Blakbird

I see that you have figured out where all that "missing time" has gone! Sorry about that everyone. I realized the other day that it has been over a year since my last update which is really unacceptable. I wish I had more time. BrickCon is coming up, and after that I have no excuse not to work on it.

It doesn't exist. You didn't see anything. Don't be trying to uncover any secrets or conspiracies.

"More desirable" can only be defined by you, not by anyone else. Which one do you like better? I bought a Power Puller just for the #4 yellow angle connector, so buying one for the wheels seems to be obvious!

Yes. But they are a different kind of rubber than the rear tires. They are stiffer and less flexible.

I am selling a bunch of those tires!! However I did not acquire them by buying up the existing market. There was no existing market. Rather I bought 20 copies of Nitro Muscle and parted them out, anticipating the demand for the tires. So it was virtually impossible to buy these tires prior to my making them available.

There are many such ways. I just finished rebuilding Brian Cooper's Teknomeka. This massive robot weighs many kilograms (OK, technically weight is Newtons) and all of the joints are articulated with worm gears. If these joints had any slop in them at all, the whole thing would fall over. Brian uses a variety of methods (not including the subject gearbox) to remove play in the system and they are highly effective. Sadly, I cannot share any of them since the instructions are copyright, but rest assured that the methods are out there! As for the gearbox itself, it was used in some late 90's early 2000's models that were mostly studless. It can be mounted with 3/4 pins instead of studs and suspended from other parts. Bushings help, but they are an even 1/2 stud lengths so they can't fill the fractional stud gap. If you put enough longitudinal force on the worm gear, it will still slide and you'll get backlash in the system.

I've finished about 20 renders of these castles which can be seen on my Brickshelf account here. I've also made revolving animations of all of them here. I've placed a sample below to whet your appetite.

Those gearboxes were widely used in the mid 90's in Technic sets, especially "Tech Play" which were designed to be easy to build for beginners. When LEGO switched to the studless system, they became less relevant for Technic sets but are still used in System sets. I talk about them a bit here and here.

No difference. Same part, different color. The air tank is as you describe. There are no valves or any other features. It is just a pressure bottle.

I can try to remember to look into this when I get home. Off the top of my head, the early "Expert Builder" years the tires were all hard plastic and hardly elastic at all. Clearly not rubber. The exceptions were the big tires from the auto chassis which were a type of foam. They actually have very high friction coefficients and are still used by some TT'ers. From 1977-1985 this was all there was. In 1986 we got the Model Team tires, but they were also very hard. It wasn't until 1991 that we got the first rubber motorcycle tire, followed by rudder balloon tires and the 8880 tire in 1993-1994. The rubber material seemed to stay pretty much the same through the Power Puller and F1 (8458) years. Only in the last 5-8 years have we seen the harder material. Not every set uses the same material though. For example, the larger tires from the Nitro Muscle set are rubber in the rear and the harder plastic in the front. Fascinating indeed. In fact, the whole concept of the struggle between form and function is very nicely summarized by LEGO Technic. In the early years of Technic, function was clearly the point. The first Auto Chassis didn't even have a body. For most adult Technic fans, function is still the point and why we buy sets. An we want to be able to SEE the function. Only in recent years has the form started to catch up and, in some cases, overshadow the function in Technic sets. I see the Roboriders and later Bionicle as a case in point. Minimal function. Mindstorms would probably be the opposite.

Am I married? Occasionally. The linked incident had nothing to do with LEGO. I am currently married and was very up-front about my LEGO "hobby". I told her about it after we started dating (so as not to scare her away before she knew me), but before she found out on her own. Her initial comment was that there were a lot worse hobbies for men to have. Of course, it wasn't until later that she really understood the extent of my obsession. We've been married 1.5 years now and I still don't have them all reassembled, but they have spilled out of my "LEGO room" into the rest of the lower floor of our house. She is generally supportive, though does not necessarily understand what all the fuss is about. She does not try to stop me at any rate! She has been with me to BrickCon and is at least mildly interested in the modular houses. If you can manage to get your wife interested in any aspect at all, that will help you out. She may not care about Technic, but maybe modular houses or architecture or sculptures or mosaics. If she has no interest whatsoever, than you can simply point out the alternative hobbies on which you might go spend money and LEGO will start to sound pretty good!

Whether the tire is made principally from what you're calling "plastic" or "rubber" is not a reflection on its quality. They are simply different materials, each with their advantages and disadvantages. I think it is unfair to say that LEGO has reduced their quality. There have been many changes in tire material over the years. Is ABS cheaper than rubber? I think it actually costs more. I don't know what polymer they use in the current tires, but it is neither. That being said, the 8110 tires are certainly made from a different material than the 8466 Power Puller tires. The former seem more like "plastic" (though very elastic) and the latter more like "rubber". This will indeed result in differences in friction coefficient. However, for Truck Trials the friction coefficient is not very important because they are mostly not conducted on hard surfaces. What is more important is the tread pattern. I don't think you'll find the 8110 tires any less capable in a TT than the 8421 tires. Knobby is probably better though.

There should be no problem at buying an assembled set of that age. I have many and have never had a problem.

That's not the file I'm thinking of. Someone did complete instructions of the whole car. I have the PDF, but I can't remember where I originally found it. It was posted in a link here on Eurobricks.

Note that there are also instructions for one of his much more elaborate supercars made from 8458 and 8466. Anyone have the link handy? I'm referring to this car:

That is exactly why I don't expect to see an XXL motor. The XL motor is already capable of destroying LEGO parts, so an XXL motor would be guaranteed to do so. The system just can't take any more torque. The only way a large model can be motorized is to be very slow. But that's exactly what a rock crawler can be!

The first step in your recovery is admitting to yourself that you will never be satisfied. I have every Technic set ever made and I'm still not satisfied. I just moved to a new house, took apart all 300,000 parts and put them back to together and it still wasn't enough. I've built another 100,000 parts of MOCs. I've added a 600 square foot addition onto my house just to display them all. Still not enough. So all you can do is accept the truth. You are an addict. Feeding your addiction with lots of ABS seems to help. You've already discovered online forums. Looking at MOCs on MOCpages, Brickshelf, and Flickr can kill lots of time. Then there are thousands of videos on YouTube. If that's not enough, you can get into LEGO CAD. It's free and you have as many parts to play with as you want, so you'll never run out. Between learning all the software and techniques and making renders of the results, you can spend the rest of your life on it without running out of new topics. If you really want to kill time, try making instructions!! If you like Technic, you can read lots about the sets you don't have on my site, Technicopedia. You can always start going to conventions too. I don't know where you live, but BrickCon is coming up in a few weeks.

Here are a few more views at low resolution. Higher res versions can be found on my Brickshelf (once moderated).

Don't get too excited yet. These are preliminary pictures and often the models have a way of getting "optimized" before the final version is released. They may very well decide to change back to bley for "cost reasons". I share your hope that we get these in black though; they have many uses and are impossible to find. Not too late to retrofit 8081 either! My guess is that the crawler will be a chance to use the new portal axles for an extremely low geared (high torque) rock crawler that is motorized. A real rock crawler often doesn't use any differentials, so 4 wheel lock would be fine with me. If they use 3:1 gearing in the portal hubs and also the Unimog pendular suspension, this thing will go over anything. That's going to make it expensive though.

As both an AFOL and an engineer, I find these castles absolutely awe inspiring. I don't build castles in general (I'm a Technic guy), but I'm finding a huge exception here. I am mesmerized by looking at them. In fact, I couldn't resist starting a series of renders, especially for that which will not be built!

At right angles, studless building geometry is pretty obvious. It is the diagonals that get tricky. The only magic ratio is for the 3:4:5 right triangle. If you have 3 studs horizontal and 4 studs vertical offset, you can connect them with a 5 stud diagonal (or multiple thereof).

8421 is way better as a technical achievement. 8275 is more fun to drive around. Both are beautiful to behold. Pick your pleasure. As for the 8258 versus 8110 comparison, here is a view from all angles:

Yes, the same principles apply. However, if you ever hold 10194 in your hands you will find that it is vastly lighter than one of these big Technic sets. Not only that, but because it is a train it always runs on smooth, mostly level surfaces and never has to go over obstacles. If you could drive your Technic set in a straight line on a smooth floor without having to turn or abruptly start and stop, then you could make such a set reasonably reliable. But these sets are for kids and no kid would ever play with it that way. First order of business is always to try to drive over the cat. By the way, the motor in 10194 is also right next to the wheels so there is very minimal gearing or axles needed to transmit the torque. In something like 8110 or 8258 the motor would be located far from the wheels and the torque would have to travel through many elements. It only takes one weak link to break the whole system. There are no differentials or universal joints in 10194. In order to make a good R/C car, you have to have differentials and u-joints and it has to be fun to drive and robustly designed against damage. I totally agree. Without motorization, all the fancy 4WD parts in 8110 are really just for show. You don't get to see them really do anything. As a demonstration of a 4WD system, a happy medium would be to motorize it but put it up on a stand so the wheels all turn but it doesn't actually drive. Because of the portal axles, 8110 is the closest set yet to being able to be motorized without having to worry about breaking anything. You can protect parts with the clutch gear, but then you aren't really getting the full power of the motor. To make a LEGO set be a "real" R/C vehicle, you would need motors many times more powerful than even the XL motor, metal parts, and mechanical fasteners (screws). Since those things defeat the whole purpose of building with LEGO, I don't think it is going to happen. I could be wrong though. Thankfully, the fact that the parts exist at all allows we adult fans to experiment as long as we are willing to sacrifice some parts along the way. I've always found failure to be the best learning tool!

There is no question that you have to buy both. By means of comparison, here is a computer generated picture. 8258 is "longer", but 8110 is "taller" and "wider". By volume then, 8110 is bigger. It also has more parts. In my opinion, 8258 is more complex though. For those reasons it is tough to do a comparison. They are very different models.

The best lessons on generic techniques come from buying new (or used) studless sets and building them. If you don't want to (or can't) do this, then download some official instructions and look through them.