SaperPL

I would be worried if those two small linear actuator can pull this multi-stage boom up, it's too much load on them/for their safety mechanism, I think. I tried using one of those in a simplistic boom that is pretty lightweight and one of them wasn't enough.

I like that you're going outside->in and not inside->out as everyone else. That may be interesting to see the problems with steering vs drive shaft and how will your initial external design survive the clash :)

I like the challenge of making those kinds of models, it's always interesting to see what people come up with in tight spaces, but it feels to me like this kind of approach ends up with everything holding onto mechanisms themselves with barely any frame. I did try doing those, but usually ended up with either something being too weak or not having enough space to fit something important. My small wheeled excavator would be the prime example of that :) Aren't you afraid that handling of pneumatic controls will take too much space of the cabin? Also what is that 1 stud long pneumatic/rigid pipe acting as a pivot point for the arm? Is that cut into length and allowed or is that an actual standard lego piece?

@Jim is it okay to use a sticker sheet from original set on the contest model? Or stickers in general. I vaguely remember there were contests with stickers in the rules, or my memory is at fault here...

After doing some research, I decided to go with 8109 Flatbed Truck because of colour scheme which should be easy to replicate without hunting for exotic parts in specific colours as well as the fact that I wanted to do something slightly different. FINAL MODEL: Full Size Photo Original Model Full Size Photo Original Model Full Size Photo Original Model Full Size Photo Instructions on Rebrickable: https://rebrickable.com/mocs/MOC-155661 ORIGINAL POST: It is also a set without a fake piston engine so I don't have to fight to squeeze in the drive train and the engine in this scale. What I like in this set is in particular the kneeling/lowering of the rear of the truck alongside raising end extending the flatbed, which is a pretty cool mechanism to try and make more compact: Lego Technic 8109 Flatbed Truck Speed Build - AustrianBrickFan The extension of a tow wheel holder is really cool as well, but I don't think I'll be able to fit such mechanism at my scale, because the bed pivots over last axle and cuts corner this way in the original model. I managed to make an initial prototype for the bed and kneeling geometry, but I'm not yet sure about whether I should use the single linear actuator like this, or make it two so there's room in the middle between them to drive the tow wheel holder extension there. So far good enough, but I don't like how far up front is the knob for this function. I didn't check the proportions/spacing between front and rear axles, so the whole thing might be long enough already and the knob would not be where the original model had the controls.

I really like the outrigger approach - how are you keeping the gear racks apart though when they are extended? I mean the only thing holding them is the gear, but can they slide sideways on this gear?

I also missed this one. Sent a bunch of my MOCs, but I might be outside of their scope with what you guys are submitting. Anyway I'm wondering what's up with that no specific deadline apart from the info that stop keeping your information by the end of the year.

Thanks, but I did check that one long ago and it's not the shape that I need. What would make more sense is the 2x2x3 corner piece designed by @efferman

Finally had time to assemble the parts that came to me from various sources. Not everything is original Lego, this model will probably need to wait with instructions till more parts are available in DBG...

by "new" I meant that it's relatively new type of pin. What surprised me is the usage here, didn't thought about using this part for loose usage.

Am I the only one that noticed the new 3L pin used for pistons in mini fake piston engine? I didn't think about that, but It seems like a cool alternative to having to secure the axle with a bushing.

By courtesy of @eric trax and by our curiosity I can share a size comparison with his Jeep Willys MB (Lego Classic Defender 10317 alt-model): The Jeep is in 1:12 scale and I think my Sherman is roughly 1:13.5. For reference here's how those compared in real life:

DBG parts are slowly getting here. I sourced some 3rd party panels in DBG for now that these are not available from Lego in DBG at this point: Not really a fan of how those short curved panels are moulded differently, but I understand that is because of original shape being owned by Lego. Will have to wait and hope till there's a set with those in DBG. I'm trying to figure out what to do with that angle at the back. I designed my own variant of angled panel and I'm trying to print it with resin printer, but I'd rather figure out how to make it with something available from Lego: Also I need to figure out what to do with this rear corner of the cast hull here:

That is exactly why it makes sense to make a contest that has rules about the submission to make it so it's not "bigger is better"/pay-2-win. That's one of the reasons why I want the rules to be precise. Because when you look at this from the other way around - consider a contestant that is spending a lot of money adhering to the written rules and being the one that slightly shrunk 1:8 supercar to 1:12 scale and after the popular vote that he wins this way against the other one that was more "in the spirit of the contest", he's disqualified from the top three because that's how jury decides. If that happens it means either this is a failure of the rules being not clearly representing the spirit of the competition in the interpretation of the jury if the rules could be interpreted in the way to allow this kind of submission, or the failure of not disqualifying the submission before the popular vote happened. And I'm giving this example of popular vote and then jury vote because this scenario happened already and IMO has clearly shown this problem. If the rules leave room to interpretation, they should be improved/explained as soon as people start asking questions at the beginning of the competition, but if someone finds a way to fit into the rules while walking the fine line on the boundary, it should be a fair game. If the problem is with people voting for just what looks better and voting stage taking too much time, then why not consider only contestants voting like in game jams? This has higher chance of people voting having the focus on what the contest was about and understanding the problems and constraints of the topic etc. There are ways to do this correctly and there are references in other creative-work-based contests, but the approach where you want to have jury vote just because the rules leave too much room for interpretation OR you allow people outside of the contest to vote and end up flooded with votes on what looks better, is just flawed. From my perspective the cleanest way to do so is to allow only contestants and moderators to vote and maybe previous contest winners as well, after enforcing the rules/disqualifying the submissions clearly failing to comply to them. I don't want to argue about their viewpoint being better or worse, but the approach is clearly flawed - if we need jury to weigh which submission is mostly in the spirit of the competition, then it means rules weren't written clearly enough or popular vote would allow voters who don't care about the spirit of the competition.

That is why I said multiple times that jury should disqualify submission not adhering to the rules - with chance to object/discuss the jury's interpretation of the rules - but after that it's fair game that people should vote on what they like since at this stage everything is made according to the rules. Even if you would make a contest about making a model that is "good at doing something", until that is objectively measurable by pure numbers, making a bare minimum mechanism that for example moves fastest or furthest etc, may loose to a model that is a complete package with looks and building techniques etc even if it's worse performing in that specific matter, and that would be fair because there would be different views on that. Unless there is actually a contest where we are rules that define the contest being about specific metrics, and not just being the boundaries, there's no actual reason for jury vote here apart from disqualifying submissions that are out of the boundaries of the rules and that still should be open to interpretation if the rules were not stated precisely enough in the beginning.

How do you even end up with such conclusion? Everyone has his own point of view and values things slightly differently, so if we'll have like 30 contestants + 20 more users that will vote, how does this compare to few moderators in the jury? Or is the jury supposed to comprise of more people now, like for example all previous contest winners or something like that? Did I miss something? Popular vote of course poses a risk of people voting for what they like and not necessarily taking rules into account and that's why verification of submissions should take place before the voting stage. And also yeah, you could make an argument that a lot of if not most of the people voting don't take the spirit of the competition as the priority in voting but just vote on what looks cool. But if you for example would need a jury voting step to ensure the submissions are evaluated to your own/jury's interpretation of the rules, then it might mean that the rules were not properly written in the first place and then the clear handling of this is for the participants to either be the only ones voting, or making decision together on where to draw the line of crossing the rules based on the rules written in the beginning. Yeah, this is kind of weird. And also the fact that votes are public may have some effect on others voting.

Why not go for criteria verification by jury first and then voting like usual stage? There is a deadline for submissions and after submissions are closed you can take a moment to discard the ones breaking the rules. The contest being announced with stages like this ahead would make people more careful about the criteria in the first place if the reasoning behind changes in the process is enforcing of the criteria. If you are allowing submissions to be voted on and then make a jury voting that affects the popular vote, then it's not really clean and that happened before, but if there's a stage where you decide that some submissions did not meet the requirements, and that's before voting, there's a room for discussion on how people interpret those before the voting stage, IF that situation were to happen. I feel like there's a higher chance that people would be avoiding breaking the rules if there's a stage where they can be disqualified before the voting. Also I don't like the jury voting if that's just few people deciding because obviously we all value different things and thus popular vote takes into account more points of view than just group of few people in the jury.

When talking about shrinking contest, I meant the size limit for the contest entry model - Because for example you could shrink down 1:8 supercar to 1:10 for example? and it would still be a pretty big model while still it would be shrunk. For me it would make sense if all of us were either shrinking down to car-transporter-sized cars or to $10 set size. For alternate model I simply wouldn't want it to be a pay to win contest when few people would win just because they're alternating the biggest sets like liebherr or supercars. And I feel like it'd be easy for experienced alt makers to just come and disrupt the contest with something they were working on anyway. Discussion is there to give them feedback for what we think would make sense/what we'd like to see in the contest. And there is a good reason for them to figure out optimal rule set if their goal is to bring the most people to participate - If I'm not really excited about the challenge or I'd see that rules will allow people with most money and time on their hands to dominate the contest, I'd probably focus on my own projects instead. And I suppose everyone is deciding on each contest participation based on whether they are excited enough for the challenge and have time/resources to spend on it in specific time.

For shrinking contest - yes, the size limit is nice for planning out things. For alternate build contest it's about the cost of the set and I believe that setting up a part limits to something around 1000 is a good choice because above that it becomes a pay-2-win at some point - with bigger sets you'll end up with everything you may need for vehicle construction and lots more panels that can be configured in more ways.

I missed that earlier, sorry!

I think you're not getting what we're talking about - we're not talking about limit of pieces of the set that you want to shrink, but limit of how many pieces your shrunk model can have.

I was just setting an example. I'm not sure which approach I like better, for a car competition I liked the bounding box and the requirement it's supposed to fit the car transporter which made all cars roughly the same scale. If you make it about part count, we'll end up with bigger designs that are simpler inside and smaller ones that are more fleshed out, not sure if that's bad, but I really liked the past competitions that ended up with similar sized models.

I wasn't talking about limit on the set you want to shrink, but on the limit on the target size of the model that you are making. I was giving out an example of this size because if we were to go for the size of car-transporter-fitting cars, we could end up with sets that are in the size of close to this size.

If there is a set size requirement then it's going to be a level ground for everybody. I would expect the requirement to be something sized like the $10 sets - like mini claas xerion.

That is why I said it in context of small scale models. It shouldn't be a problem to learn to assemble a small model in studio. The software is free and really easy to use... And I'm not saying that all contest should be like that, for bigger models it would obviously get cumbersome. I never said the contest would be virtual-only... That is true, but how do you construct a requirement for showing internals in a way that it will be always clear how something was built? A lot of detail is often lost in the photos when elements are obstructed by other elements.