howitzer

I'm not aware of any part moulds that are specific to a brand or license, to my knowledge all are reusable in MOCs and future sets. Maybe a slight problem arises from things like the colour scheme of Bugatti, which currently offers a limited parts palette but that's not a licensed-specific problem as there have been quite a few non-licensed sets with "weird" colours before, offering limited parts palette. There are of course a few printed pieces with logos but all of them, to my knowledge, are also available without prints.

I don't think microscale is underrated or underrepresented at all in official sets as many sets representing real life things are microscale, few examples that popped in my mind: Tower Bridge, Taj Mahal, ISS, Saturn V. All of those sets are of course very large when finished so they provide a good display, and they are also interesting to build being so large, so they are in entirely different category than polybag microscale sets or even Architecture sets.

I'm pretty sure that licensing has been hugely beneficial for Technic, at least from the sales point of view and increased sales will of course help TLG to bring more new parts, whether functional or aesthetic. The times of Technic models being just liftarms with gears inside are far behind us, and today looks is also important design consideration - not least because of licensing where exterior must be easily recognizable. If you think some classic models from 30 years ago (like 8865 or 8872), there's no way such an unfinished-looking sets would be released today. Even 8868, which was unprecedented in it's aesthetic detailing at the time looks pretty rough by today's standards.

I'm quite sure that 42096 was never meant to be anything else than a big empty shell for modders to build upon. I also got it when it was on sale as a parts pack, although I'm not interested in supercars generally at all, but functionally it's barely above the entry-level sets of 1990's. As for the panels, I dislike that they tend to cover up all the interesting functionality, but on the other hand, there's no denying that most sets look much better when covered with panels. This is probably the main reason why TLG is heading this direction with Technic, considering how much better those sets look on the store shelf, as they still have to compete with other toys and there looks play a significant role in purchase decisions.

Go read the earlier discussion regarding this. You can combine several pictures but you do so at the loss of resolution, as there's still maximum size of a picture you can post.

The old 28-toothed differential uses 14 tooth bevel gears. They are very weak and where phased out in the mid-90's in favor of the reinforced 12-tooth bevel gears. https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=4143

For once, Google Translate is correct. If they ship it no later than 27th of April, they have kept their word.

I see the shortcomings of this set's looks more a limitation of Technic, combined with the scale. You could probably do much better either with System parts for the exterior, or by scaling it to similar to that of the Bugatti or Porsche. I'm pretty sure it's next to impossible to capture the subtle curvature of the real car in this scale with mostly Technic parts.

I don't know if they update the Hall of fame anymore, but this definitely belongs there. Amazing job.

Ok, so it was much harder than I anticipated to make a structure that both works (drivetrain+steering) and is supported well enough to actually hold together and still be functional. I went through numerous iterations in CAD and had to start over many times but I think I finally managed to achieve what I wanted to. The front of this car is of course very cramped but along with it the main problem was the difficulty of managing half-stud offsets that resulted from the combination of my parts limitations and the required size. 1 stud more in width would have eased up things considerably. The current parts palette for making half-stud offsets is very limited so I had to get quite a creative to make it work. Here's a couple of photos:

Here's an engine I designed for TC18 as an attempt to make a three-cylinder inline engine as small as possible. Missing from the model is a belt that's supposed to drive the yellow axle.

I also love the front design! And it's nice to see someone else using the same wheels as I am, those don't seem to see much use nowdays...

I checked the 8868 instructions and yes, this connection is indeed used there. Check also this presentation: https://www.hellobricks.com/pdf/jamieberard-brickstress-bf06.pdf My interpretation from this is that connecting half-pin to a Technic hole is legal within TLG but even if it weren't, it's completely irrelevant for this contest as the rules don't forbid connections that TLG considers illegal.

Umm, I don't think you read my comment properly. I said it's _less_ costly than a new part, not that it's trivial or cheap. Yes, the mould parts probably have to be manufactured as I said, but they don't have to be designed from scratch like with a new part, the old design is probably completely usable except perhaps in fitting it for the new machinery (and perhaps not even that, depending on how old the part in question is and how the machinery has changed or not over time). And then there's the issue of quality control, which is already partially done for old moulds, as the part in question has been already tested in the market so there's no new design defects to control for, only possible manufacturing defects. Bringing back an old mould is indeed costly, but probably not as costly as designing a completely new one, at least for the majority of parts.

Because new parts for the old mould still probably have to be manufactured, but unlike completely new parts, specifications for them already exist so they don't actually have to design a new mould. This means that returning a discontinued part is less costly investment than designing a completely new one. It's also less risky to bring back an old part because sometimes new parts have unforeseen design defects which have to be corrected if the part's usage is to be continued but that costs then extra in the design and manufacturing of the new mould parts.

I'd venture to guess that public MOCing is forbidden because the designers get to know about all the newest themes, parts, building techniques and so on, so they might accidentally let something slip if they could publish their MOCs. TLG is nowdays obviously very concerned about leaks on the new sets so this kind of limitation for their employees is only to be expected. Beyond that, I'm sure it's just another engineering job. They will always have their constraints for whatever product is being designed, and naturally you only design exactly what the higher-ups tell you to. And yeah, don't turn your hobby into a job.

Hi, and thanks for all the comments. I found the solution for steering with driven axle (after a bit of searching I found that after all I do have the parts necessary). Then another problem arose in how to fit an engine under the hood. The fake engines I knew of previously were far too large so I had to think of something new to make it fit. This is what I accomplished so far: (Ignore the steering joint, it's just a placeholder) Now I will only have to find a way to route the engine to the differential while supporting everything properly.

Would be nice to have the video embedded into the post, instead of link that I have to copy and paste to open in another browser window...

I actually have 8865 but it doesn't have driven front wheels so I'm not sure how to adapt it's parts for such a purpose and neither has 42093. Any tips on how to accomplish this without dedicated steering parts would be welcome though :) At the moment I'm trying to throw together some assemblies to see if they can be made to work here.

The red beams in the screenshot mark the maximum dimensions of a car in this contest. Which is a funny thing, considering that I scaled the model around the wheel I'm using and that means it's almost going to fill the available space. In reality these cars are as small as proper cars can be, while the Car Transporter is a lorry, so with my scaling, it's more like a van compared to the Car Transporter set. But at this point I don't care, as the wheels in question are the only ones I could use and even then they are on the smaller end of the contest-approved wheels. Thanks for the tip, but unfortunately I don't own that differential, only the oldest 28-tooth ones and the newest 28-tooth (not Torsen) one. I've yet to determine which kind of engine I'm going to build but it's going to be connected to the rear wheels. The problem is more about the steering assembly, as I don't have any parts that would enable the wheels to be both driven and steered at this scale or at least the turning pivot would be placed too far away from the wheel.

I thought a while about whether to enter this contest or not, as I'm not a car enthusiast nor I have many proper car-parts to make good axle assemblies etc. But I have never really built a car of my own design, so I wanted to take this as a challenge to build something new. The next obvious problem was choosing a car I want to build. I spent a while browsing different kinds of cars and stumbled upon the Japanese concept of kei cars, which is a category of small, practical cars especially designed for crowded metropolises of Japan and from those I chose Honda N-Box as the model I'm attempting to build: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_N-Box My basic problem in building cars is my lack of parts, especially for steering and exterior so I won't be able to sculpt it to perfection nor will there be driven front wheels unlike the real counterpart, which comes with front-wheel-drive and all-wheel-drive. I'll probably omit the suspension too, but I'm not there yet so we'll see. I started with modeling the exterior in LeoCAD, with continuing to the interior once the exterior is complete enough:

I believe it's to keep entry posts in manageable length. Even three images make a pretty long post with the forum rules about image size so more than that would be even worse. Stitching four images into one also makes them much smaller, thus enabling more angles while losing detail. Also, you can show as many images as you want in your building topic, so it's not like you're not allowed to show your work properly.

What a funny contraption. Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Tank

Check out also http://technicopedia.com/index.html There you can find a lot of interesting technical information about Technic sets, mainly older (pre-2000) as it hasn't been updated in a while.

As someone who's not generally interested in muscle cars, I find this set strangely appealing. There appears to be a nice selection of parts I don't currently have, and it seems also to be a mostly well-built model with good functions for it's size. I'm not in a hurry though, I think I'll wait for the reviews.