howitzer

It's Lego so yeah, technically all sets can be motorized. But not all came with instructions for motorization with a supplemental set. Unfortunately I have no idea where you could find a list of such sets. I know that the B-model of 8865 could be motorized, and I have also a vague recollection that B-model of 8824 might have had instructions for motorization too. I believe most A-models didn't have option for motorization unless a motor was included in the set.

There are two different adult markets for Lego: one is us AFOLs who would want to see Castle and Pirates and whatever revived but the other market is the much wider but much less involved audience of people would buy a set made of their favourite franchise as a singular display piece but who aren't really interested in collecting Lego or MOCing. Friends, Stranger Things, Seinfeld and so on cater mainly to the latter group, while sets like Barracuda Bay and Medieval Blacksmith cater mainly to AFOLs. TLG is probably hoping to lure few of the non-AFOL audience into becoming an AFOL but I'm pretty sure most of the sold sets in that category have gone to people who will never buy another set or will buy only a couple. And then there are the most popular licenses like Star Wars and Harry Potter, which of course have a much wider audience than these one-off licenses.

I'm not sure if this is the real reason, but "stretching" the worm gear to match the 2L length would change the pitch of the screw, which might prevent it from working properly with spur gears. Or maybe it's because they wanted such a worm gear that cannot be backdriven, and changing the pitch might allow that to happen.

Yeah, even the Cement Mixer has the (very thin) excuse of having the drum part which is hard to reuse, but there's absolutely no reason for 42108 to have no B-model.

You're not wrong, but I'm expecting the clone brand prices to increase as their popularity does, and Lego still has an unmistakable, highly regarded brand which is worth a lot. This kind of thing also seemed to happen with smartphones, few years ago giants like Apple and Samsung dominated the market but their newest phones tended to be really expensive. Then Chinese brands like Oneplus began to make phones that were not exactly equal to the flagship models of Apple and Samsung, but they were still really good phones for much lower price. Then, couple of years later, the phones are still nice but price has increased a lot and now they are just one more brand in the market. If some clone brand will also gain significant market share in the construction toy market, they have to deliver everything TLG does - quality product, interesting themes, tv-shows and games to go with the toy and all that - and those won't come for free, they have to increase prices. Their prices are low now, but that won't be the case forever. I'm guessing that Lego stays the market leader with the highest regarded brand and most expensive sets, but others won't be far behind. On the other hand, any soft drink company can deliver a product easily equal to Coca Cola for less money but somehow Coca Cola is still very big and highly regarded brand. Pepsi is almost as big though, even if they have a carefully cultivated underdog image, but still many people strongly prefer Coca Cola, and it's not for the taste. Brand loyalty is a real thing and many companies depend on it for survival.

In the past there have been plenty of licensed sets with B-models, 42030, 42043, 42053, 42063, 42078 and 42081 at least. 8110 and 42054 didn't have a B-model but I understand they came with instructions to build many kinds of implements which sort of compensates. Except for the UCS cars the dropping of B-models trend only seemed to really start in 2019 with the Land Rover/Porsche and PU sets and since then we've had much less of them. Last year even sets like the Cement Mixer and Mobile Crane had no B-model, even though as a mid-size non-motorized sets they should be prime examples of the possibilities for a B-model.

When building axles, make sure you put the differentials in correctly. Then check the correct orientation after you put them in. And check after checking. If you put them in wrong, the front and rear wheels will spin to opposite directions and you don't want to find out about it after you've finished the model, it's really hard to fix them afterwards. This is probably the most common mistake in vehicles with multiple driven axles.

I have no idea what this machine is or does, some kind of farming thing maybe? But it sure does look cool. I wouldn't have imagined that you can actually make all the 5 tyres in the set useful like this.

TLG is tipping their toes in the water of digital world right now and with the failure of Hidden Side it's obvious that they are stumbling. Still, I believe they will learn and adapt, and electronics (beyond dumb motors and light/sound bricks) are going to be integrated more into the play experience. As of what shape that might take in the far future, it's impossible to say, but a lot can happen in 3-4 decades and if you consider how electronics is constantly spreading into all areas of life, it's pretty unlikely that Lego would be an exception there.

Saturn V really exceeded my expectations. I had read various reviews and I was already pretty hyped about it, but what I expected was mostly a pretty rocket with not-that-interesting building experience. The final model of course looks great and is one of my favourite sets but the building experience blew me away, it was so great I was almost sad when it was finished. With all those neat techniques laid inside it's a shame that they are hidden from view. This one I also missed when it was initially released and some six months before the re-release was announced, I happened to find someone selling an unopened set nearby for 170€ and immediately scrambled to get it. Even upon the re-release I have absolutely no regrets on buying it at that price. On the other end is the ISS set. I mean, it's faithful to the source material and all, but the building process felt mostly just connecting random bits together without much idea of what is happening and why - except the big solar panels which were just repetitive to put together. It's not a bad set, but it's a good demonstration on how some ideas just don't translate that well into a Lego set, no matter how inspiring the source material is. And I'm not faulting the set designers here, they had to work with significant constraints and I don't think there's any way it could have been made more interesting.

The main reason Bricklink can offer so many kinds of parts for so little money is that there are thousands of sellers, many of who aren't in it as a full-time profit-oriented business but rather hobbyists who do it to support their hobby. So basically they donate their time for the benefit of the buyer and would turn a huge loss if they calculated a proper value for their time. TLG or any other large, profit-oriented company cannot do such a thing as they'd have to pay salaries to their employees, invest in and maintain the machinery and so on. The only reason TLG can produce so many sets and still turn profit is that they do a lot of planning in the production of the bricks and they have state of the art automated machinery to do things like counting parts. Thousands of identical sets are much easier to produce than having constant stream of custom orders which were all different.

This depends a lot on the country you live in. Shipping cost is a huge pain for me even for orders from other EU countries and ordering from outside the EU adds at least VAT and maybe customs fees so even if places like Hong Kong or Russia often have the cheapest selling prices in BL, they are not that cheap when you account for the additional costs of actually importing something. Often the cheapest sets of BL inside the EU are found in Germany or Hungary, and sometimes they really are less expensive than anything I could find here in Finland (regardless of shipping cost) so it's always worth checking them out. But in my city there is one particular retail store which offers vast majority of in-production sets for significantly cheaper than Lego's own store or other local retailers so usually I just pick up anything I want from them, no need to order stuff online.

Very nice and cute little tractor, I like that you managed to fit a differential and fake engine in there, in addition to the steering.

It's true that presentation matters. Great photos and a nicely edited video provides for a better presentation and because it's impossible to handle the entries and get a good feeling on how it's built and how well it stays together, all the voters can do is to view the photos and video. While it's not useful for the upcoming GBC contest, I wonder how for example the small car contest or motorbike contest entries would've fared if the rules had stated that there must be a drop test, like a video of the vehicle being dropped of a set amount of height (like 50cm) to see how sturdy it is? As for the GBC's, reliability is a big factor so some sort of assessment on it might be nice, though I'm not sure how to formulate that into the rules. Fragility, unnecessary complexity and excess part usage are indeed something that many amateur builders struggle with, and they tend to set the really skilled builders apart from less skilled ones. I wonder if some kind of contest could be envisioned where the voters could make an assessment of these factors, like a contest where a building instructions must be included with a part count limitation and parts palette would be limited to common ones so the voters could actually build the models themselves? I have no idea on the feasibility of such a contest (maybe it could work as a C-model contest?) but it's just a thought. Or maybe I'm taking this far too seriously, most importantly we should have fun with the contests after all.

Umm, what realistic, practical applications Technic or any Lego anywhere has? I mean, sure, you can use them for various purposes like for example as a camera stand, but that would be a waste of money as you can buy much better camera stand for much less money than was spent on the bricks. GBC's are indeed completely pointless as something practically useful but that's not their purpose at all. Nobody expects Lego builds to perform tasks in real world applications, it's a toy and a hobby. Making a Lego build that does a real world task might be a nice challenge of course, but in the end it's equally pointless to making a GBC, as purpose-built machines are better in every way. So yeah, you can build a lawnmower out of Lego but even the cheapest one bought from a hardware store is just better. And yeah, as myself and others have stated, the GBC competition won't be any more problematic than other contests with the high part counts or simple but flashy designs, functionality does matter. Of course aesthetic also matters and nicely finished entry is more likely to do well than an entry without much in the way of finishing touches, but isn't that as it should be? The motorcycle competition winners were also well-finished in an aesthetic sense and the rules required to show the internals too so that functionality could be analyzed - a rule which I'm sure will also be implemented in the GBC contest. While doing well in a contest would of course be nice, I don't enter those with an expectation of winning because I see them more as a learning experience and a way to engage with the community here. Playing to win is pretty boring to me anyway, so I play to have fun.

Nice review! I look forward buying these, both seem to be fun little sets and the B-models seem to really add to the value you get for your money.

I love the simplicity of the construction (only liftarms and pins) but I can't help to think about more complex setups. Haven't really seen much of those built from Technic, so I'd be curious to see for example suspension bridges or cable-stayed bridges.

I also have an idea, but that requires parts I don't have and I'm not going to start buying until the contest is actually announced, so I hope I'll get a bit of heads-up to get the orders in place in time...

Yeah, obviously someone somewhere have done practically every feature you can think of. But these are not common (as something like gearboxes are) and never been done in an official set.

No idea where that was, one of these endless topics discussing the proliferation of repetitive car sets and how to make them less repetitive. Couple of things mentioned were: headlights that turn with the steering wheel and 4 doors.

First and most obvious problem is that your linkages do not align properly. Their lengths and angles must be exactly equal, or there will be bump steering and toe outing.

Too bad Lego cars, especially official sets, tend to be pretty simple and repetitive mechanically. Someone somewhere listed at least a dozen functional features that could be implemented in a car set but has never been done, and that's just with current parts, for example new gearbox parts to make them more compact and realistic would change the game entirely...

You might have a point there with the "gadgetry" but isn't that true for any contest? Big and flashy builds are popular even if smaller ones might be equally well-made. On the other hand, GBC's are all about moving balls in innovative ways, so I wouldn't worry too much about big and flashy but simple contraptions dominating it. As for the GBC standard, these modules aren't going to be connected to a single large loop so there's no need to comply with the standard. If someone wants to have their module presented in an event, surely they can be modified to comply with the standard, I see this contest more as a proving ground for new kinds of machines instead of an exhibit of finalized versions. Same goes to GBC's which accept other items than the standard balls. The effort wouldn't be wasted any more than any effort put into a MOC that's going to be disassembled is wasted as the ideas can be refined and reused for future GBC's. Or, just state the GBC standard in the rules and and be done with it.

Very nice! There's been a number of Archimedes' screw GBC's before but somehow those always felt a bit underwhelming to me, while your version is really great use of the slide element. Makes for a clean and nice-looking machine that does its job well.

A PF L-motor and a battery box aren't expensive in Bricklink, but if you feel you don't want to spend money, most GBC's could also be operated with a hand crank, which is of course not great for shows but I'm sure it would suffice for this kind of contest. I'd rather see as little limitations as possible, considering that every limitation you put might exclude someone from participating. If some limitations had to be put into place I'd go for something like 1 main ball-moving function, with optional supporting functions (like a simple conveyor belt lift driven by its own motor). You can do marvels with just a single motor (just take a look at Akiyuki Ball Factory) but those large, complex machines take a lot of time to develop and tune so I doubt we'd be seeing too many of that kind.