SaperPL

The prototype looks a bit structurally messy, but the new design feels really solid in contrast to that. Can't wait to see it in action as well. Are you planning to increase the speed of movement though between the motors placed in the middle and those axles with worm gears?

I think you're loosing a lot of traffic by not adding working links, especially when it comes to people watching your videos on the phone because it's cumbersome few clicks to manually go to a website and find your MOC there. My trick for my laziness when it comes to adding the link is that rebrickable is still accepting shortening links to just MOC number by removing everything after it like this: https://rebrickable.com/mocs/MOC-164338/thirdwigg/john-deere-gator/#details -> https://rebrickable.com/mocs/MOC-164338 and this is short enough for youtube to not cut it away and optimise as it sometimes does. Anyway, good model, I have to get some of those tyres and try making something with them as well, because I keep seeing those in really cool small sized models. And also experiment with those rubber pieces you used for suspension, and btw I still need to try building the chassis from your TC20 model with those, gotta see this trick with flexible chassis IRL :)

Cool little model. I'm curious though, as I didn't follow your progress on this one - did you perhaps try doing this as an alt model for the john deere tractor, or was being close to your tractor scale main focus right away? Also curious - what's up with your links to your rebricable MOCs under your videos? Is there a reason why you always have something wrong with them? I remember that youtube did sometimes cut some links off for me, but not for rebrickable.

I've written my concerns about it above. Note that apart from the servos here, there's still need to fit motors and figure out how to connect it to a 4-motor hub. I'm not sure if its worth it, since at this point it's an overcomplication of things that behave similarly to motors connected directly with proportional control and don't behave like differential steering with locked output proportion at all. And with two servos, I'd have to drop one of the turret functions and not having gun elevation in a model of this size would be really weird.

This looks really neat. Especially the snow plow with those teeth and edges detailed out and great proportions between tracks and wheels at the back.

@Ryokeen I was thinking about something like this, but I'm not so keen on having that thin liftarm close to the gears because there's a potential that the gear shifter will push it against the gear teeth if the driving ring is blocked against the gear. Should work most of the time, but it might be touching the gear. I'm leaning towards a single servo mechanism as best compromise, just need to figure out the motor layouts to be solid and don't take up too much of space while having driving axle sent to the back of the whole chassis.

I got stuck on this for a bit longer than expected and I'm not sure which way to go with the steering mechanism. The problem is, that the last iteration of the mechanism works great until I put a lot of weight on it, at which point the path of least resistant when trying to steer is to spin the motor that is not driven at the time instead of it working as a break and thus one side being slower. There's various things I'd like to achieve here, but at this scale I can't achieve all of them: make the steering with two sticks and not one stick is gas and one is servo make the steering work on the same principle as the actual Sherman steering make the steering behave similarly to actual Sherman steering The potential solutions and their drawbacks: single servo differential steering through connection at specified ratio outside of the differential - one stick for steering, not gradual steering angle, configuration is kind of weird when it comes to passing the drive input to the fake engine at the back. dual servo with two gearboxes for steering of each side - should behave like its supposed to, but it's not a differential steering anymore, it's tricky to reinforce and is pretty long because of two servos placement. the actual Sherman-like differential steering that had it's own separate video, but is really huge and it would mean either making the whole model bigger which I don't want to do, or designing quite a few 3d printed elements to shrink differential. The twin gearbox approach would work really well with gradual steering on each stick, but it also means that drive motor(s) need to go somewhere and they would take input from the feature for turret, so I wouldn't have gun elevation anymore. Ideally I would have the motors driven off a battery box, but for that, I'd have to have gearbox disconnect drive output from the drive motors, and then it'd be weird that neutral is in the middle of the stick. On top of that, it's kind of hard to figure out how to reinforce the orange shifters location so they won't slide while also they won't touch the reinforcing elements or the reinforcing elements wont collide with gears near them The single servo steering is the one from this video: Which I think is the most reliable approach, but it's a bit annoying that it's controlled with a single stick. I dropped that approach earlier because it felt like it requires a lot of space, but I increased the size of the chassis significantly from that prototype already and also reworked the turret mechanism multiple times, so It might be the best bet. Still, I'm not 100% sure if I should go this way, or is there a better approach, that's not just going yolo with two drive motors connected directly, which I don't really like, but at the same time it would allow for a cleaner, simpler build. But at the same time, with current weight of the model, the slight difference between motors or how to power is supplied from the hub will mean it won't drive perfectly straight.

$11 set might be too smal to get many people excited, you have to really have some interesting build with not a lot of pieces for it to be exciting. I think that optimal size for a small set is something around 350 pieces like john deere tractor with trailer and if we were to get such non-branded $20~ish sets that are slightly more polished on the looks than the $11 sets, but still having functionality, it'd be great. Even more awesome it would be if lego would focus on a single scale matching the car transporter scale and few last supercars like senna/bolide/tecnica and started releasing various sets in the matching scale. We have some of them in similar if not the same scale, like the tow truck and few others, but it'd be great if they made it as a series similar to how speed champions are handled, because without it, "investing" into a collection at specific scale may be too risky if they might just change the scale next year.

stroeller and seregiz have both built this tractor in red:

I'm talking about making the cabin window with transparent pieces instead of building it with those thin 3L liftarms.

Neat idea. Just a loose thought - maybe using the transparent headlight pieces from Ford GT would fit along a transparent curved panel from the small tracked excavator as a cabin windows here?

I would say ships and submarines, helicopters etc also fit in the vehicle definition, you just have to make them themed like those arctic expedition vehicles. The same would go if you want to make an offroad expedition truck - it just needs to fit the arctic theme here with colors and additional features.

Sorry for the follow up question, but I just want to make sure and I should've asked that in the first place - similarly to how it was often in the arctic sets - I assume we can have a main vehicle carrying smaller sub objects (some scientific/drilling equipment for placing/carried living quarters container etc) or minor vehicles (small snowmobiles) as long as they fit inside/can be carried by it.

Thanks for clarification!

1) Is voting going to be still connected with forum account or is it going to be some kind of public voting site with e-mail verification like strawpoll or something like that? 2) Why exactly three motors? It makes sense to make it 4 motors because of the hub having four connection, and thus you get two motors for drive and steering and two for additional functions, but with three it just makes it a single motorized movement for that additional function. Kind of feels like it might limit those builds that want to have RC drive to just having a winch or motorized openable loading ramp/doors. Is the core idea that you either go for RC or have a manual model with 3 motors for some other features then drive as a treadeoff? 3) About the progress in the topic - is it okay to keep my build secret and jump drop everything in the topic last day with photos/screenshots of the phases the project came through? 4) Are gifs accepted in the entry tread as a single photo or not? Some contests back I asked this and it was a no, but it seems as it wasn't a problem in the last contest. 5) why no size/piece count limit? And it's not clear whether it has to be a vehicle or not? We may end up seeing something like a "set" containing an arctic base and multiple vehicles. Is that approach ok? Is it okay to make a base and ton of various vehicles in it?

Interesting approach with using BAR connection for ball instead of a pin to shrink it down. I didn't think about it - good concept. How does the FDM printed ball joint hold itself though? It looks like it'll break off easily unless it's that close connection letting you have more connection area at a cost of lower angles you can achieve. Suspension arm with an axle socket like this is really interesting idea. You could try to figure out a hub for a steering with pivot inside the wheel. I did play around the idea here: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4916659 but it's not with suspension included.

Seems like the frontpage brought it to TLCB as well - congrats :)

Great model, the ladder coming out from the doors is really neat. When I've seen the container door lock at the bottom, I feel stupid now for not figuring it out when I was making similar doors for a semi trailer :D One thing that I feel like isn't perfect is that the arm handling the container feels a bit fragile, but I guess you've run out of parts at that point or out of space to fit the arm when it's collapsed into the frame.

This thread is about existing parts made by Lego, either still manufactured or not, if I'm not wrong here, and people asking about parts that would be useful in specific cases and so on. What I described is about parts that we, as community, could design/define requirements and potentially 3D print, to maybe show interest in specific types of parts to Lego (and CADA).

Looks awesome. You should update the first photo in the topic to be showing the model without everything opened up, and maybe not that angled, and you might get it frontpaged because it's really good :)

@Milan I wouldn't focus the discussion necessarily on the parts being 3D printed, but more likely for a discussion of what type of parts could be useful. If we focus just on 3D printing, those without access to a printer won't participate. But they could also use studio part designer for combing parts together and bring more ideas into the discussion this way. Also it would be good to separate the 3D printing of highly specialized custom parts like the axle frames that @efferman has designed and focus on more universal parts that could be reused in different scenarios in such discussion. Noteworthy is that some of custom 3d-printed prototype parts could (and will) end up in models designed for CADA, and if they are useful, hopefully Lego may follow in their models at some point, similarly to how it went with flip-flop liftarms.

Can you show what you mean? Thanks! Meanwhile someone built the RC model and showed it off in a video:

It would be good if we had a discussion about new types of parts proposed and prototyped by the community in a separate thread as such cool stuff here will be lost between more general questions. But if the thread is not a pinned one with definition of what should get in, it'll be lost quickly in depths of further pages.

I made something similar few years back, but with wheels being directly driven: Some additional info can be found in studio renders here: https://imgur.com/a/y6Vlkp8 I'm not sure if you can really shrink something like this much more unless perhaps you would make the wheels as pairs and put the gearing between them, but then you're increasing the friction when rotating them. Note that it's tough tu have the wheels at the edge of the vehicle in something like this because you have to have that small turntable underneath the panels. That's why I built this bus in such rounded way.

I forgot to drop this one here from the contest: