Blakbird

The first motor has never been in a Technic set. The second motor in black was 12V and also never came in a set, but it did come in a supplemental set: In light gray, the small motor was 4.5V. It came in a supplemental set in 1977 with the big rectangular battery box. This could be added on to models or used with some of the models in the original Idea Book: The first actual set to include a motor was the 8050 universal set which used the 4.5V motor and a matching form factor battery box with 3-C batteries. You could also get the later battery box in a supplemental set:

That was indeed pretty clear. However, this brings to mind Lazlo's Chinese Relativity Axiom: No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats, approximately one billion Chinese couldn't care less.

Crowkillers and Sariel both have links to many friends and resources which represent a great cross section of Technic. Follow the links.

Not sure what you mean by "technicopedia says 2006". The Control Center II is on my 1995 page.

While the brick itself may not be a trademark, yes LEGO could certainly sue the company which is the subject of this thread for copying an entire product, including packaging. However, suing a Chinese company is totally pointless because the government will not enforce any penalties.

I use LEGO Education pretty regularly, but it has severe limitations. Their selection of parts is very limited, especially if you want a specific color. In fact, you don't even know what color they will send you until the parts arrive. In most cases, the prices are far above Bricklink prices, but there are some exceptions in which it is a good value. I often get PF parts from them, and sometimes pneumatics. Another poster mentioned that Lugbult actually prohibits the parts from being sold on Bricklink. This pretty much kills it for Technic. There is very little chance that I need 200 red 5x11 panels, but I want someone to have that many in their store to make the price and availability reasonable. It is also sad that the Pick-a-Brick walls at the LEGO store never have any Technic parts, so that is not a resource for us either.

I've certainly thought about that, but if you read the rules your LUG needs to host at least 2 events a year which is pretty hard with a virtual LUG. I even thought I'd heard that virtual LUGs are explicitly prohibited. So yes, we can start our own LUG if we want, but I don't know if it will qualify for LugBULK.

Yes, I'm aware of the LUGBULK program, but unfortunately I seem to be the only one within hundreds of miles who cares about Technic so no one wants to order Technic parts.

Go back in time only a few years and there were virtually no instructions available for building Technic MOCs, and very few for even System MOCs. More recently, through the efforts of builders like Crowkillers, Jurgen Krooshoop, Designer Han, Nico71 and others, we now have dozens of complex instructions available for free download or purchase. Many people with large collections may already have significant numbers of the parts needed. I've built a large number of these (at least 30) and have collected most of the parts individually from Bricklink. In the beginning, this was pretty easy to do if you could put up with the expense and the manual labor involved in organizing all the orders. More recently, this has become harder and harder. As it turns out, the worldwide availability of Technic parts is just not that large. For example, based on a recent thread I decided to build Crowkillers' Gallardo in white. Collecting some of the rare parts was not easy. But it was immediately clear that the worldwide supply of parts could only support the 3 of us who mentioned that we were building it. It will be virtually impossible for anyone else to build this model. Likewise when the red version of the Gallardo was originally released, collecting the parts was quite easy. However already the supply of the red 5x11 panels has dried up and made this model nearly impossible as well, even though this part is common and still in production (but not in red). Ask nychase what a nightmare it was trying to collect the parts for all of RoscoPC's F1 cars. Some parts just don't exist any more and needed to be substituted. Looking forward to the future, I expect technology to allow more models to be available with instructions and through social networking, more people to be interested in building them. This will make the parts shortage exponentially worse. The situation is worst in the USA where Technic is not as popular so there are not very many parts sellers. This thread is to brainstorm ideas on how to improve this situation, even to make suggestions to the LEGO Company on how they can better support the fan community in this regard. Do we just need more people parting out sets and opening Bricklink stores? Do we need an easier way to order multiple lots of parts directly from LEGO? Do we need access a LUGBULK type of program which would allow some sellers to have much larger inventories of parts for sale? Personally, I'd love to be able to order piles of parts directly from LEGO like a huge Bricklink store, but I understand that the logistics of stocking and picking all these parts makes that difficult. Alternatively, I wish LEGO would sell "Parts Packs" of large numbers of useful parts. Another recent thread indicates the most adult fans buy sets just for the parts which is far from an ideal way to get what you need. In the past, something similar to this used to be available. Examples: For older, out of production parts, we are probably out of luck and are forced to use the second hand market to compete for a limited supply. But for current parts, there must be a better way. It seems that supply and demand are out of balance which is driving prices up and frustrating new builders.

Giving money to companies who blatantly steal LEGO's copyrights is usually considered bad form. Beyond that, it would be illegal to sell these in the USA (and many other places). You therefore won't find any reputable online retailers selling them. You might find some disreputable ones though!

Right, Hispabrick has also done a bunch of great interviews with Technic builders. They even interviewed me once! I was pretty proud that in this issue the two interview were Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen and me. http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=44665

Personally, I don't have any problem with people voting for best model, not just best designer. For example, I think it would be just fine for people to vote RoscoPC's Lotus 43 as "Best Technic Model" and for it to win an award. After all, Luca may never be at the USA in a convention so when someone else builds it, it allows a greater audience to enjoy the model. However, if the model did win an award then I would consider that award to belong to Luca, not to me. I have even displayed Nico71's models! Nico, if I remember right I have displayed both your wheel loader and your supercar roadster. I think I even referred a few people to where they could download instructions. I'm not really a designer, but if I was I would like the idea that my model could be shown at many places around the world by different people, but I agree that I would want people to understand that it was my design. Free publicity!

I don't think DLuders has any special inside information about the contest that the rest of us don't have. His post was just his suggestions for what he feels will have a good chance of winning the contest. So don't assume the PP tires will be allowed. I would guess that any out of production parts will not be allowed, but maybe we will be able to suggest current parts in new colors.

A couple of things about this contest are very surprising to me. The first is that I am surprised they would want to release another crawler model only one year after the first one. Usually they try to diversify the offerings more because otherwise the new model with compete with the existing one which is still for sale. Secondly, I am surprised they could turn a fan generated model into a real set so quickly. I would expect it to take a year or more after a contest to be able to get through the redesign, testing, and instruction making process.

I display other people's MOCs at conventions all the time. For example, last year I displayed some of Crowkiller's cars and Jurgen Krooshoop's Sunbeam. The year before I showed Jennifer Clark's JS220, Grazi's truck, and Barman's V-8. This year I am showing all of RoscoPC's F1 cars. In all cases I coordinated with the original designers to make sure they were aware of the display, and of course I credited the designers on the MOC cards. It is not impossible that one or more of these would win an award, especially since there are so few other Technic models at the con to choose from. If one of them did win, I'd assume the award really belonged to the original designer. Remember that the award in not cash or anything, it is just a LEGO trophy. I'd probably display it with the model or offer to send it to the original designer. I'm a little hurt when people say that those who build other people's MOCs from instructions are not real fans or are cheating in some way. Not everyone has the same skills. I suck at building my own MOCs, but I'm pretty good at rendering and writing and making instructions so I contribute in that way and get a lot of enjoyment out of the building process. I don't know Scott or exactly what he did in this case other than what Paul and Nico have provided, but I wouldn't assume he was trying to cheat anyone. He probably should have been more clear on the MOC card and to the event organizers about who the designer was though. For what it's worth, I am the Technic Coordinator at BrickCon this year so I'll be selecting the winner for Best Technic. That also means I can't win, so don't worry about that! Hopefully I have enough knowledge of the MOCs that are out there that I would recognize a copy. You can see some of my displays of other people's MOCs from previous conventions here: http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?i=3801648 http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?i=3801649 http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?i=4152483 http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?i=4147579 http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?i=5209611

I replaced that part with two of these: and then also used axles instead of pins to secure it.

Yeah, I think I'd be interested. I've never done a draft before, but that's mainly because they never seem to have any Technic parts.

In case anyone is wondering how it is going.....

That's the way I'm building mine so you should see photos in about a week.\ The other car color alteration I've wanted to do for a long time is Skyliner's Countach in orange, but this may never be possible.

Yes, I have also cursed myself for making the render and thereby needing this. That race is going to be difficult. So, spurned on by this thread, I decided to update the model file and the instructions to make the car like the render. Turns out there are a couple of other parts which don't exist in white, but I was able to make a couple of small design changes to make it possible. I made a parts lists in Brickstore and then compared it with the original parts list. Of the 1523 parts in the original Gallardo, you need 433 new ones to change the car to white. About 1/3 of those are just pins and 2L axles because I got rid of the blue pins and red axles. Didn't sound that bad at first, but then I started looking at the parts. Some of them are exceedingly rare (or course the 19L black flex axle is the worst). Among the worst parts are 4ea #4 white angle connectors and 16ea white pin long with stop bush. I'm afraid that I was forced to clean out the majority of the worldwide supply in order to get 16 of them. There was no way to get the angle connectors so I had to buy an R2-D2 and a stormtrooper just to get them. Altogether, it required 14 different worldwide Bricklink orders to get these parts, and I still don't have the black flex axle! On the plus side, I will have a sweet white Gallardo and I'll probably sell the surplus red 5x11 panels I won't need any more. No time for another render right now, but here is what it looks like in LDView. You can see a few of the changes including the older ridged axle connectors and the shorter 14L flex axle on the front fender.

Bam. This actually came out incredibly awesome. So much so that I may have to convert mine to look like this.

MLCAD uses the placement of the last part as a baseline for placement of the next part. So if you have one at an odd angle, just drag it slightly further up the list of parts so that a "normally" placed part is at the bottom. The grid used by MLCAD by default has a different value in the Y-direction that for the lateral direction. This works for bricks but is useless for Technic. You can change the grid. Since I do virtually all Technic in MLCAD, I just make all 3 directions the same value. 10 for coarse, 5 for medium, 1 for fine. You can adjust the angles as well. I use 0.1 degrees for fine so I can get things to align precisely. There is no auto alignment in MLCAD. You will have to rotate each part or gear into place to make them align. This is why it makes sense to use submodels for things which move together. Then you can, for instance, rotate a gear and its axle at the same time and always keep them in phase. SR3D takes care of most of this for you.

Nice review! I'm pretty sure that "3-in-1" refers to land, sea, and air.

I like your anti-fraud measures and your no-refund policy. It is amazing how many people will use eBay or Paypal to buy a download and then demand a refund. Sadly, eBay and Paypal will always give a refund because you can't prove that they actually received anything. People use this to steal downloads without paying for them. Guess how I know! Good work on these instructions. I am glad to know more people are willing to do this for the community. And yes, I think it is still counts as doing it for the community even if you ask for compensation.

You read all that and just got "1600 rpm/pound" out of it? Selective reading! Well, if you make it weigh 1.5 pounds then it won't be a 9396 model and you have not achieved your objective. Yes, you can make an XL turn that fast but then it has almost no torque. The train speed regulator also only puts out about an amp or 2, but not having to lift the battery will help! If you used an automotive jump starter you might be able to briefly get the 60+ amps you will need. Or a car battery. And jumper cables. I see that you cannot be dissuaded by logic. Oh well. If you manage to do it, you'll win the Collier Trophy and in fact, fame and fortune WILL be yours. If we all watch you screw up, you'll get a different kind of fame.... Fun either way! I can't wait to see the results! I will personally congratulate your brilliance and success if you can put the heli on a scale and manage to generate more than 2 ounces of lift. Good luck to you!