Blakbird

Maybe, but the slotted pin joiner came out years before 8041, so it is unlikely even early versions of 8041 ever had the old joiner.

That design would be VERY weak in the fore-aft direction. Those narrow control arms are really only for small models.

There's lots of errors in Bricklink inventories, especially related to multiple versions of the same part. If you are member, you can send an error report to them when you find these things.

Yes, I have the E-Revo but I broke a rear drive shaft last night doing back flips from a standing stop. I have to make repairs pretty regularly. This just goes to show that even with a purpose built R/C model there are still lots of failures. Amazing LEGO R/C works as well as it does. While charging my batteries last night I was also reminded why LEGO cars won't ever perform very well (other than the structural reasons). PF battery box max current is 1A at 9V or 9W. My E-Revo batteries have a max current of 250A (!!!) at 24V or 6000W. It is hard to compare two products when one has 666 times more power than the other. I wonder if that ratio is a coincidence.....

?????? How could it be faster with fewer batteries? It would certainly be slower. That cannot be answered since SBrick doesn't exist yet. I don't see any reason you couldn't use it. No. They have the same current limit. Yes. Anything is possible, but I wouldn't recommend it. There is no windshield so there is nothing to wipe.

I can confirm that Proline makes good tires. I've got some of that brand on my Traxxas E-Revo and they are awesome.

The real Tumbler uses "Super Swampers" made by Interco. Plenty of R/C tire manufacturers make this very tire, so just search for Interco Super Swamper and buy one with the right inside diameter.

That's a lot of questions. I'll try to give some brief answers, but keep in mind that the entire PF protocol is open and available to read if you want to know how it works. There have also been a lot of tests of the motors done by Philo. By "power unit" do you mean battery box? The standard 9V battery box is limited to about ~1 Amp, so at 9V the maximum power is 9W. There's no theoretical limit to the number of components you could hook up to a battery box as long as they are drawing a combined current of less than an Amp. I've had 9 motors, 4 receivers, and a bunch of LEDs all connected to one battery box. No, not really. The voltage stays the same (roughly) no matter how many motors you hook up. The power doesn't change any as long as you stay under the current cutoff, and once you do they would all cut out at once. The speed of a motor has nothing to do with how many are hooked up as long as they are hooked up in parallel (which is the only way to do it unless you cut wires). There is no way to answer that. The time it takes will depend on the capacity of you batteries and the amount of load being driven by the motor. If there is no load on the motor, it would probably run all day. If it was working at maximum and drawing an Amp, it might last less than an hour if you are using cheap batteries. Mostly the extensions are for getting power to motors which are far away, but they can also be used as converters to use an old 9V power system or old 9V motors. Essentially, yes. A switch allows you to turn a load (motor or lights) on and off independent of the battery box switch. It allows you to reverse direction of a motor. It has no effect on receivers because they get their power from an unswitched wire. I have no idea how to answer this. "How do they work exactly" could start with a description of basic physics and chemistry. If you really want to know, reading the PF specification is the way to go. If you are looking for a more cursory answer, they are infrared receivers which use pulse width modulation to control the speed of 2 outputs. Not quite. Each IR receiver has 2 outputs, so it can control two things on a given channel, but you can also have more than one motor on a given output (stackable). This means there are a total of 8 independent functions that can be controlled remotely if you have 4 receivers. Yes. Multiple remotes allows you to control functions concurrently. If you are willing to control them all one at a time, then you can get by with one remote. The 5th is essentially useless, although a few enterprising builders have used a 5th receiver with an additional battery box to get around the current limit and get more power. For example, you could have two motors driving your vehicle, each on a different receiver on a different battery box, but on the same channel. The "regular" remote is usually what you want. The other remote was really made for trains. The standard remote has no gradations. Each function is either on-forward, on-backward, or off. Nothing in between. You have to hold down the lever and stay within range of the model to keep the signal going. The train remote has forward and backward each in 7 steps so you can control speed. It also does NOT need to stay in range of the vehicle. If you tell it to go full speed ahead, it will keep doing that until you tell it to stop. It is very difficult to control vehicles with this remote because it does not return to center or to off. The ideal R/C remote would be a cross of these two, but does not exist. I wouldn't say they are both necessary, but it is useful to have one of each for testing the best way to control each type of function. A very large model might use one for some functions and the other for other functions to work best. Looks like you have a good plan for getting a selection of PF components to start. Make sure you get at least a couple of each size of motor. The E-motor is really not very useful for powering anything (it is made to be a generator), so you might skip that one.

It has to be a bevel gear so a 40 tooth wouldn't work. I wouldn't recommend any higher gearing anyway.

Yes, carpet is a problem. Besides the extra friction when going straight, the real problem is steering. I think some of this is caused by the lack of center differentials (between axles).

We pretty much whine about everything. After complaining about all the red models for years, now we are complaining that the red #3 connectors and the red 14L flex axles are too rare so we want more red sets.

I can't disagree with you there. The model is deserving.

I actually thought about that when they were both sitting on the table at the same time. They both use the same turntable, so it is technically possible. I thought of putting the Terex shovel on the Grove carrier, but it won't work because of the long axle sticking out the bottom that it is not safe to remove. But I guess you could do the combination the other way around. The older of the two would probably be fine with that. She wants to be a Master Builder and is going through all the Master Builder Academy sets.

Wow, that is an incredibly capable buggy. Makes me wish I had some of those RC motors and receiver. With Lego creations performing at this level, it would be really helpful to have some dampers for those shocks. The model would be way more controllable off road that way.

Wow, that is one impressive actuator!! Do you think the internally threaded sleeve will be able to spin inside the barrel with all that contact area? It may need to be lubricated. The planetary reduction is a cool idea. I assume it uses 8 tooth pinion gears for planet and sun. I like the idea of using 2x2 bricks to make the piston. In fact, by using different length cross axles you could make an actuator with different stroke. This also allows us to buy some chrome 2x2 round bricks for the piston! Compression strength should be very good. I am a little worried about the precision of the gear teeth and threads. I hope they move smoothly. Does this part need to be polished? I also think that with no thrust bearing the sleeve may have trouble turning under load. Let me make sure I understand the planetary system. The input will be the sun gear. The ring gear will be fixed to the housing and therefore not rotate. The planet carrier is connected to the internal threads and drives the piston screw, so it is really the orbit of the planets that makes the whole thing work. What keeps the ring gear from spinning in the housing? What locks the planet carrier to the sleeve? The piston is guided by the sleeve at the lower end threads, but there is no guide at the upper end which may cause the actuator to buckle under high compression loads unless the 2x2 bricks fit very closely inside the threads. I am eagerly looking forward to the results of your testing.

That is one impressive first post. That truck would be amazing at any scale, but it is hard to visualize how huge it is with 10 of those Unimog wheels. And I'm so happy to see that you used pneumatics! It looks like you took advantage of the fact that 5x11 red panels got a lot cheaper recently....

Having finished describing all the functions, now I can move on to the part of my review dealing with the actual build. Here's the real life finished model: I'll say one thing: the build was not quick. I acquired the parts over the course of about 4 months once the parts list became available, and then I had to get a bunch of additional parts when gerger made design changes. The loose parts filled two big IKEA bins without the panels or PF parts. With such a big project, I felt that parts really needed to be sorted. This is just a tremendous amount of parts. The PF parts alone cover the whole back of the table, and the pile of panels is unprecedented. I was working with a rough draft of the instructions, and at this point I was still waiting for some last minute parts so I decided to build out of order and start with the boom. I was anxious to see how big it was. From there it was time to do the 6 axle assemblies. With every axle driven and 5 axles steered, you might think this would be pretty repetitive. While there were similarities, I found that every axle was unique and therefore the build experience was varied. The axles are build in pairs, first the front two, then an outrigger box, then the middle two, then the back two, then another outrigger box. The front and rear outrigger boxes are not identical either. Front axles with drive motors: Outrigger box added: Middle axles added: Rear axles added: (this is still not the whole length, we have to add another outrigger box!) At this point I was able to put on the tires and try out the chassis. At this weight, it drove and steered very well and I played with it all day. Now it was time to add the aesthetic features of the carrier, which involved a lot more parts than I was expecting. I was able to avoid using the rare black bushings by just using black axles instead. Again, I have to say that the performance was very good at this weight, but this was when I first had an issue with the 2L axles falling out. The only thing left to do was add the superstructure, and the boom was already built. Still, look at how many parts remain in the background of the above picture. The superstructure assembly took only one (long) evening. It is hard to explain just how large this thing is, but my daughters were impressed. I had a really good time building this model. It looks great in any position. Some performance suffers due to the weight, but I think it performs admirably given that factor. With all that being said, I did make a couple of minor modifications to strengthen things here and there, and I'll talk about those next time.

Who said it was bad? You can read my impressions of the moving and steering in my review. Apart from some axles falling out sometimes, it works great. What I post will just be the output from LPub. The cable routing is well documented in another thread (pun intended), but I have a feeling afol1969 will be adding all that stuff in his quest for perfection.

Time to explain the final 2 features. The main winch is driven by an M-motor through a clutch gear. The total reduction is only ~5:1, but the cable is still pretty slow which is probably realistic (you lose half speed because the cable is doubled down to the sheave. It seems to have plenty of power, though I have not tried to lift a load with it because I do not think the boom could support the weight when fully extended. The last feature is the telescoping boom. The mechanical part of the mechanism is simple enough, but it is cables that allows the 3 stage telescoping to occur. This function is driven by an L-motor through a fairly convoluted gear train. This is necessary to allow the power to pass through the boom pivot. The worm gear drives a rack at the end of the middle stage, and the 3rd stage is driven by cables. Per other suggestions, I also added a return cable to assist in getting the 3rd stage to stow without gravity. It all works very well, although routing the cables was tricky.

Good catch, thanks. I'll try to fix that tonight. You didn't mention which set you are talking about, but I am willing to bet it is 8480. Don't worry, I won't disagree with you.

You can be sure that someone has thoughts on it... A LEGO pneumatic compressor and gear would be cool, but I think it would be slower than the LA's, not faster. The single pump compressors just don't provide much air.

Don't worry about it. I noticed it and removed the constraints before rendering it.

I'm proud to announce, after a 4 year hiatus, the latest update of Technicopedia. This is a huge update and includes the following: All models from 1996. All models from 1977-1996 with missing LDraw files have been added. All yearly history pages have had compilation photos replaced with renders. Donation button added. Some disclaimers: You'll notice a vast difference in picture quality between the various 1996 models. I took some of the pictures years ago, and took some of them recently with an inadequate lighting setup. I just couldn't bring myself to go replace them all. Newest photos look the best. Although I've been working on photos, animations, and computer models for weeks and months, I did all of the writing today! I was going to do one model a day, but I got on a roll and couldn't stop. I posted it at midnight after 15 hours of work, so there is a distinct chance you'll find typos or other oddities. Error reports welcome. Enjoy!

What a great day! Only 17 models left to go.

Hopefully I'll get the site to the point where it is not just about classic sets. If I actually catch up to the present, then I only need to add the new sets each year which is not such a daunting task.