Lipko

There sshould be a 2L pin with bushing and a axle-pin connecting the T with the wing and the L beam at the same time.

I cannot do better, if I could, I would already have done so. It's not about your skills, you know that, I know that you are the best Technic car designer probably, and honestly I haven't built any MOCs ever except Crowkillers' Vampire GT, so I can't comment on the building quality. What I was trying to say that CADA is just too similar to Lego for me, and I'm trying to undertand why that bothers me, and why I feel that strange "sect" vibe about these dreamy CADA opinions. And suddenly I became the villain. It would definitely be easier to discuss this in person with a couple of beers, that's why I asked about CADA events. Another point I feel CADA is not there yet, it's AFOC base. BTW if I had the time, I'd buy CADA just to try, but I can't make the time even for my own simple MOC. Another "feeling" I have, is that if CADA would divert more from Lego, and go for, say, (partly) metal parts with the possibility to become better than current RC models, no one would have a bad word. CADA and LEGO are unique (as I know but I may be wrong, not counting copy cats), that these are construction toys that are also look awesome on the shelf. So two almost the same brands filling the same niche alone, dunno, fells unconfortable.

Okay, I'm going to stop too, because I don't want to start qouting people here, and maybe I misunderstand the, but I feel hatred from towards TLG from some of you (especially you, Bruno), and even hatred towards Lego fans ("fanboys", "victim cards", and other such expressions) for some reason. Everything Lego does is crap, CADA is the "dream" company. So your vision about " anything we like according to our own vision and be happy" sounds a bit wierd. You seem to be happy bashing LEGO and "fanboys" actually. For the review: the chassis is quite flexible, turning radius is huge (and even huger with 4 wd), doors and chassis deform when operated, steering wheel connected by friction. Just some things TLG models get bashed for all the time. Okay, you mentioned some bugs that were trivial to fix too, some of them are more like building instruction mistakes than design mistakes. I'm not saying Lego models are perfect, or very good, but I don't see that huge difference between the quality.

I see that on both "sides". I'm waiting for some other reviews, sorry, but yours was just too positive to be believable. And I do have a feeling against CADA at the moment, but I could not point out what. Maybe that I don't believe that two brands with almost the same content and system can co-exist for too long, and Lego has still way more inertia. I don't want to invest and "play" on both sides then to find myself outside both. I wish more than anything (I'm overacting) that Lego would co-operate with hobby designers in some other ways than Ideas. CADA has this, but at the moment that's the only appeal they have.

You act like a CADA representative.

Thank you very much for the interest! Of course you can hijack the thread, though making a separate thread would be a bit better, as one thread might be confusing for readers. There's a lot of room for improvement, especially with the "new" flipflop beams and frames. Though I won't have time to look into the instructions deeply, or "approving" the modifications. Unfortunately I won't have time for cooperating.

All these stuff should be in a separate "jury voting contest debate" or "TC20/TC25 restrospective" threads, because this general contest thread is essentially destroyed by all these whatever

Sorry, my English sucks hard. By musical instrument I meant some music machine (be it a marble machine, percussion machine, music box with ballerine, whatever), not modelling a guitar or trumpet.

anymals real space related stuff manufacturing machinery working musical instrument (anything that can produce real melodies)

https://recordsetter.com/world-record/bubbles-blown-30-tarantula-mouth/40691

I can agree with those, I have very similar values. And I know very famous builders who pretty much gave up on the hobby (partly) because he felt the same way. It brings me down too. But be honest to yourself. You already knew all this if you didn't live in a cave, so all of this comes off as whining instead of real complaint. You went for building quality instead of empty awesomeness not because you didn't know building quality is not interesting to most, but because you value it. You knew already that bigger is better, prettier is better and "licenced" is better, but you didn't go that way. Because you have strong values or because you were coward and didn't dare to go for looks, because you may have failed. And you might learn that going for looks may be equally hard, if not harder. I'm in a very similar situation, and I have to admit, I could never reach the sculpting level of BrunoJ or TLego or Erik Trax even if I would gave up on every value I have and would make an empty statue. I rarely do "lincenced" models not because I have some ethical consideration, but simply because I'm afraid I would just fail. The current Dakar project is "licenced", but I have no idea how I will succeed, and it's more likely that it will turn out to be a generic model instead. Even though I gave up on many things, including functions and building quality. I don't care if the model is perfectly in system, not all panels are fully fixed, etc. (There are some things I will never do... but you get it) EDIT: and someting I always forget: I did win (okay one second place) contests and the models were worse quality than TLG sets. I guess that makes me a "pro" in a way, I can adapt to the task and I have a good conceptual sense, I can choose models that would look good in Lego, but are also a bit uniquie. Or the opposite, not unique at all, so it stands out from all the strange unique models. Many entries fail because being too unique, awkwardly unique.

You can't expect premium quality in a contest, simply because of time. For me it takes at least 200 hours to design a big (say 1:8 car) premium-ish quality model (without instructions and polishing buildability). That hardly fits in a 2-3 month contest. Okay, I'm not the buidling-speed etalon, but I doubt the same quality model can be built in less than say half the time, which is still a lot for a contest. You talk a lot about building quality, but I bet if others would look at the models you call good quality, they would find their flaws and weak points. So even that is not an exactly definable thing. For example you may call perfect suspension geometry a must for making good quality, but I cannot care less about the same thing. I'm making a Dakar car at the moment. By far the biggest challenge was (and still is) fitting the spare tires.... I ditched adjustable suspension and detialed engine bay in favour of fitting the spare tyres. Which feature is more characteristic than the other? For me the tires, someone else would have ditched spare tires in a heartbeat (like TLG did for their model). Oh, and I ditched the on-board fire distiguisher for a sequential gearbox and sturdy chassis. For someone else a fire estinguisher is simply a must, just like a working cockpit steering wheel for me. How would you specify these for a contest? It's only feasible if there would be a "build a C2b buggy class Dakar rally car that fulfills the following 50 points" contest. A a very specific theme, and those are usually contests with 6 entries at most.

That's why I said these "recreate" type of contest, while being very popular (honestly it was not appealing me at all, so I'm in the minority in this topic too), it is swampy (I don't know the proper term). I would have not entered even if I had the time. I will be blunt: awesome entries have chance to win. If you can't decide what's awesome, then contests are not for you. You have to "feel" it, it's simply too complex to explain what is awesome for each contest. If you don't have this "feeling", than you will have a hard time making good models, and I honestly don't know why you are doing it at all. If you are doing this because you love solving engineering problems or recreate interesting machines, than that's fine too, but don't expect to do well in a usual contest, even if you pass all the checkpoints. Because with a very detailed and clear list of "values", the other contestants will also pass all the checkpoints and you'll end up with a tons of entries that perfectly fit the descriptions. And at the end, awesomeness will be the only distinctive factor again. And of course awesomeness can't be defined, so there will always be personal infuences, that's why I agree that a public voting is better than a jury voting. To sum it up: these contests are not about solving particular engineering problems, these are about seeing awesome models. Maybe solving engineering problems whould also be worth making some contests about. I wish I could be concise, this is clearly a major issue I have.

It's on the "looks" axis in the graph, but I forgot to inculde in the text summary. I agree with you generally, though I don't think the problem is that huge. If that's what you value, just stick to it and accept that it's not the most popular thing. As I did, because that's what I value also. It was hard to stomach, but I only moan about it if I'm not building. If I'm building, I can forget that I honestly feel vastly underrated. And for photo quality: It's a bad excuse with nowadays technology. There are some threads about how to make acceptable photos. Just some quick hints: take the photos from a proper distance, at least from 1 meter to minimize perspective distortion. Get a free image editor and apply auto-color/auto contrast. Make your photos outdoors because ambient lighting is the best. See my portfolio photos. All done without dedicated expensive equipment and experience/interest in photography. My videos are crap, yet I won contests. One hint: never go above 3 minutes.

I think too simple isn't good either. Ranking the entires forces the voter to look at the entries more closely. If you can't rank then you can look at others' votes so you can compensate a bit. I agree that the F1 method was tested and worked okay, but I'm a test engineer/prototype engineer. So for me doing+testing is much preferred to working out every details up front if the problem is complex. And everything involving intelligent agents (voters in this case) is super complex.

I think there are 3 main groups of AFOLs. engineer: prefers functions, but there has to be a minimum level of looks artist: prefers looks, but there has to be a minimum level of functions collector/Technic-layman: prefers looks, doesn't care about functions. The arttist and the collector has a bigger common area, so a public voting (when Technic-outsiders can also vote) will always be in favour of looks. Maybe we should try a contest theme that's not about the looks, or looks is forcedly "eliminated", say car chassis contest, interesting mechanism contest, whatever. Sorry if I only say obvious things, but I like to think in diagrams.

In my opinion, this over-/under-specification conversation discussiom is the result of the contest theme. While these "recreate" contests produce awesome models, they are too swampy, as the source material is too diverse, so too specific and too generic at the same time. More diverse than generic themes, which were my personal favorites as there were many entries, many voters and not more debates than other themes.

Are there any CADA evets/meetups/exhibitions.in Europe?

Oh, than all is ok. I'm not following contests closely recently.

Having participaded ín some contests since the first one, the only real problem I see with community voting is letting recently joined members to vote. It's easier to join and vote than to support a project on Ideas. There was a contest whith dozens of one post users voting on the same entry. I guess because of a good Facebook campaign.

Very nicely expressed.

Interesting discussion on the price and size. I am a middle class guy (I don't know the definitions, maybe upper class since I have about twice salary as the median salary), I could "easily" afford to buy this money-wise. The reason I cannot afford being a collector (which I am not interested in at all) is space. I cannot afford to have a separate air conditioned room or basement or shed. This is where I stand a bit surprised: seeing some of you guys have a dedicated room bigger than my bedroom. I could do it if I told my misses that "we cannot have another kid because I need that room for my toys". So to sum it up: my opinion is the opposite to most of you: the set it not appealing as it's way too big. Not shelf compatible as the Titanic or the Saturn V.

How about a more descriptive index topic name instead of "[complete name of the subforum again] Index"?

The Arocs felt flimsy and felxible, the build was not "elegant", it was a bit boring to assemble. Special functions/unusual machines are okay to me too, as long as they look pretty

Thank you for the tips, I found a company in Hungary, I'll contact them and see how it goes. https://forwartsticker.com/about-us/