2GodBDGlory

Ooh, congrats on finding the parts to make brown work!

So earlier this year I decided it was high time I actually build another 1:8 car MOC, which is a territory I used to build in an awful lot, but hadn't done for a while. I then looked back and found that the last proper 1:8 car I had designed was this Ford Mustang: Anyways, I wanted to build something with interesting mechanicals and a simple enough body to model. I was looking at sporty '90s Toyota Corolla models when I came across an image of this custom build: It's a 1989 Toyota Corolla GT-S owned by Randy Wimenta, and extensively modified to have AWD and a desert racing setup, which you can read more about here: https://www.treadmagazine.com/buyers-guide/awdrola-the-remarkable-transformation-of-a-toyota-corolla-gt-s-into-an-off-road-beast/ Anyways, it was a model of a car I was already interested in building, but with even more mechanical functions to emulate, and some great style! Aesthetics: I didn't have the white parts to build the car in the original color, but my trusty LBG looked about close enough. I used some red parts on the rear, and then finished the yellow, orange, and red stripes with electrical tape (and orange marker on labels for orange). I was pleased with the way the look turned out! I think it's way better than my old 1:8s, though not at the level of other more appearance-focused builders out there. The rims are some 3D printed "steelies" I had lying around from a Toyota LC70 trial truck project last summer. The license plates are 3D-printed as well, and are replicas of Idaho license plates. Why Idaho? I'm honestly not too sure. I think my criteria were that the location's plate look ok, have both front and rear plates, be a place I like, and have some level of desert for the car to drive in. Neither I nor the real car have any connection to that state, but that's what I did, for some reason. Functions: Opening doors, hood, and trunk AWD with 2x PF L motors and an I4 piston engine Steering with PF M motorAWDrola 6+R joystick manual transmission with 2x PF Servo motors and moving cabin joystick Clutch with PF M motor Central differential lock with PF M motor Pop-up headlights with PF M motor Rear pneumatic drum brakes with moving handbrake and PF M motor "Super Strut" front suspension 4-link live rear axle Torsen rear differential Opening Stuff: The doors opened with a fairly basic manual latch. The hood opened with a rudimentary strut. The trunk opened, and had quite a bit of space inside, but no way to keep it open Drive: A big priority for me was to have a fully transverse drivetrain (until getting into the rear axle driveshaft), just like the real car. The two L motors always drove the piston engine, followed by the clutch, transmission, and central diff lock. Planetary hubs were used on the wheels. Largely thanks to those, it was actually able to drive! Not fast, and both fifth and sixth gears were starting to get crunchy, but it did move! Steering: Steering ended up being hard to squeeze in after building the drivetrain, and had some issues. It was using a PF M motor through a small linear actuator, with a working steering wheel. Unfortunately, the small LA's clutch tended to kick in, so steering didn't work very well with weight on the car. It was never really something I was going to drive around, though, so I didn't mind too much. Transmission: This was definitely the highlight of the model for me! This car has a fully transverse 6+R transmission shifted through a realistic manual transmission joystick on the remote control, with a corresponding joystick moving around on the interior! The working principle uses two PF Servo motors, each shifting a separate transmission. The first shifts a 3+R transmission through gearing such that its natural 180° of motion create 270° of motion in a wave selector to shift through all four positions. This is controlled by left/right motion of a proportional joystick on my MouldKing 6.0 controller, allowing for it to land in all four of the acceptable positions. The second transmission is a close-range 2-speed, with 24:24 and 20:28 gearing to split in between the ratios of the 3+R. This one is controlled by a servo that just rotates 180 degrees, and is controlled by a PF IR remote clone connected to the remote control's joystick. Forward/reverse motion of the joystick shifts this into either the high or low gear, as in a 1-2 shift on a manual transmission car. You may notice that this isn't actually a 6+R, but rather a 6+2R! I didn't need the second reverse, though, so I'm ignoring it. Realistically the car should be a 5+R, but I couldn't think of a way to build that on this working principle, and from my research the original Toyota gearbox did have a 6-speed variant (used in some Lotuses, or something), so theoretically I think a real one could be built that way! As mentioned before, there is a moving joystick in the cabin, with transverse motion hooked up to one servo, and fore/aft motion hooked up to the other. I was really pleased with the gearbox! Clutch: The clutch was a pretty basic affair, with a PF M motor switching a transmission driving ring through a custom slip clutch, to disconnect the drive motors from the transmission. It didn't have any practical purpose, and wasn't the most reliable, but it was there, I guess Central Differential Lock: The central diff lock was run by another PF M motor, also tucked in the front, through another custom friction clutch. In the picture below (spoilered out), it shifts the driving ring on the right of the image. Behind it is the central differential, which has a 24T clutch gear permanently mated with its case through a driving ring. The one output of that central diff then drives the two DBG 24T gears, but if the right driving ring is engaged, the red 24T clutch gear and the DBG 24T gear on its axle are joined, forcing the case to rotate at the same speed as its output, locking it. I was rather pleased to have this string of three 24T clutch gears, all being used to mate with driving rings! (The left one is part of the 2-speed transmission, with the other side of it driving the central diff through its 28T side) Pop-up Headlights: Everyone loves pop-up headlights! The ones on this car were flipped up and down using a PF M motor running a rubber band, which then drove an axle with two small linear actuators on it. These were tucked just below the hood and just above the rims, but worked pretty well to raise and lower the lights! Unfortunately I didn't bother to work in any LEDs. Brakes: I wanted to have some kind of brakes, but I didn't think adding front ones would be realistic. In the end I decided to just simulate the parking brake operation, with two small pneumatic cylinders mounted on the rear axle to press rubber parts against some drums. These were mounted inboard of the planetary hubs, so they could take advantage of the gear reduction to have more powerful braking! They were controlled by a PF M motor under the trunk running a pneumatic autovalve/compressor, with the motor's rotation direction determining which way the valve opened. There was a third pneumatic cylinder to move the parking brake lever up and down. Super Strut Front Suspension: In doing research on Toyota's of this generation, I came across an interesting Toyota suspension design, called "Super Strut" suspension. It's a variant of a MacPherson strut, designed with more of a focus on handling. I'm not sure if a stock '89 Corolla GT-S like this one would have had it, and I'm pretty sure this real-world custom build was using Rav4 MacPherson struts, but I wanted to add this more interesting design: Just like the real one, I had two bottom links (creating a bit of a virtual pivot), a ball joint connected to the strut, and the extra camber control link connecting the strut to the transverse suspension link. It used two 9.5L hard shocks per side, tilted on an angle, and had pretty decent travel. It wasn't the most durable suspension, but I'd rather it be interesting than durable! I'm also not sure I could have fit a traditional double-wishbone setup with the transmission, so doing some strut type was rather beneficial. Rear 4-link Floating Axle Suspension: The rear axle was a relatively basic solid axle with a triangulated 4-link setup. (The real custom car was using the rear axle from a Toyota Corolla All-Trac Wagon, which had a solid axle, unlike other Corolla variants) I had two soft 9.5L shocks per side, but one per side was using a little 3D-printed clip that precompressed the spring to be close to the hardness of a hard shock (because I had run out of hard shocks). This suspension was simple and reliable! Torsen Rear Differential: The rear differential had a limited-slip Torsen-style differential. It really wasn't needed for performance, but I like Torsens, and I had room to put one in! This isn't my design--I can't remember where I first saw it, though. I was rather pleased that I was able to use these curved Bionicleish parts to trace out the front and rear of the axle, sort of like a real car's differential carrier! Other Notes: Another thing I challenged myself to do was to make the A, B, and C pillars structural, which I was fairly successful in doing! The A pillars would pop out of the roof, but the B and C ones were quite strong, and I could lift it by the rear of the roof, with no roof supports other than those six pillars! The electrical setup was nine motors on eight channels, powered by the six channels of a MouldKing 6.0 battery, and a clone 2.4 GHz PF "IR" receiver run off that same battery I was quite pleased with the model! I liked the looks, and it had a lot of fun and interesting functions to engineer, which worked fairly well! I don't know when I'll build my next 1:8 car, but it was a lot of fun to get back to the genre with more developed skills and a modern parts inventory! More images at: https://bricksafe.com/pages/2GodBDGlory/awdrola

Though just because they don't have the parts on Bricks & Pieces doesn't mean that they're not going to use them again. I wouldn't write off seeing other pneumatic components return at some point

Right, I had to eat that last time I sold a set to the US from Bricklink! Anyways, we should get back on topic...

Yeah, I think the best bet in North America might just be buying from European Bricklink sellers, who usually seem to be cheaper--perhaps because of their bigger discounts? That only really works on bigger sets where the shipping can be amortized, and maybe works better when you don't care if it's used or not?

I don't think there would be any simple way to add a neutral to the existing 4-speed, but it does seem likely that you could delete one of the clutch gears being used for either first gear or fourth gear in order to create a 3+N transmission. Looking at my model, I don't think the 4th gear can be deleted without affecting other gears, but I think if you remove the blue 20T clutch gear used for first gear (the one closer to the ground), you could get a 3+N. On this particular gearbox, the speed differences between gears are very minimal, so losing one gear probably wouldn't be particularly noticeable in speed, so that might be a good solution

That is pretty impressive building speed! I used to be faster (and less busy), but now one MOC for me is often a three-month project!

My car also has a throttle cable and a manual, and whenever I'm driving someone else's auto I'm annoyed at how often I have to use the brake pedal! It really is close to one-pedal driving a lot of the time

@Jim, I've got a rules question. Is water allowed in contest entries? I'm not sure if it will work, but I was thinking of trying to make hydraulic steering using Lego pneumatics and a peristaltic pump, if I can get it to work. Would the water for that be acceptable to use? (I've even got a good natured/far-fetched argument for water being a Lego element! Every Lego box includes lots of air, making air an official Lego product. Normal air contains humidity, including water! So theoretically my hydraulic system could be using purely water condensed from the air included in Lego sets!)

Depends what you mean by efficient, I guess! I just meant that the actual final gearbox looks mechanically efficient, with few gear meshes and low friction/backlash. Other types of efficiency are debatable

Yeah, for my personal purposes, I'm pretty happy with how Lego Technic has been going. I don't really buy sets, so I don't really care if they're mediocre or repetitive, but I do buy parts, and TLG has been very generous with the useful new molds lately!

Oh, I'm sure a more compact gearbox could have been made, but from my reading in the car world, Koenigsegg is really proud of their unique 6-clutch transmission, and presumably it was important to them that Lego represent it relatively accurately, which required a larger gearbox From a value perspective it's valid to point at a low gear count compared to the P1, but I don't know that it is from an engineering standpoint. From my count the other day, this 9-speed uses only 12 gears, which is amazingly efficient! By releasing new gear sizes, Lego was able to build a gearbox with far fewer gears than before, which may be poor consumer value, but definitely seems like an engineering/efficiency win

Looks nice! That was the second Technic set I bought, so it's rather nostalgic for me

Looking good so far! I like the use of more unusual suspension parts to get a slimmer axle

Though to be fair, there's also going to be a lot of new people on here. If I had to guess the number here would be trending downward, but maybe more because people are moving to social media than because people aren't building Technic. I think it's normal for people to take up the hobby for a few years, and then move on. This can be because they just lost interest after a while and moved to something else, or because their life got busier with added responsibilities, and they just don't have the time for it anymore. I don't think decreased set quality would be a primary factor. Honestly, poor modern sets don't seem to be hurting the casual fans who just build sets (as evidenced by high sales), and I don't see much reason that they would hurt the hardcore fans who just need parts for MOCing. Maybe there's a middle ground of people who would be hurt more by it? Or maybe mediocre sets prevent the transition from casual to hardcore fans in some cases?`