EdmanZA

This really puts me in mind of one of those Arctic 4x4s from the Top Gear Arctic Special:

That's a great-looking build! My attempt has stalled a little bit due to time constraints, but now I'm feeling inspired to give it a bit of a kick. To keep things interesting and spread the cashflow a bit, I'm toying with the idea of splitting the model into subassemblies (e.g. frame, mandibles, landing gear etc.) and then each month ordering all the required parts for a couple of them and building as I go along. I need to do some tinkering to see how this might affect the overall costs, but I reckon it could be fun.

Thanks, that's fixed it for me.

I found the problem with Brickficiency is that the results can be distorted by the large, high-inventory, high-cost stores that Lobot mentioned. When I ran it, I was getting the only two-three store solutions were from various combinations of the stores and were around £1000-£1100. The four store solution got to around £950 (still mainly from these stores) and the five store took too long to solve. For comparison, the BL average price for the parts was in the region of £550. The sweet spot probably sites around 10 stores, but this is not possible without modifying Brickficiency and would take an extremely long time to solve. Before my Brickficiciency broke, I had planned to search for a subset of parts (around 20-30%) from five stores and then add any addition parts from the full list on to those orders (on the assumption that if they're well priced for a subset, they're probably well-priced for a large set). I'd then repeat the process on the remaining parts. It's also worthwhile bearing in the mind that LEGO offers free shipping on orders over £50 (and cheap shipping below). This can be a good way to get large lots of bulky or heavy parts. This is how I got a good stock of 8x8 plates, 6179, 6565 and 6564 (sorry, SpacePirate )

Me too. I last opened it about a month ago and it worked fine. Opened it the other day and it crashes immediately. This has occurred on two separate machines, one with Windows 7 and the other with Win 10.

I've also been experiencing this recently, both in Windows 7 and Windows 10. I think it may be related to some Windows update or the like, since both machines worked OK a few weeks ago. I'm in the process of accumulating parts and I use Brickstock quite a bit in my initial filtering. Here are some of my thoughts: - setting all parts to the average BL inventory price and sorting by total price and part price lets you find the most expensive lots. You can focus on substituting these, . - if you scroll through the list of parts in Brickstock, it will list the used and new prices and number of lots for sale on the left. You can use this as a guide to find rare and problematic parts. - It's a bit of manual work, but's it's worthwhile comparing the average prices to Lego Pick a Brick and Bricks n Pieces. Some parts may be slightly more expensive from LEGO, but if you look on their BL price guide pages you'll see that the only way to get them is from multiple stores. Bear in mind that LEGO usually offers free shipping on order over a certain value, so this is great for large, heavy lots (sort parts by total weight in Brickstock).

I really enjoyed building this. Posing takes a bit of work and a few dropped heads, but once you get it right you can do some cool things. You also get some pretty interesting poses when you accidentally knock it off the shelf...

Very nice MOC. Out of interest, where did you find the LBG 26° Banner (or Trapezoidal flag) parts that you use on the outsides of the legs? I don't see any on Bricklink, or LEGO Bricks & Pieces and they don't seem to have been in any sets.

You can use either - they're functionally identical here. I think I used the 8448 ones when I built it. The buttons for the battery box are accessible when it's installed. It is also pretty quick to remove the box to change batteries - I seem to recall you just need to pull out four bushing pins and then it drops out. The only obstacle is that you may need to lift the truck up to give enough space to drop.

Yes, bit it might require some trickery to get the right rotation point. Here's a good link with a tutorial: http://www.holly-wood.it/mlcad/easyrotation-en.html

I'm not aware of any of the LEGO tools having this functionality. To get an accurate measure, the programs would need to know the centre of mass and mass of each individual part. Professional CAD calculates this based on part volume and density, while LDRAW etc. would either need to calculate the volume and mass of each part on the fly, or this data would need to be included in the part files. If you just want the total mass, you can import the parts list into Brickstore or the like and you should get a mass. To get an estimate of the CoM, you could assume that each individual part's CoM lies at its origin. You could then read the LDRAW file into Excel to get the origin location of each part. Combine this with mass data from Brickstore and some lookup functions and it's fairly trivial to treat the model as a system of particles and calculate the CoM location. To get an accurate CoM calculation, you will need to know the CoM location of each part, relative to its origin. You will then need to perform transforms in Excel to work out the part CoM location from its origin location and rotation. With that data available, the CoM calculation is, again, trivial.

That's what I assumed - one end fixed relative to ground, the other fixed relative to the rotating part i.e. the ends can't swivel at their fixing points. I'm just wondering what assumptions that maths makes regarding these points. Assuming the maths is right, I find it very interesting seeing how the real world can violate mathematically ideal assumptions.

I'm intrigued by the maths of this. Would you be able to post a link to somewhere where I can do some more reading about it? The other thing I'm not sure about is whether the ends of the tube are assume to be fixed or can rotate freely.

It could be quite fun to try and rig up some kind of AC circuit with induction coils.

This sounds like a very optimistic price. If I go into Brickstore and use the average prices for the current Bricklink inventory, I get a price estimate of around $390.

Will it only work with those specific devices, or will it work with other devices that have built in IR e.g. the Sony Xperia Tablet Z?

I've uploaded the complete pneumatic schematic with hose lengths. Bear in mind the lengths are approximate and are based on the specific cable routing I used. The total length is about 5.5m, so if you buy 6m or more of hose you should be fine. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/33170756/AG_5571_Tow%20Truck_Pneumatic_Schematic_final.pdf Edit 29-02-2020: Replaced Dropbox with Onedrive - https://1drv.ms/b/s!AvtTeyYHFWw9gotYXyUb2Ki9xOxKMw I didn't do a detailed study of wire lengths since I was limited to what I had available. It will definitely work with 2x 20L wires and 5x 36L, but you'll have to coil some of them. I think the absolute minimum wire lengths you could get away with is 5x 20L+, 2x 26L+.

It's pretty fiddly and sometimes feels like you need three hands (all with tweezers for fingers), but the fiddliness also makes it difficult to apply enough force to break anything. I considered using CV joints on mine, but they have a lower range of angular motion than the universal joints. You'd have to do some modifications, moving the mounting points further apart to get them to fit. The back one might be possible, since there's a bit of space to play with at either end and any movement will reduce the shaft angle. I don't think you can replace the front one since, unless you use more than two joints, you can never get the angle below 45°.

A taste of things to come:

Thanks, that helps a lot. I'll keep track of the lengths and post the info once I'm done.

I'm in the process of building this now, and I'll try to keep track of the hose and wire lengths I use. Blakbird (or anyone else who's built this), I've got a couple of questions about the pneumatic routing which I'm hoping you might be able to answer: What does the switch in this picture do? Some of Grazi's pics suggest that it might be for switching between the auto pump and a manual one. http://www.brickshel.../001-frame..jpg Which pneumatic switches do what (obviously not critical, but it's nice to configure it as the designer intended)? I think the order is (from front to back): http://www.brickshel...entially-24.jpg - Deploy raise mid wheels. - Deploy outriggers - Lift boom - Lift rear pad - Extend rear pad What is the order of pipes going into the 'Christmas Tree' in the first linked pic? Presumably, from top (grey) to bottom (yellow), it's the same as the front to back order above. Are you able to take a pic of the underside of the truck, particularly showing the tubing routing around the air tank and supply? Thanks

There're some instructions for Star Wars MOCs here: http://www.techlug.fr/instructions-lego-lego-star-wars

In Brickstore go to Help>Registration... and enable demo mode. There'll then be an option to import Bricklink XML files.

Lego gears have a 1mm module, so the chain link should have a pitch (distance from link to link) of around 3.14mm.

Credit for this one should go to Jennifer Clark / Blakbird - it's a technique I saw used in their JS220 instructions.