Stereo

Nothing modern, but this tire is narrower at about the same diameter. https://rebrickable.com/parts/32078/tyre-70-x-28-futuristic/

They work for me, but only after a few refreshes.

The rule about voting 1 point for your own entry is making my game theory senses tingle. If the winner has a large enough margin it won't matter. But it potentially sets up a prisoner's dilemma. If everyone cooperates and submits a vote, they're all equal. But if someone "defects" and doesn't vote, it gives them up to an 18 point advantage over people who did vote. For example, if everyone approximately agrees what order to rank the entries, 1st and 2nd place will give each other 19 points and themself 1 point, and it's fine, both get 20 points. But if 2nd declines to vote, they get 19 and 1st gets 1 point and so 2nd is more likely to win. I suppose a couple options are to just make it mandatory to vote in order to win. Or require participants to rank their own entry #1, which feels weird but incentivizes people to vote, and again if every participant submits a vote they're still all equal. Or instead of doing points total, use the average score of votes, not counting the vote for their own entry. Which, going back to the 1st/2nd place thing, if 1st has (1,19,19,19,...) and 2nd has (19,1,18,18,...) they get 19 and ~18 after removing the 1 votes. If 2nd doesn't vote, they have (1,19,19,...) and (19,18,18,...) and the averages are still 19 and ~18 after removing the 1 self-vote. Anyway, I did vote, this is just the kind of stuff I think about for fun.

A quick survey of my loose 1x2 bricks points at it being a pretty specific era, maybe 2005-2010, of having the hole on that part in particular. None of the 'old colour' (light grey, brown) have it, some reddish brown and medium blue ones with an older underside printing style do have it, and then the ones with the most current underside (extra (C) LEGO, newer font) don't have the hole. 1x2 plates seem to have the hole only on the 'newest' of those three, but longer plates have had them for a long time - quickly found examples of 1x4 and 1x6 plates from the '90s that have the holes, and current ones still have the holes. I've noticed this before and I'm pretty sure some of my '90s sets came with mixes of 1x6 that do and don't have holes. I think maybe I determined it based on having some set with a majority of my red 1x6 plates in my collection at the time, but the hole/no hole being too close to 50-50 to supply everything.

It's glued or whatever to the backdrop anyway, so they might have also glued the 2 of them with no gap.

I've looked around the third-party stores a bit, but it's always possible to get more specific on what you want, until nothing is right. Does anyone produce smaller wheels intended to work with the metal axles (in the 2878 holders)? I'm trying my hand at a 6 wide passenger train (digital-only so far) and coming up with an aesthetic issue where the locomotive's floor is a good bit higher than the passenger cars, seems like 33" wheels on the cars and 40" on the locomotive, so the livery (same height horizontal stripe on everything) doesn't want to sit in the right place, as it's basically the floor of the locomotive and the lower edge of the windows of the cars. Being able to lower the floor of the cars by a plate would help; the part substitution I have in mind is to go from #5 (small) to #3 diameter wheels, which would avoid needing custom holders. #3 is 1 plate smaller radius than #5, so the new flange is the same size as the original rolling surface. The side decorations I have mocked up here wouldn't work, but the coupler and truck in general do. A more complete solution would be #4 wheels in a holder that puts them 0.5 plate closer to the floor of the car, giving it this same height but with wheels that fill the space better, but making custom wheel holders seems like a much bigger job. In the meantime I'm probably just going to treat it as one of the quirks of 6-wide (like cars being half as long), it's just when I zoom out and look at the overall colour blocking of the livery that I'm not super happy with how much black 'underside' the locomotive has, and when I compare to reference photos, the one out-of-scale problem is that the entire train is 1-1.5 plates higher than it should be.

I like the studs for roof rivets, at least that's what I assume they are.

Specially designed to transport Chevy Vegas, they had it set up so fluids would only drain from the top rear corners so it could be loaded nose-down. https://www.motortrend.com/features/chevrolet-vega-vert-a-pac/

Haha, I always avoid them if I can, a few old sets (8860 and 8865 Test Car for sure) use them to mesh with the oldest differential style and I swap those to 12T bevels when I build them, interestingly they mostly work with each other. I've actually snapped a 12T in half in the distant past, so I don't trust the even thinner gears for any load. I've made instructions available on Rebrickable, with some minor parts differences from what I actually built, since I used parts I already have. https://rebrickable.com/mocs/MOC-194382/Stereog/tc27-heavy-duty-forklift/#details

Heavy Duty Forklift Features: - raise and lower forks by 20 studs with knob - tilt mast with knob - steering with knob as well as steering wheel, with Ackermann correction - 3 cylinder fake engine driving front wheels, located behind the cab - opening engine hatch and rear compartment - forks manually slide sideways to suit varying loads

I have been tidying up the Studio file to make it match the physical model, and probably make instructions, and I thought it would be a fun exercise to do one of these linkage-only renders. Red - mast height. Yellow - steering. Blue - Mast tilt. Purple - fake engine driven by front wheels. One oddity now exposed is the 14T gear under the steering wheel. It turned out the way I built the cab floor means there's only a 1 plate gap and regular 12T bevels won't fit. This doesn't work very well if you try to use the steering wheel directly, axle tends to pull out of the 14T gear and it's difficult to put back. But it's a bit late to work on the design, and with gentle play it holds up ok.

Maybe one of those pick-a-brick blank space modulars would be a better way to sell an inverse corner set. Make it half alleyway, half green space or something.

I found a formerly spring-loaded cannon that didn't fare so well, lawnmower carved one of the bars off of it and put a big dent in the side so it doesn't work. It still looks like a cannon though so it was good enough for me.

In other magazine news, seems to be confirmed that the heavy-lift helicopter has Bright Green as its accent colour (using parts that are otherwise unique to the Kawasaki Ninja)

Windshield parts are usually the best (most printed Star Wars ones are in 1-3 sets, unprinted a little more common) but difficult to look up the parts. Generally I do it by figuring out length x width (eg. '10 x 4', '6 x 4') and searching for that. Though ones with bars or clicky clips might be listed at a different size so I'll also try +-1 length if I don't see it. With less rare parts where you have say 50 possible sets, knowing the general colour theme helps a lot. E.g. if it's a grey piece, but you know the set's got a lot of blue and black in it. You can scan sets for that. Another option that's more effort is put all the parts you can identify on a Rebrickable part list and then use their Build button to search for sets that match that list. I've only had wrong sets be better matches in the Minecraft theme, cause it sticks to a very limited set of pieces, and sometimes small sets have every piece present in a larger set, so the small set will look like a better match. It lets you input quantities, which can help narrow it down if you think the set has a whole bunch of 2x2 slopes or something. Mostly I'll take the first option (rare single pieces) if I'm shopping bulk lots and trying to get a better estimate of what's in them. Or of course helping out other people online from photos. Once I buy bulk Lego, I want to have it on a part list anyway so I maintain my (~25k) loose parts in Rebrickable lists, and from there it's convenient to see what sets are nearly complete.

As far as I know the clips are centered at the midpoint of the stud, and the "base" of the antistud inside the binoculars is right at the edge of the bar. So in millimetres that should be 4mm-1.6mm = 2.4mm. Plates are 3.2mm so it's 3/4 of a plate thick gap. Brackets are 1/2 plate so they should fit in that space (not tightly, but maybe enough of the stud engaged). If the stud hole's not actually a full stud deep, it would be less than that 2.4mm. Without knowing the exact aesthetic you want, maybe you could switch from using 2 clips to a clip and a bracket. And have the binoculars on the right instead of the left.

Discord is discouraging hotlinking, anything hosted by them is a temporary link now, they didn't especially announce the change (maybe it's in patch notes?)

More pictures in the Bricksafe album. It can lift the cargo container from 42078, ish. When it's lower, it's not got enough weight to counterbalance it, but at full height the weight is in a more reasonable spot. To take photos outside, it's required to pay the pet tax. She pretty much immediately walked between me and the subject.

I was keeping this problem in mind while building something else, and here's another interesting one: 3937 hinge part is a quarter plate shorter than 3 plates. So it can fill in the half-stud (1.25 plate) gap. I didn't focus on the row of tiles underneath, of course the 1x2 jumper exists without a groove. If you had 2 studs depth, the 2x2 with 2 studs would also work.

When is the Entry post open for submissions?

The axle inside the antistud of a brick is loose with no play, you could also use a 3-long pin but I think that's illegal cause it stresses the pin.

If you use a technic 1x1 brick instead of system, you can put a plate half-offset above it instead of needing the jumper. Though now I'm looking closer I guess that's a 1x1 with studs on opposite sides.

I can only narrow it down to 'during my dark ages', every set I own has the reinforced one, but 42098 (2019) is the oldest set I have that contains the part.

It's the vertical offset, you go down 1.5 studs and back 5 so the total length between ball joints is 5.22 studs. Usually with solid axle designs it's allowed for on the springs by letting them rotate front to back as well as side to side.

I can't see exactly where the bogie pivots, but you can do something like this: (red parts for chassis, yellow for parts that turn with the bogie, and then a black 2x2 turntable plate) Tan 20t gear is directly on the bogie's rotation axis, so it can drive gears that move with the bogie, while having a motor on the chassis drive it. 2 studs apart as shown uses 20-12 gears, 3 could use 28-20 or 36-12 (but 36t gear is more than 4 studs wide), 4 could use 12-20-12 etc.