Ankoku

Although the movement is a bit jarring, I like the concept. The idea that a side bar becomes the base, runner bar is rather good. I like it.

@Lixia75 You may want to take the question here:

Great work. I love how smooth it is. I was kinda expecting to hear the balls on the teeth of the curves more. That said, the sound of it running is still soothing. Well done!

They stole the images, they didn't reverse engineer anything, neither were they the ones to buy the eBay Sariel car auction. If you look at their other sites, non-LEGO related, they just takes images from anywhere of anything and stick them on their site at random prices. The idea is to get someone to buy it and then never actually ship them anything at all or as people have mentioned, the equivalent of a potato. That is how the scam works. All they need is for the images and prices to be temping enough for people to enter their creditcard details. Be it wigs, LEGO, motorcycle helmets or anything else. One person who got ripped off by them, had bought 11 items off them. O_o;

I don't see where the issue is. e.g. these are template sites, all claiming to have the same contact details, the domain registered by the same company. If one goes down, it doesn't matter as there are plenty identical sites to choose from. If you are doing investigative journalism, the number of sites just makes life easier and how quickly disappear tells a story. The links I have suggested deal with just this type of shady company and their forever transient style of doing business. There difference here, the hook from a journalism point of view, is that you not only have customer fraud, but you have them using other people's IP and it is one of those people who is making the complaint. If it was just another person who got scammed, that isn't that interesting. When it is a IP owner who is in the mix as well, it makes it far more of a story.

There is also: https://www.actionfraud.police.uk/report_fraud

Amusingly, said company is an issue within the Wig community. That seems to be the origin of this particular company. https://wigs-scam-alert.com/chinese-rip-off-web-sites/

Not entirely true. This company has been around for 10+ years and at least some of it is UK based, since they are posting stuff from within the UK and are registered here. Also, finding their endless torrent of fake sites is easy, so you don't have to worry about the most recent ones already being shut down. @Sariel Another one to consider is this: https://www.facebook.com/fakebritaintv/ The guy in the banner image is actually from BBC's Watchdog, but this particular show is more specific in nature, purely dealing with fake and scam companies (Watchdog often dealt with big legit companies and their, on occasions, dubious practises). Also, it provides an email rather than online form for contacting them.

@Sariel You may want to try this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006mg74/contact It is a program on the BBC which deals with rogue companies, scams etc. With this and LEGO England, you can present a story they can go with and it brings attention to a type of scam which people may not otherwise be aware of. Save those poor old pensioners from receiving potatoes in the post. Since you are actually the creator of the MOC, they may take more interest in it, than if someone random contacted them. On a side note: Images on the site are split into 3 categories. Images unique to the branding of the site are on jhimg.com Images of products are on alicdn.com (The latter being the CDN for Alibaba.com) Images relating to the eCommerce software they are using are hosted on the site itself. Using the jhimg.com domain, you can start to spot copies of the site, like this one: http://www.simple-many.com/sale/index The branding on that site is a broken image which returns this: No Such Key The specified key does not exist. Host ID: img-like-new.oss-cn-hongkong.aliyuncs.com And yeah, there is Chinese all over the shop in the coding for the page. The company in question, registered to the address is: QANDIES LIMITED In 2003 it was listed as a mail order company. In 2007, it was listed as a Retail Sale Via Mail Order Houses Or Via Internet Directors are: Mr Guohui Qin, WENJUN LOU, MS CLARE MARIE TANKER The oldest of the 3 is 42. This is how the scam seems to work, if you dispute an order: https://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/popreal-do-not-order-from-this-company-scam-scam-scam-c993749.html There are lost of complaints here about the place on Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=+2.27+Romer+House%2C+Lewisham+High+Street%2C+London%2C+SE13+6EE+&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b#lpqa=d,2 Google has it listed as: PerfeHair, Hair extensions supplier More variants: https://www.outmanlets.com https://www.gamesir.hk The list of them is endless.

@rskamen I should mention here, since I got caught out by it myself, that you will want to use something like https://bricksafe.com/ to upload images and post them here. You will still get a thumbnail and every. That said, you will avoid hitting the very small EuroBricks attachment limit. e.g. the limit is for all images ever. Rather than a limit on any one image. All of the images of my ball factory, are uploaded to and linked from BrickSafe.

We should probably move comments like this to a different thread. Including my own. I didn't mind the steering solution they came up with for 42030. It wasn't that smooth, but much like with the ball factory, I learnt something new from the solution they went with. It also highlighted how strong the servo is. When doing the inventory BrickLink purchase for the ball factory, I actually did it all by hand. It was exhausting. I also found sellers by hand as well. Now, I import the parts lists and use many of the tools on offer in terms of automating seller choices. That said, I still remove the odd item, to see if I can reduce the overall cost by a significant amount. I also, once sellers have been chosen, check out their inventory, to see if they have anything else I feel I may need in the future, or really obscure stuff.

When you have built this, then you can call yourself a man: That model left my fingers and thumbs destroyed. It might be worth searching for: LEGO GBC Wheel on YouTube. There are quite a few on there and to be honest, just looking at a still of the wheel is all the instructions you need. I have tried a few designs by doing that. Obviously, this is tricky when you don't have many parts to work with. You may want to look into buying some old Technic sets off eBay. When you aren't interested in a pristine box etc. you can get them for a reasonable price. I ended up buying a number of white Technic Space Shuttles. The less iconic sets which were sold at a mid-range price point tend to be quite common and cheap 2nd hand and thus a good choice for parts. Those space shuttles provided many parts for the Akiyuki Pinball machine.

Inspiration goes both way :) I wish the pickup and put was smoother. Is cool though.

I guess the other question is, if there aren't instructions, are there more photos? :) If you look here at the start of Akiyuki's video, you see him using a wheel lift to raise balls up after they exit the ball factory: It is even there in the preview image. The ReBricker version of the ball factory allows you to either let the balls feed back to the start, or exit out like you see in this video. There are many different wheels out there, some with instructions. You can find some of them in the general GBC thread here: There are also instructions for an Akiyuki wheel lift as part of his Fork to Fork machine. It is large, so it would be separate to the ball factory itself.

Some good stuff: Interesting that the wheel slider one has a fly wheel at the front and at the back.

Below, you can see the difference in height between the two pieces: Now it isn't much, but if you stick an axle in one end, it makes the other worse as it tilts. I can get both axles in, but it is tighter than I would like for my own personal preference. So since the ball rod is now locked in place via the Technic, Axle and Pin Connector Angled, I am happy to just leave it sat as is, without axles.

You are best asking how far @9v system got with his. This is the thread for it:

Ended up going with a couple of these:

It is interesting, seeing his change in approach to it between the 2010 and 2012 version of the machine.

It seems very strained having it pulled up high enough to get the axle in.

Great work! I have got my sticks now, so I will be making it before long. In other news, I am working on the Pinball machine currently and have come across an issue in the instructions which disturbs me: There is nothing to stop the area highlighted from rotating, making the entire thing somewhat redundant. It can rotate 90+ degrees and the first ball will basically push it down below where it would be functional. Since you can't see how this is achieved in the video, I suspect this isn't the solution Akiyuki would have gone for. Are the instruction lacking some axles to push through the holes?

This doesn't seem to far different from what Akiyuki did and Sariel has done in selling his car. And this is LEGO endorsed. https://www.bricklink.com/v2/community/newsview.page?msgid=1106293

This looks like a question for @Berthil! Surely it is mainly a matter of getting the angles of the rails correct?

@MAB Bravo!

Has anyone found a preference in what spring strength to use? I have seen more than one type used.