Blakbird

How much do I spend on Technic? I won't answer that question when my wife asks, so why would I answer you? I actually try not to think about it. I don't know exactly what my collection is worth, but I have it insured for $50,000.

For anyone who may have doubted what a global hobby LEGO Technic is and what a global reach Eurobricks has, I thought I would present the following chart that I put together. This shows the distribution of all the instructions sold to date by country, and the globe is pretty well represented! Still not much from Asia and nothing from South America, but I was inspired by how much a design can span the globe with little more publicity than this Eurobricks thread.

I love the Caterpillar engine. Looks very authentic. And I've never seen that type of crane before but it is fascinating.

Both great cars, but the vampire is a lot more complicated. You won't be disappointed with either. If you can only choose one, choose based on what you like in terms of appearance. If you want the most functions for your money, then choose the Vampire. If you want a model and instructions that are most like an official LEGO model, then choose the Concept Car.

That is the part that will surprise you. It is quite hard to learn, and much harder if your plane is not balanced or powered properly. Outrunner just means that the coil is on the outside and rotates with the output shaft. This makes the output speed much slower with higher torque so you usually can direct drive a prop instead of gearing it down. Most modern motors are outrunners. You can tell by the diameter. Outrunners will have a very large diameter housing, probably the same dimension as the length of the motor. Regular motors are long and thin. Yes, a plane this size could easily draw 50 Amps. Flying time of an R/C plane is often only a couple of minutes. Honestly, it takes so much concentration to fly that you can't go much longer than that anyway. You are going to want to get a prop that is matched to your motor output. So wait until you select a motor and the manufacturer will have prop recommendations for various battery voltages. Anything with more than 2 blades is very unusual, and you can't tell the difference once in flight anyway. You could make a 6 blade for display and use a 2 blade for flight.

Sounds like you might be referring to a "super set". In some years LEGO released instructions to combine multiple models into a single larger model. These instructions did not come with any of the individual sets, but could be ordered through the LEGO club or other means. This means what you are looking for is not a set and won't be found on a set list. I am aware of the existence of a few of these, but your description is not triggering a memory of a specific model. You posted the question in the right place though. Hopefully someone here will remember what you mean.

You have no chance of flying this without R/C flying experience, even if it is airworthy. I have a degree in Aerospace Engineering and have piloted real aircraft, and I still crashed my first R/C plane within 5 seconds of takeoff. It takes a lot of practice to be competent at it. You need to practice and become competent at flying aircraft you know are properly powered and stable before you can hope to become a "test pilot" which requires superlative skills. This will also teach you a lot about motors, props, and batteries which is knowledge you will require. I have enough experience to tell you that you'll be using brushless outrunner motors with 2 blade composite props direct driven and probably 3 cell lithium-polymer batteries with about a 5000 mAh capacity. The power and radio setup will cost you about a thousand dollars if you don't already have the transmitter.

Those didn't exist when this topic was started almost 5 years ago. I'm sure the list would look a lot different now.

The biggest problems are the battery boxes. The worst that can happen is corrosion from leaking batteries. Apart from that, the contacts inside the battery boxes get oxidized over time which reduces the voltage until they don't work at all. This can be corrected by cleaning the contacts with a wire brush. The same can happen to the old 9V wires, and the contacts are very hard to clean because they are inside the studs. I use steel wool. All of my old motors, switches and pneumatics work great though.

I also built this wrong the first time I put it together, and it took me a long time to find my error. The instructions really are correct, but they are hard to follow with all the hinge plates. You can download the LDraw file from Technicopedia and zoom right in on all the details to see if you have it right.

They are rough estimates. Calculating the overall length by adding up the individual parts the way you did is better. What totals did you come up with? I thought the parts list estimates were reasonably accurate. Note that instructions use units of studs whereas this parts list uses units of centimeters.

Congratulations on getting blogged by The Brothers Brick. It is very unusual for a Technic creation to show up there.

I paid £80.

OK, so your approximate wing area based on average chord is S = [(11+19)/2]*155 = 2325 cm^2. We need this in square meters so that's S = 0.2325 m^2. For calculation purposes, I'm going to assume that you have an airfoil equivalent to NACA 2415. In order to by able to fly with a reasonable amount of drag, we'll assume that you need to be able to take off with an angle of attack of alpha = 10 degrees (which is very generous). Based on the lift coefficient charts, your lift coefficient is CL = 1.0. This is really good and your actual airfoil will probably be less efficient than this. For the density of air, we'll assume standard sea level conditions. rho = 0.0023769 slug/ft^3 or 1.2012 kg/m^3. Lift is equal to weight which is 5 kg (this is actually a mass). Now we can get the velocity V for takeoff (no climb) using V = SQRT [2L/(CL*rho*S)] = 5.98 m/s or 21.5 km/hr This is not a scale speed, this is actual speed. To actually be able to climb and maneuver you'll need a lot more speed than this and you really don't want to be flying at an alpha of 10 degrees, so you'll want your top speed to be about 3 times this or 60 kph. The drag forces on your plane at 60 kph are going to be very high, so you will need very high power to achieve this speed. I would plan for at least 2.5 kg of thrust. Structurally, you'll need to make sure that your plane can be lifted by the wings with a factor for gusts. I would lift it up by the wings at about 1/2 span and shake it up and down and make sure they stay on. If they don't they will break off in the air. Plan your center of gravity to be at about the 1/4 chord point of the wing.

You make the coolest stuff.

We have the same problem in our political elections! People vote based on who they think will win, not who they actually like. In this case, I voted not just based on what I like, but what I would buy. These are not necessarily the same thing. Some of the other models were also fascinating designs, but I probably wouldn't buy them. In fact I think that is a flaw in this contest. For example, the contest is now on the Frontpage of Eurobricks. This means that a lot of people who are not even Technic fans and have no interest in buying the model are going to be voting. They are probably going to be voting purely based on what looks the best to them. From LEGO's point of view, these are probably not useful votes because they do not translate into sales. This means that a model could win which no one will actually buy which would undermine the contest. Luckily, since you have an LXF file we can all build your model whether it is ever an official set or not! This is also a good point. If the price was projected each model, voting would be different. For example, the quad bike could probably sell for the original $200 price point, but the highway enforcer might be $300. Therefore if the voting is based on what you would buy, you might be more likely to buy the quad bike than the highway enforcer even if you like the enforcer better just because the price is better. Voting between models with totally different part counts isn't really fair.

It steers smoothly. As a manually controlled model, the parallelism of the front wheels is not really a big deal. If you were to motorize the model, it may be somewhat more important. Allanp has a motorized version of this model and I didn't note any problems in steering control. For a high speed R/C model this might be an issue, but these hubs will never be used for that.

I bought an extra copy of 8110 as a starting point. It comes with some of the PF components, lots of parts and lots of orange. I was able to take the extra 5x11 panels from it and make the snow plow for my existing 8110 at the same time. I was able to sell the tires and the pneumatics and make a lot of the money back.

I had a really hard time voting because of all the great entries. In the end, I wanted something that was as different from the original 9398 as possible, while obviously retaining the same chassis. Therefore that meant I wanted something that didn't really look like a crawler. I also wanted something that actually looked like it belonged on that chassis. Based on those criteria, I picked hrontos' quad bike. It looks completely to scale with a real quad bike and is just much bigger and more functional than any LEGO has released before. Looks like it has no chance of winning, but this is the one I'd be most likely to buy if I saw it on a shelf.

If you are just pushing the model around on the table, the wobble is not noticeable. However, if you lift it up there is a lot of play in the joint. This is the penalty you pay for having low friction though. I rolls really smoothly.

Lego has historically only sold sets, not parts. This means that the only source of parts to the second hand market is from people who have parted out sets. When a part was only ever contained in a single or small number of sets, it is rare. This doesn't necessarily mean it will be valuable. There are plenty of rare parts that nobody wants. But when rarity is coupled with demand, prices become high. Sometimes a part exists in lots of sets but only in one set in a certain color. The yellow #4 connector is a perfect example. #4 connectors are in lots of sets in lots of colors, but yellow only came in the Power Puller and there were only two of them. On top of that, the Power Puller was not a very popular set so that limits supply even more. If a part came only in a single Star Wars set, you can still assume that there are hundred of thousands or even millions in circulation. But if a part came in only a single Technic or train set, there may be very few available.

Very similar to the tires from 8880 but they are 2mm wider. You can use the 8880 tires on these wheels but they stretch a little at the sides. Tread pattern is the same. I hope the sticker quality has improved, but there will be no way to tell until a few years have passed. The stickers from my Silver Champion, by Williams, and my Ferrari F1 have all disintegrated by now, so it does not seem to have improved over time. Note that I keep them in a climate controlled room away from UV. Not sure what more can be done. They also change consistency once they start to fail so that even removing them is quite difficult. The stickers are vinyl now. I don't have an old Williams sheet to compare, but recollection is that they were similar vinyl. It is the white in particular that seems to have problems, perhaps because there is no ink to protect the substrate. The old transparent stickers have never had a problem. In any case, this model looks pretty good without the stickers so if they go bad I will just remove them.

if the past in any indication, the stickers will self destruct in a year or so anyway.

Actually I did meet two people the same day for over 6 hours, and then built for 4 more. Long day! I am holding one in my hand right now. Feels like rubber to me. Pretty good grip on the table. Those are for the alternate model. It shows them in the instructions loose in the last step so you don't think you just missed where to put them while building.

DO you have the right channel selected on the remote? The orange switch switches between four channels. If the first doesn't work, try switching to another.