J159753

Amazon UK currently selling 42109 Top Gear PU car for £61.87. (51% discount) Have they a towering pile of unsold stock? If only they'd apply that discount to other sets...

I admire 8880, but I never found it as much *fun* as 8865. I loved tweaking the positions of the cogs/axles in the 8865 engine till it ran really smoothly - whereas if you built 8880 correctly it worked; if it didn't worked you'd built it wrong. None of the 'tuning' needed for 8865. And 8865 was much more fun to push fast round the floor! Coming back after my Dark Ages, I really appreciated 8848 (which I bought second hand).

(And Lego Ideas book 8889, pp38–41. Yes, I know that's not a set, but it was still a pretty cool chassis!)

"My guess is that there will either be a compressor with a hand crank, or a compressor connected to the rear wheels that will produce air pressure when the model is rolled around." if so, then let's hope the air tank also makes a (very welcome) return.

If I could have total wish fulfillment... Drive. Single XL-motor connected to purely mechanical 2-speed automatic, connected to differential with L motor for steering two tracks. Functions. 4-step gearbox for 4 functions; 1 motor driving, 1 motor controlling. If they could come up with some mechanical magic for more than 4 functions I'd be even more delighted. Size - as small as possible to fit in above mechanisms. new parts? Honestly not too fussed, although new parts to allow better gear boxes / transmissions would always get thumbs up! other fancy features? Really neat solutions to caterpillar track tensioning & suspension. TLDR: find a balance between motorization and mechanical complexity. I can dream...

First one looks much more 'Lego' to me - but either would be great!

Oh, Lordy, that first design... When I dug out my childhood technic sets I looked at those black pins, and, sad to say, very many had teeth marks on them. Normally I try and treat my vintage technic with some reverence, however flawed it may have been. Single-port lego pneumatics? Smiled at fondly. Etc. But those first-gen black pins? I binned them all. Life's too short...

yes please! I think this could make a huge difference. And in cases here designers couldn't decided which section a piece should be in, force them to design in a more modular fashion. I recently rebuilt 8448. Its explicit modularity was such a breath of fresh air!

4 PF L geared up sounds great! And all Lego :-) I've started building and have replaced several gears so far with real Lego ones so they mesh smoothly. (Cada differential & tan gears were especially rough connection) Assuming just 2 motors, and original gearing, would people recommend the supplied Cada motors, or MouldKing hyperspeed motors?

those track pieces remind me of the original caterpillar tracks, used with the pre-Technic(al) 'expert builder' cogs... https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=bb0076&idColor=11#T=C&C=11

Seems much faster browsing on a computer from the UK. Thanks! :-)

There was a ton of speculation about the specs/mechanics of 42114 before it was launched - but I don't remember anyone guessing anything remotely like its gearbox. OK, the set may have been a bit of a disappointment in other ways (I've only read that; I don't have one myself), but Lego blindsided us with a funky new technical solution noone had considered (at least in an official set rather than a MOC). Let's give them the benefit of the doubt that they'll somehow take advantage of Control+ to do something cool and unexpected. Perhaps with a few interesting new parts as well... (and yes, I'm privately keeping fingers crossed, against all reasonable hope, for RC pneumatics...)

8275 cost me £99.99 (direct from Lego) when it came out. A far cry from this set's rumoured cost... 8275 seemed like excellent value at the time, and the new remote control power functions were very exciting. I remember being impressed by some of the ways it had been made so strong (and how weak a few extremities were), but thinking how mechanically simple and straightforward it was. It worked very well, but (apart from being remote control) wasn't that interesting.

I'm loving these! Will definitely try and find time over Christmas to build them for/with my kids...

I appreciated some of the building challenges of the old models, that now you only get on MOCs, not official Lego sets. Tiny tweaks to the positioning of elements along the crackshaft in 8865 made the difference between a car that sang as you pushed it easily in 1st gear, or one that would only move in fits and starts even in 3rd gear – to my young self it really felt as though I were 'tuning the engine'. I remember wishing for a third hand every time I manoeuvred the engine chain on 8880, and satisfaction when I'd managed to get it on – I felt like a mechanic who'd just completed an intricate task. I think the 42083 Chiron is wonderful (especially when Pimped Up), but the greatest building challenge is the common & rather artificial one of having to wiggle beams around until multiple pins deign to clip in at the same time. I approached 42110 Land Rover hoping it was like 8865 (where if I built it carefully enough the geartrain would work smoothly) but eventually concluded it didn't actually make much difference how I built it: the design was fundamentally flawed and could never work reliably and smoothly; but modern Lego pieces are sufficiently foolproof that, short of malicious incompetence, it didn't matter how carefully or carelessly I fitted them together.

we haven't seen the old-style caterpillar tracks in a long-time, have we?

Do we have the faintest idea of how many sets Lego sell? even to the nearest order of magnitude. I'm not asking for inside information, just back-of-envelope hypotheses. E.g. would little pull-backs sell c.100,000 world-wide over a 2-year lifespan, but a flagship technic model more like 20,000? Are these figures hilariously high or low? I've no idea.

Thank you!

42100 Leibherr currently £266 in UK: https://www.argos.co.uk/product/8905028 Several other Technic sets at 1/3 off. £10-off-next-purchase voucher for all orders over £100.

42100 Leibherr currently £306 (free UK postage) at Smyths. https://www.smythstoys.com/uk/en-gb/toys/lego-and-bricks/lego-technic/lego-42100-technic-control%2b-liebherr-r-9800-excavator-rc-set/p/175376

Interesting numbering... :-)

ditto. Email sent off to TLG (UK)

Given that Lego is meant to be at least in part an educational toy, hasn't TLG missed a trick not making regular transparent motors, so people can see what's happening inside them? I would have thought many people would love this.

Sorry to be asking rather than offering/demonstrating! But has anyone done a mod of the 42025 cargo plane to give it four bidirectional switches for the four functions (like 42042 gearbox), rather than two switches for four functions as in the official model? My young children are desperate to play with this model, but are endlessly confused/frustrated by the controls, and I'm not sure I have the expertise to design the mod myself. (although I would happily lose hours I don't have trying to...) Thanks!