gyenesvi

These turned out pretty nice, great that you made a trailer too for showcasing. The pullback motor for the heli works pretty well!

Nice amount of functions in that helicopter too, it's a great duo! The looks are pretty cool as well!

Well, many unfortunate truths are being said in this thread. I also have to agree to this. Unfortunately, most people don't appreciate quality designs (and this is a generic phenomenon, not just lego). Most lego buyers cannot tell the difference between good design and bad, as long as it looks good or big enough, or represents a real branded thing that they desire. This is why supercars are trending in technic; it's about looks, brands and desires. People don't care much about the details of suspension or gearbox, as long as it has some. They would not understand the differences anyways, why would they? I didn't understand that before I started designing suspension geometries myself. This is why Lego is not bothering much with good technical details and coming out with not so good quality models all the time. So ultimately, the only people who appreciate very high quality custom models are those who can design them, but even if those people would buy other's MOCs, that's a very small group. Another conclusion I agree with is that selling instructions for models for which you need to collect parts is hard. It is hard to collect parts, typically means ordering from multiple BL shops or Lego, carefully selecting which ones have the best prices and the least amount of shipping costs. If you just let the algorithm do it automatically for you, it can come out much more expensive. So as a conclusion, selling B models is much easier. You mean the 1000+ for successful B models, right? Because from what I have heard (and experienced), for non B models, even a 100 can be considered a great success. Also, the distribution is very skewed. There are only a handful of models that actually sell that well, most of them sells much less. @gheneli some nice designs up there, I like when lines flow well and there's little clutter, I agree that's more important than modelling every small detail at the cost of tons of clutter. Also, what I wanted to add about selling, is that for many designers that can sell reasonably well, it took a couple years, if not a decade to get where they are today, and they built out a follower base. You cannot expect to be able to sell well all of a sudden. Also, many started in the 2010s when technic was in one of its golden ages, and the market wasn't saturated, or during the covid era when many people got into lego and the buyer base was larger. Those times are gone, today it's more difficult, the market is saturated, and customers are going back to other hobbies.

I agree with others that the switching motor could be directly connected, it's pointless to complicate things in the RC case. My philosophy about RC gearboxes is that more than 2 speeds are pointless, and often impractical :) Though I mainly build off-roaders where a high and a low gear makes sense, but anything in between does not really. So I assume this is more for the sake of doing it, than the actual practical utility of having more speeds. Also agree with others that 8x speed range is way too much. The lego motors won't really be able to handle it. If it was me, 3x is the most I would try, something like 1x, 1.66x, 2x, 3x (or 2.77x) for the 4 speeds. Lego motors are weak enough for a single speed for a larger car, not to mention a range of speeds and the friction of the gearbox. As for the 12T-12T diagonal connection, just try it manually with 2 gears on an L beam - you'll see immediately that it does not work, way too much friction. I guess you could start out with testing a 2-speed gearbox and having a complete body of the car to see the weight, and find out which speed range works, and then you'd see how you could fit more gears in between the two extremes. What's the scale of the car you are building?

Actually, I have long been wishing for more brown parts, I think they could look good on vintage classics, like pickups, trucks, off-roaders..

Thanks for the info, now I understand, interesting hub design. Are the bearings 8mm or 10mm? Do you use Cada CV joints in the driveshaft? Cool, I never tried to print a rim, but this is exactly the one application where it would be really useful. I wish Lego would make a deeper rim for the 80mm tires as well, along with such a portal hub, it would be awesome for mid sized RC off-roaders.

Great looking model as always, really nice details, even though it uses custom parts for the difficult technical aspects! At the same time, it would be nice to specify all custom parts and give more detail about them in your writeup. I'd also be interested in those custom portal hubs, I have been thinking of a 8:16 hub myself for 80mm wheels, but haven't really gotten to a printable version yet. This looks nice and compact. Can you show more details of its usage? Something does not seem to add up wrt to the red version and the black one in the model itself, in terms of mounting. Where are the A-arms connected exactly? What kind of CV joint is used (seems like the input axle is longer than the standard 2 stud lego version)? How is the steering linkage attached? Why are the two red 2L axles needed when there are screws as well to hold the two sides together (or why do you need the extra screws)? How do you insert the output stop axle, if its hole seems to be blocked by the towball's pinhole behind it? Furthermore, are those standard lego tires (from Audi)? And the rims? Are those custom ones, or just have a rim cover?

I think it doesn't look bad, but if you don't like it, you can erase the pattern with a regular eraser (though it takes some time). And then you'll have clean blue fenders for other builds in the future, which I found useful as well :) Nice idea for the contest by the way!

I fear bright green, since the Porsche is also bright green..

Yeah, recolors are always good for parts. Recolored cars should not be counted as one more set, in the sense it's just a bonus item. It's not taking the spot from anything else.

Thanks, sounds interesting. I see that most components are just standard RC electronics without any lego compatible housing, the main thing is the in-wheel motors and custom rims, but that can result in good play experience and easy installation.

I'm not much of a bike guy, but it looks very cool, and has some solid geometric solutions too!

What is this Add Power? I could not find any info about them online. 3rd party electronics company? Do you have more info?

Sure, I sent you a PM on Messenger with some images illustrating it on a sketch build.

Yes, I took the 1x1 brick stop into account and the CV joint max angle as well, but in my experience the tire starts rubbing significantly earlier than these limits are reached (when steered about halfway to the stopper limit), this is why I am asking, it seems too early to be acceptable. It may be okayish for manual use (although I can already imagine it to cause enough friction to be felt, don't you feel it when you push the model around?), however, if I build an RC model with this approach, it will soon ruin the tire I'm afraid, especially as I'd want to use it with a higher steering angle (large CV joints).

These turned out really cute, matching each other both in functional theme and shaping style, really in spirit of the contest!

Wow, this is a truly remarkable construction both in terms of mechanics and in terms of aesthetics, amazing achievement! And I say that not just as a lego enthusiast, but also as a software engineer. This is a really nice way of illustrating how early mechanical computers worked. After watching/reading the explanations, I understand most of the principles, but I'd still have some questions about the details of its workings. The principle of the OR gate is clear (either of two vertical pushes), the explanation of the AND gate took me some time to understand, if I'm correct it requires a combination of tilting and vertical pushing, and the tilt comes from the memory (is that always so?). That's the details, but the overall logic is not yet clear. If I understand correctly, the overall logic determines for each state (6 of them) and each user input (8 of them), the resulting counter move along with updating the state right? The memory encodes the state we are in, each row corresponding to one state (though what the individual bits encode is not totally clear). And then, the overall logic is along the lines of "if we are in state S0 AND the user makes this OR that move, then we move to state S1, which also implies the right counter-move", right? As for this becoming an Ideas lego set, I'm quite confident you'd get enough votes, however, there might be some obstacles of it ending up becoming an official set; mainly due to the complexity of construction and operation; this may not be for casual builders. So if Lego considers this, they might look for the simplification of the user experience, and I guess the less they have to think about it the more chances you have, so may be worth thinking ahead :) The constructions seems pretty complicated, though the build process does not necessarily need to be complicated (even though somewhat repetitive), it would be good to understand how easy it is to make building mistakes that result in movement jamming or other erroneous operation for example. But more importantly, I'm afraid that also operating it, especially the steps of resetting, could turn out to be somewhat complicated for an average person. For example, even though now I get the reset process, I'm pretty sure I would not remember it in two weeks time :) First thing I wonder about is game play. I understand now that the memory needs to be transitioned with a separate gesture. What happens if I accidentally skip that, and play another move? Is that blocked, or will that result in some suboptimal / random moves? Also, it's not clear to me why this separate gesture is actually required, if movement of the memory is powered by the scissor mechanism? Can the keystroke not also trigger memory movement, since it has its own power source? Next thing is resetting. If I look at it from a user perspective, a more ideal procedure for resetting would be Reset the whole display with one lever (instead of a CW and a CCW rotation per field). I'm thinking that all field resetters could be linked and moved in sync, and a rubber band could pull back the lever (instead of needing to turn back all squares) Rewind the memory with one movement, instead of three movements. A single controller move could in principle operate all three stages of lifting the gates, shifting the memory, lowering the gates These would significantly simplify the resetting procedure, and seem mechanically doable, though I understand that it might require some significant adjustments. These are just some ideas by the perfectionist inside me, but it is already an outstanding work as it is!

@Anto I'm experimenting with your steering rack linkage on the axles for a build that would have axles of the same width, and it seems to me that the 13L steering rack is scratching the tires even at a fairly moderate steering angle. Is that so on your build? Is the rack scratching the tires? Or is the steering angle fairly limited on this truck?

Oh man.. this is a truck I have been thinking of building ever since Matt built it (probably larger scale, RC), but I haven't yet gotten into it. But YOU DID JUSTICE TO THIS THING! Amazing work, all over the place! A ton of mechanical complexity and ingenuity squeezed in there (advantage of a manual model), in a beautiful packaging. Hats off! I don't often buy building instructions, but I'll definitely build this one!

You can use one 3L on the front and and one 2L on the rear, and then they will be connected. Anyways, can be good for other models..

Also order from the 2L version, you will need them in this case in the middle in the motors.

Nice looking mini-scale truck! Nice and simple motorization, and I like that rear steering sytem, elegant solution.

That runs pretty smooth even on the dense grass! And indeed, the cost sounds good too! What are those motors exactly? They seem pretty flat! And how did you fix the U-joint to the output shaft? With a thin plate inserted?

I agree with @BrickShark that it would be very impractical to do so in this model. These are small scale floating axles and the motors stick out and wobble a lot. On top of that you would not gain much. As for power, a single Buwizz 3 unit would be ideal for controlling the motors, but then you lose the option to add a servo, as the Buwizz 3 has only 2 PF ports, and the Buwizz motors need to be on separate ports. So steering could only be done with PU L motor. But that may be a positive in some cases, as the for factor may be better suited, depending on the situation.

That's a nice looking truck, good shaping and color scheme! Cool video as well. I like the use of 2 Buwizz motors in the simplest way possible, it's a good match with the large truck body that hides them! Couldn't the servo be integrated more directly in the center above the front axle?