amorti

@Gray Gear what's the piece he's used then? nvm, just worked it out. One of those parts that definitely got better with time.

Lego Friends lipsticks will hold those exhausts together. There must be a legal way to hold the number plate in the front. The tank sides are made of 30+ pieces, with modern levels of QC for colour matching. I'm no system part expert, but must be possible to use fewer. What happens to the rear suspension in 'negative travel'? Looks like it'd have slack by the lower pivot point... Pivoting

It has potential, but there's some stuff to work out first. The exhausts can almost work like side-stands. Lose the black piece in the middle? I don't really love these new fork pieces. The lack of an axle hole right in the top means they're never going to look correct. Do you have any bigger pieces to use in the side panels? The rear shocks need better fixing points at the bottom. Even if it's just using another 2L thin and axle-pin to stop the one on there rotating.

T_Lego has said a big problem with the CaDA kit, was his design relies on rotational pin friction in a few places, and CaDA pins don't really have any. I guess the kit you got is from GoBricks pieces, and those have friction almost like 90's Lego pins, so I can imagine it would work much better. Shame it has to be a pirate copy :(

Could anything be done with 49668, so the piston only rose once per revolution? Not tried it, guess it'd be too steep of a ramp, but might be an idea.

Could you make a point to use the lower resolution image links? This thread takes an age to load on my phone. Looks good! The one change I'd like to see is thin lift arms held on with 3/4 pins rather than half pins or axles with bushes, which are old school solutions to that problem and less secure. For the linkage, you could use two 6L thin beams. Put black pins between them in the last two holes each end. This can then be placed inside a 6L wishbone. It's a very marginal amount of bending required and would give it a neat symmetrical look.

Or a pullback engine. Honestly I think that's where this set would go these days.

@nicjasnois your man for all things related to realistic suspension. Be ready though, he'll be quick to tell you if your design is pants.

The vehicle wants a V8, but I think classic pistons would look better. There is something fun about the clacky sounds of a mini motor though.

A fake v4 or even a pullback motor would both add a feature, but both be appropriate in technic vehicles of the scale. You'd be mad to force it into an even-width, half-stud long chassis and you'd never find a modern official set like that.

If the question is rigidity, the answer is always technic frames.

So that people who aren't what they're looking for can save themselves some heartache? Read another way: So that people who aren't what they're looking for, can be pretend to be that? /devil's advocate.

Seems like the minimum parts you need, to make it form locked. Could you show how you did it? I'm more a tinkerer than a designer, show me a picture of a thing and I'll tell you how it'll fail and where it wants bracing.

Name of the game is form locking. If you're relying on axle or pin connections not pulling out, it's not strong enough. On each adjoining axle hole, put a 3L axle with stop through two of these guys, one above and one below the gear racks, pointing inward. https://rebrickable.com/parts/42003/technic-axle-and-pin-connector-perpendicular-3l-with-2-pin-holes That'll join your circles of 4 quarters, and now you have something to attach liftarms to, in the correct orientation so they're form locked. Proviso: I don't have any of those gear racks, so idk if the 3l perpendicular connector is long enough.

Finally (!) had chance to play with this outside today. I made the fork legs 7L apart, because at 6L apart the front tyre can catch the springs. Unfortunately, that meant the 8L with stop front spindle reduced ground clearance unacceptably. The unbraced bevel box on the rear spindle might be ok for a Lego L motor, but it's not strong enough for a CaDA L motor. Adding the bracing on the outside as I've done also reduces ground clearance unacceptably. Both the above problems would be solved by changing the wheels. With a futuristic wheel in the back, the bevel box could be rotated inside the rear frame. With a futuristic wheel, 81.6 or 94mm front wheel, the fork could be 5L wide. It's nice to have wheels as a pair, but probably better to use a taller front wheel to add ground clearance. Could make it into a chopper that way. CaDA has a 3 spoke 94mm wheel that would look ok-ish paired with a rear futuristic wheel.

China bricks are definitely no longer just copycats! CaDA has Micromotors. MouldKing has a 6-port PF box with lipo battery, Bluetooth, and proportional remote control. Their servos also start to have proportional control, some two positions each side of zero, some 5 each side.

Then it sounds very likely you're right. I've actually been using CaDA friction pins as steering bearings on RC motorcycles, because they have nearly no friction but much less play then Lego non-friction pins or axles.

I haven't built the static, but the motor version. I think you'd lose quite a lot with the static version, because the gear stepper mechanism and attached shift paddles won't work which is a real highlight of the model. Also the gearbox becomes another display piece like the Sian but the fact of it being basically a pair of identical gearboxes to handle the two powerful motors become redundant. It's so much more interesting when a car moves itself. Without motors, it's more or less "just another" 1:8 car. I usually can't stand big cars because of all the boring work of putting panels together at funny angles with tenuous connections, but this car turned my preconception on its head. The doors are a masterpiece of clever angles, yet they're also truly stable. There are examples like that all around the car. Buy it! You won't regret. If you have the extra 40€ or so spare, I'd say to get the motorised version. Even if you only drive it along the living room and shift through the gearbox once before putting it in the display cabinet, it was worth those 40€.

Bruno's dropped some hints in the thread, that there's another set on its way. I've also been reading on the alt-bricks board that CaDA has been quietly updating the moulds of some pieces, particularly those loose axle connectors. Potentially good news all round!

@astyanax The problem I had was the one time I persuaded the missus to make a video, I'd already been playing with the car and it had only 7.6v left on each battery, which is pretty near dead. Volt for volt, CaDA motors are nearly twice as fast as Lego. 715rpm vs 388rpm at 9v. If you crank the Lego motor up to 11.2v I guess you have +/- 485rpm, which is still a lot less than the CaDA motor gives at the 8.4v a freshly-charged CaDA battery can deliver. And that's not hollow rpm - there's more torque than a Lego motor has, too. But yes, of course that costs more amps. You can't spin 4 of these motors at Ludicrous with 2x buwizz 2, same as you couldn't run 4x buggy motors that way. Why not give the CaDA motors a try? I don't see a big difference in using third party motors which are an upgrade to Lego's, if you're already using Buwizz as an upgrade to Lego IR boxes. https://www.custombricks.de/motors-cables-sbrick/cada-power-functions-l-motor.html?language=en I guess really I need to try and make a video with a pair of CaDA motors and a pair of buwizz at Ludicrous. I'll put it on the to-do list!

CaDA Pro motors are a lot stronger than Lego motors, both in torque and speed. I really don't know if it would come out faster with 4x Lego motors or 2x CaDA motors, but I suspect the CaDA motors would win. The price for this extra power, is higher current consumption. You can't run two of them at Ludicrous speed at all on a buwizz 2.0, and even Fast will trip the fuse pretty often. If you ever tried running two Buggy motors on a single buwizz, you'll have a good idea what to expect. So, if wanted to try "just" changing the batteries, you'd need to fit two buwizz 2.0, and hook each drive motor to a separate one. I have the stuff here to try it, although I never tried it yet. Here's a video with 4x CaDA Pro motors and 2x CaDA batteries. The gears were given the "light" modification described by Bruno above, where you just swap the ratios behind the differential housing. It had power to spare, but the differential was getting clicky so I didn't press for more speed. In the end, for me, this is an indoors model. Too many small pieces to lose by driving it outdoors, and near zero ground clearance, so I just put it back to original and used my extra CaDA motors elsewhere.

The only gears I notice get bad wear, where on the CaDA differential. Think I covered that above, the teeth on it aren't as good as Lego's.

I've done that trick too, but you just push the failure point along, and they will split in the middle. This will of course happen more frequently with MouldKing black furious or CaDA pro motors, which bring more torque than Lego motors.

Still, some models are guaranteed to snap one the moment you try to drive them up a curb and steer at the same time, or everytime you hit reverse at full speed, etc. That gets boring, and IME leads to giving up on that model.

Well, it runs on buwizz, so that's 11.2v which would give somewhere over 1030rpm. I'll accept a mutual loss