taken a few photos but don't have time to edit. Here's the inline gearing down to make the rotate function less circus-like. Gears skip more than I'd like because the gears are only held together by friction on the axle below them. But that's how I got 1.5 stud spacing on the axle holes to make this work (not enough room for bigger gears without redoing the motor position).

latest build area (proper desk is packed away in garage waiting for us to have more space). This is taking apart the boom from 42009 B model. Building on a table with takeaway containers is a bit hard when I'm just assembling a new set using official instructions, for modifications and especially MOCs it makes things much harder. Just motorising the 42009 B model meant a lot of opening boxes and trying to find the bag with the parts I needed. In the end I gave up and BrickLinked a few of the key parts that I'd spent a couple of hours looking for. Today when taking it apart I found some of them... bah! Still, I have video of the B model motorised ready to edit and post. Making the rotate motorised meant rebuilding a chunk of the boom and and I ended up gearing it down more than I expected so that was a bit of a hack.

I've been told that single stud parts are ok, anything more is not. Specifically, I was teasing Ricco (Technic designer) at Brickvention about it, as the chassis rails on my road train were beams held together with 2x3 plates. I could have done the same thing legally using only ~30 cents worth of parts... for each of the 400-odd times I needed that connection. IMO it's one of those things that is discouraged rather than completely banned. Probably more discouraged when it's structural.

Yes, but some Lego-and-stuff shows are open to anything that looks like Lego. Brickvention in Australia, for example, just requires that the visible parts of the model look like Lego - you can use non-Lego plastic parts on the outside, plus internal reinforcing and parts made of whatever you like. It makes the model building more impressive, but obviously pure-Lego models tend not to look as exciting. No-one's going to make Ryan McNaught's giant helicopter model using only Lego parts.

Everything goes into "spare" parts eventually. A while ago I bought multiple copies of 8043 and 8258 purely for parts. At the time I could get 8043 cheaper than the PF and LA parts I wanted out of it, so it was "profitable" to buy them just for those. The MOC I wanted them for was red, so I had a lot of spare yellow liftarms. The 8258's I bought for the wheels and red liftarms. What made it work was at the time the $AUS was up against the euro, Tomte had those two sets on special, and he offers the German post "30kg for 50 euro to anywhere in the world" deal. I think I got three orders from him like that, plus one with 4x9398 when that came out, but that was a group buy so it doesn't really count. The others were literally straight out of the box and into the parts bins and then onto the model. Right now I have the container lifter from the 42009 B model assembled (and mostly motorised), plus a few City sets, and that is all. The rest is "spare parts".

It appears to be showing force or compressive strength rather than power. What are you trying to demonstrate or test?

Love it! Cool idea, well executed.

Most PC PSUs are switch mode and it's at least theoretically possible to change the output reference to get a different voltage. So my first thought would be to see whether it's possible to get 9V directly out of the "12V" rail, rather than using a linear regulator. But that's when I went "no, waste of time, you're already losing so much power than an extra 3W here and there isn't really going to matter. On the other hand, if you're using a PSU anyway it would be worth looking at if only because changing a couple of resistors is likely cheaper than buying a linear regulator. Something like this

To me they're wildly overpowered for the job, so they lose a lot of power when they're pumping out the 9W or so that a Lego motor uses. They usually have a 5W or more fan, for starters. If I want that I have a 3A lab power supply on my desk already. Only if I was powering a display at a show where I had 10 or more motors running would I look at a PC power supply. And I'd try to gimmick the 12V rail to give me 9V directly, rather than using a linear regulator.

A long time ago I modified one of those old battery boxes too. I added a 3.5mm audio socket near the buttons so if fitted in between the batteries. That way it was still usable with batteries in it. The socket I used has a built in switch that operates when something is plugged into it, so I ended up with quite a usable device. Just be aware that they have quite a low current limit - 3A or so and the wiring will get quite hot.

Here's the lifting head modified to have two driven axles, so I can motorise rotation as well as release: (click for bigger) (the new mechanism is sitting on axles poking out the side of the existing one) More details: (bigger) The colours are purely what I have easily available, so I'll fix those up before I actually fit it. Waiting for a pile more "technic angle connector with two axles", there are 5 in the photo when there should be six (the closest one, under the red liftarm, is missing). Also, the 8T that drives the turntable is offset one stud to the left to make the drive easier. It still works. Note the complexity of the "platform" where the 14T bevel sits - there's two 8T under that to shift that axle back to the centre of the turntable.

that's pretty amazing. I'm impressed.

Ow! $20 each! Owowowow! Maybe a monocycle? You'd be better off with the lime uglywheel because that's at least affordable. Those were common-ish at one stage and a friend now has at least four, specifically so he can build vehicles with them.

That's actually a dicycle, They used to be more common but they hamster easily and that makes them very unsafe for anyone in front of them. They're kind of fun but tend to be large, making them a pain to store, so few people bother making them.

Since I'm uploading video in another thread I thought I might as well do a quick one of my 42009 motorisation. The container lifter is actually really easy to motorise, the body is quite sparse and it's almost as though the designers thought about it. I dropped a servo in over the steering and an XL motor in behind the diff with almost no effort at all. Adding motors to the boom was a bit more tricky, and I haven't bothered with the rotation (yet). But the gearbox was so big that the final model is about the same size. The L motor lifts the boom, I left out the clutch gear so my lift is faster but it struggles when the boom is extended. There's two more M motors for extension and grab. Pictures on my web site (yes, I put a manual steering knob on the back of the servo. To match the original, of course).

One end is fixed, the other rotates. Imagine you have a battery under the turntable and a motor above it, and you want to connect them. In the first video I used coloured ribbon cable so it's easier to trace it through the turntable, but Lego motors use ribbon cable too, so it's a perfect example. I'm also more willing to twist a short length of $3/m ribbon cable than a $10 Lego electrical extension cable. If DrJB can't make a video of his demonstration, or explain why my demonstration doesn't match the situation he has at his end, I think we might have to give up and just accept that what everyone else experiences is definitive. FWIW, I'm using my cellphone and out $10 worth of Lego on my living room floor above, so I do wonder why DrJB doesn't do something similar and just produce a video of his own. Ideally he'd motorise it, so we could see a battery box underneath powering an M motor spinning itself round on top.

ok, sorry about my hands in the way but I had to twist this one about 3 full rotations to get it as twisted as it is. I've used very flexible electrical cable that's about the same size as pneumatic tubing, since I have two different colours available. This stuff is very flexible silicone-insulated stuff, I can tie a thumb knot in it that's ~15mm at the widest point. I tried to keep the top section untwisted so it's obvious that all the twisting is happening on one side of the bend that pokes up. I still don't know how this is supposed to work, but I'm willing to upload another video so you can explain what's supposed to happen and exactly what I'm doing wrong to get the hideous mess that I and other expect. Are you expecting the single pneumatic tube to slip around on one end of the attachment so that rather than twisting it has effectively got the slip ring that Efferman talks about?

That looks great. Similar to what I did, only made by someone with much better woodworking skills :) I think I've posted a link before, but here's my setup: http://moz.net.nz/lego/2011-12-misc/ Just be careful of the "it needs to be a little bigger" problem :) Also, for sorting a lot of Lego this string based sifter works really well (I tested the idea with a real tennis bat before I built them). Slightly labour-intensive to make, but well worth it when I was taking the road train apart. The smallest holes were 10mm spacing but laced diagonally, so about 7mm nominal centres or about 6mm square holes. The nylon line was from the fishing section at the local big box hardware shop, it was the thickest line I could find there.

OK, I just grabbed a turntable and some ribbon cable (so it's easier to see it twisting), and made a little video. Can you point out what I did wrong?

Will definitely twist up the cable that runs through it. This is exactly how rope makers work - and there are Technic examples around if you want to look at them. The easiest way would just be to make one and see what happens.

The problem with that with only 7 steps the servo can't turn very far or the steps become unreasonably large, and they'd always have to gear it down for steering. I wonder if a mechanical servo/slave couple be made, using (say) a large linear actuator driven by an M motor, then mount a switch on it that turns one way or the other depending on the difference in angle between the servo and the actual steering. I suspect the large hysteresis in Lego switches would cause problems.

I'm slightly amused that the 8258 dumper has walls that are slightly too high for the wheel loader to clear. In the meantime, I'm trying to motorise the B model from 42009. It needs 7 of 8 channels from the remote control but it seems pretty straightforward. Unfortunately that leaves me one channel for a B double to carry some more containers.

I think that when a major part of the model depends on completely non-Lego parts it's not good to have it in the Hall of Fame. Push that and at some point you've got a non-Lego model with some Lego bits decorating it, and where do you draw the line? For me, the line is "would not work without the non-Lego". With Jennifer's crane, take the metal bits out and it doesn't work at all, so it's not a good fit for a Lego hall of fame. edit: remember that there are people making metal Lego-compatible parts. Would a "Lego" rock crawler with a metal chassis and transmission go into the hall of fame? If not, why not? It'd definitely not be allowed in any of the trial truck contests, for example.

Maybe also consider a proper block grabber using bent liftarms and probably rubber 2-long parts for extra friction.