J159753

This looks wonderful, as ever – congratulations! (Can I raise a side-issue, though? Imgur is no longer available in the UK, and Imgur-hosted images are not visible on UK computers. Please could posters consider using other image services if it's convenient for them to do so? Thanks! https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/41592665292443-Imgur-access-in-the-United-Kingdom)

Not exactly, I'm afraid. Although all the different digital building tools for technic are essentially 3D CAD tools that internally manipulate vector models of Lego bricks, they ALL, very frustratingly, output to PDF as raster/bitmap images, rather than as vectors. This would make sense for rendered scenes with complicated lighting, shading, reflections, texturing, etc. But it makes no sense at all (other than lack of time on the part of the programmers) for PDF output. Which means the file sizes are WAY bigger than they need to be, and quality is far worse than it need be. This is an bitmap saved from the 9398 instructions above (last page of 1st book). I haven't processed it in any way or screenshotted it: it's directly extracted from the PDF, where it states it's at 72.093dpi - far from high-res. If I zoom in on the cogs centre-right, without any image enhancement, this is what's in the image: Our eyes are miraculously good at extrapolating detail from small images, but when we zoom in we see how much we were intuiting rather than actually seeing. I don't have these paper instructions, but looking at others I'd guess they're rendered at 1200dpi or more [300dpi is more than good enough for continuous tone images like photos, but these are technical illustrations with lots of sharp diagonal lines - even rasterised at 600dpi they'd look bumpy when printed at high-resolution]. But a 1200dpi image is 278 times bigger than a 72dpi image before compression [ (1200/72)^2 ], Even just raising the resolution of these instructions from 72 to 100 dpi would roughly double the file size... If these were saved as vector data they'd be as sharp as the output device (screen or printer) allowed whatever the zoom level, and at far smaller file size. One day Studio will offer this, I hope...

I've only built 8880 once (I don't have it myself), but I dimly remember a genuinely tricky bit where I was trying to clip the transmission's chain links around a rear steering axle. It required quite a bit of manual dexterity (at least with adult-size hands!) And I did like sets where 8865 where it *really mattered* how carefully you spaced cogs along axles so that the motors and gears turned smoothly with minimum friction. Modern parts are much more foolproof, and arguably give you less sense of satisfaction when following instructions. A model is either correctly assembled or not - rather than mediocrely or well.

A (real) plant/flower/botanical will naturally have colour variation, so if anything it's good for there to minor variation in nominally the same colour for the Lego version; for a mechanical object like a car, that's not the case. ?

I think they'd be extremely popular!

There's no need for a gearbox to require either/or control of functions. Big Red and 42009, for instance, can both be easily modded to allow simultaneous control over different functions, much as 42042 was from the outset. That would be my ideal form of this set. The fun of direct control and its mechanical complexity would handily outweigh the jerkiness of having only ±100% control over motor speed.

Still remains my favourite-ever Lego build - I even pulled it apart so I could rebuild it from scratch, now understanding how it all fitted together. (Not the easiest set to dismantle in places!)

Back in Jan 2022 this was expected to have be 150cm tall and 2882 pieces. A year and a half later it's only 100cm tall - but 2883 pieces. It seems unlikely that the set would be comprehensively redesigned and shrunk, but end up with an essentially identical piece count. It's not as if there are many obviously 'optional' pieces bulking out the 100cm version. Did they JUST remove 50cm worth of trusses, and quietly bulk it out a bit?

YES! Wonderful for inspiring those of us who are less creative with newer parts...

Wow. Really beautiful...

Random aside... I've had very little success getting my Lego-building children interested in Technic so far (ages 5-8). One built the gearbox from 42042 with ease but showed no interest in it thereafter. But a few days ago I got out a few pneumatic cylinders and they're all fascinated with them! I find them asleep in bed still clutching a pair of connected cylinders, I have to ban them from the dinner table, etc. Pneumatics *really grab their interest in a way that gears (or pull-backs) don't seem to, at the moment...

I was thinking of cobbling together parts for this set and building an approximation of it. To use the Control+ app must I have the PU large angular motors, or can I substitute the SPIKE prime large angular motors? Thanks!

Genius idea!

One aspect I don't understand about modern official Technic is the ideological avoidance of studded beams at all costs. It's not that TLG aren't still producing the studded beams and using them other lines. There are times when studded beams would clearly add design flexibility or structural rigidity, but TLG insists on going for all studless technic nonetheless decorated with system pieces. Why? I'd love it if they went back to a more pragmatic, hybrid approach - still primarily studless but using studded beams where it was helpful and not a significant visual impact.

The original was always a bit jerky to be honest! At the time I thought of it more as a wonderful proof of concept than a smoothly functional set. Movement back/forth was jerky; changeover between the motors' two function sets often jammed, and the arm twisted around if you ran the actuators to their limits. Rebuilding it with tweaks and more recent parts has been on my optimistic to-do list for years, once I have a bit more time and a space to keep half-built models!