Bublehead

5:10 1:6 10:4 6:3 3:2 11:1 Well done everyone. Thanks @Jim and @Milan for your efforts in putting this contest together. Hope everyone had fun. This is truly an overlooked theme for Technic models, IMHO, so shining a light on it may help inspire more builders to create even wilder rides in the future.

@Seasider, nothing is going on down in the hole... it just lets my ride sit like the ride does in real life. In the three photos in the entry post, the last one shows the bottom side of the base assembly that it sits on. Four 1x15 beams. That’s it. No counterweight, no additional motors, no smoke or mirrors. It is simply a stack up of 3 beams, the RTC bearing, then the lift and lower drive motors, scissor lift, upper RTC bearing, and finally upper ride carousel. The battery box and IR receivers are tucked between the scissor jack lift arms. The thing is very compact, doesn’t require any ballast to keep It stationary. The picture of the initial ride above shows the base exactly like it sits when down in the hole. What makes this thing perform so well is that RTC bearing construct. That thing is the bomb.

My fear is that the Boost hub is more or less what the Technic version of PU will be like. 2 internal motors, two external ports, total of 4 motorized functions in a model. Let’s you do drive, steer plus two other functions... including LEDs, that’s pretty much more than any Technic model has ever used to date... yeah, this is where Technic PU is headed. You couple the fact that hubs can be linked, and you just keep adding hubs and motors until you get what you need. Never mind having to shoe horn in the space for every hub in your model... just means you have to build bigger models, right? @shadow_elenter, you should love the new PU then.

@aminnich, more like 3 weeks for me, but a lot of hard work by all of the contestants. I wish I had more time for a better presentation, but I could not be more pleased with the performance... I was worried it would not be as fast as the original ride, and it ended up being twice the speed!

Thanks for the review, @Sariel. This is pretty much everything we all fear wrapped up in one place.

@HallBricks, that’s the 40 plus years of playing with Lego finally paying off... some of those relationships are well known spacing, at least to us old schoolers who built a lot of axle/connector constructs to enhance the rather blocky appearance of studded beam Technic models in the old days. And turning octagons into circles is a mainstay of Technic lego

Very well done, the automation is very ingenious, love the slow return to home... well done. A very worthy opponent. Good luck

Well it’s finished.... glad that I could get it in... A note on the sound in the video... the clicking you hear are the two small LA at the end of their travel. This is unavoidable... you can’t pass rotation through a turntable without interaction and the added weight of another motor to engage or disengage a clutch was unacceptable. You can drive the safety harness motor to counter this but I am a lazy carny ride operator... Some vital statistics.... 100% Lego 2 L motors, 2 M motors, 2 IR receivers, 1 rechargeable battery box 30 curved gearracks 2 Turntables Performance: Total all out combined RPM greater than 60 RPM which is twice as fast as the real ride. The original amusement ride has a lower base RPM of 10 and the upper carousel has a 20 RPM limit for a combined 30 RPM total. Can run in forward or reverse on both rotary stages, lift and lower while turning at top speeds. Can extract the contents of any stomach in 30.5 seconds.... Enjoy!

@Erik Leppen, thank you for the comments, and yes, a better photo is coming... I have to Shanghai my wife into being my camera person for the video, since her controlling the ride while I film would be a disaster. Since this ride is built to be “permanently” installed like the original ride, the base mechanics need to be sunk in a well. I can either did a hole in the ground, or I can cut a hole in some foam core board and fake it... at this stage, and seeing how hard Arizona ground is to dig up (seriously, this stuff is like digging through concrete, they use jack hammers to dig post holes...), I am going to go get the foam core and a knife and leave the dirt alone. On the nightmarish safety bar mechanism... yes when faced with having to up my game due to the other awesome entries, I had to get motive force to 16 cars around a huge circle to make the seat restraints work. I had to do it through one turntable interface, so no electric wires. The upper carousel was getting heavy so I had to limit the amount of bracing and get the movement from vertical rotation so it could pass through the turntable, then split that rotation into linear motion using two small LA, this linear motion drives a lift arm lever that passes the linear motion from the center of the carousel, up and over the gear rack central hub, out to the hex universal jointed distribution shaft ring, this drives eight 90 degree transfer meshes that distribute rotational force then to 8 cars, which gang that to 8 additional cars using ball jointed 1x9 links. So yeah, now, at the end and beginning of the ride cycle, the little bars go up and down Before they were just manual... how passé... But this is engineering under pressure, kind of crazy, and not a bad job since I only decided to design and build it 3 weeks ago. My first amusement ride took 8 months. This one took less than 28 days, but the performance is pretty amazing.

12. TRABANT A TC14 Amusement ride entry by Dan Roth aka Bublehead The video: TC14 Trabant by Dan Roth aka Bublehead by Daniel Roth, on Flickr The pictures: Link to topic:

@shadow_elenter, We are cut from the same cloth... I think TFG’s (Technic Figure Guys- pronounced “T”-Figs”) are the perfect scale for amusement rides... I wish I had all my figs from back east, it would make for a better set of riders than minifig Star Wars riders, but I only have one figure here and he really throws the ride off balance due to centrifugal force... It is unfortunate you can only seat 10 riders... going to be some pretty long lines waiting on that ride. At 32 seats, my Trabant is going to crush it on The Midway... maybe even make enough scratch to afford that tooth implant my carny trash wife has been coveting. I bet that thing will stand out like a beacon in that tooth-less smile of hers. Can you image the size if you would have started with a 32 seat bench? Wow...

I have found chains do one thing well, transmit high speed rotation from point A to point B. Note the “high speed” designator which means low/no torque. My Twirl and Hurl armature used shaft driven bevel gears meshing with the turntable gearing to synconize and rotate the two spinning ride heads with the central turntable. Is this the same or similar thing you are using here? After looking closely, I see the gears... maybe shaft driven would work better? That is what I would try.

Ok, here is a nearly finished shot and a top view. Notice the octagon safety bar drive distribution shaft and the mechanism to operate the bars.

That’s ok @Jim, I’m not pushing it, I’m just going to need as much time as possible that night... and thanks for the extra time already, I was amazed at what I got done in two weeks. Having a lot of fun either way

Trying to not waste any time, but I have time to think, if not build, at work today... been working out the safety fencing in my head... I think I have enough parts to just finish a decent presentation... Color scheme is going to be weird... dark blue 3x11 panels for fencing with a red/black/lime/yellow ride... oh well

Well, I am going to post mine as soon as it’s finished... @Jim, what is the actual cutoff time (and time zone) for us fools on the Americas side of the pond? My midnight Friday is your Saturday morning.

So after sleeping on it, looks like I am going to use the Extreme Adventure and Airport Rescue (42069, 42068) as the parts donors to finish this tonight. Hopefully all the rest of the build goes well, the safety bar drive mechanism, though workable by hand has yet to be tried by motor alone, but once I get it all put together it should work. Now comes the “let’s make a pretty video” segment of the competition, which I will gladly concede as a weak spot... I have very little time to script, light, shoot, edit, score and publish a slick vid like my fellow competitors so don’t be surprised by the quality (or lack there of) of my single take, naturally lit, hand held, on a smartphone, crappy audio/video presentation.

And... we come to the end of the parts bins and now have to stop for the night and decide what gets disassembled tomorrow. I got all 4 motors installed, 3/4 of the cars rebuilt with new safety bar, and got motive force to all cars to drive the safety bar. Rebuilt the scissor arms, mounted both IR receivers, rebuilt the rubber tire drive mechanism to prevent tire/axle creep. Added reinforced mounting for scissor arms, rebuilt the LA drive train and shortened the drive/pivot axles back to the journal ends. Remounted the center spire to open up real estate to allow the safety bar drive actuators enough room to get out to the safety bar distribution shaft in the outer rings. I am lacking 2 of these: https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=87408&idColor=11 or the thing would be almost done. A note on performance- after today’s rebuilds, the thing needs a wider base. The speed on both turntables has come up to the point that when in full wobble mode, it now throws the ride off balance on the 15x15 base. Yesterday the drag due to several misalignments (due to my constant prying and twisting to rebuild without completely taking it apart) plus the poor tire alignment on the upper drive made it not as fast. So, during today’s rebuilds, several pins and bushes were added that where missing due to haste on the initial build/design. Time is now the enemy... the design is solid, the features all work, it’s just can I finish the build and get a good video for the contest between now and the cutoff. Wish me luck.

I have 4 sets of cars... 4 black with red seats, 4 Red with Black seats, 4 Lime and Red cars with lime and red seats, and 4 half red half black cars with red and light bg seats.... I can either have 4 sections each one different or go type 1,2,3,4,1,2,3,4, etc... etc... the pictures above have 4 sections of 4 similar cars... I don’t have enough panels to make it completely uniform.... but hey it’s an amusement ride and it’s supposed to look poorly maintained, rickety, and ready to fall apart.

Ok small update... the absolute necessary three motorized functions are in place and work reliably. Upper carousel is now driven so the ride does its thing. Both the base rotation, carousel rotation, and carousel lift work without major disasters or interactions with each other so I can start either rotation in either direction and run the lift while running both rotations either simultaneously or individually. Only thing left now is the safety bars/restraints which will take a lot of time because I have to rebuild 16 ride cars and run the motive force from the motor to all 16 cars. I may do working gates and platform, ticket booth... not sure what will get done by the 7th. The ride would actually work better as an installed ride with a center well to house the lower mechanics and use a poured cement slab apron like many permanent rides installed at amusement parks. To simulate that I am going to make a platform using 5x11 and 3x11 panels mounted on a board with a center hole cut to allow the base to sit below the ground plane. I am simply amazed how fast this thing turns... to scale, I think it would start to make people pass out from too many G’s. The cars are a blur so the ride would be similar to a passenger, except it’s the world blurring not the ride.

@Erik Leppen, I am going to enter it, but I have to finish the details... running out of a few key elements... may have to bust open a Claas tractor as a parts donor... we shall see.

Thanks @Erik Leppen

Do we just change the name of our WIP thread to MOC when we get finished or do we need a WIP and a separate MOC discussion topic thread as well as our entry post in the contest thread?

Ok seems “Trabant” means “satellite”... and since the ride was invented during the “space craze” of the sixties, they were looking for a new space based word to name the ride...

@I_Igor, yes, here in the states Trabant has no automotive meaning for us. And I am not sure why the original ride got this name... maybe a google search is in order...