Blakbird

No, it's not the date or what Twenty Legged Hen put in the box. Those are the same on all three images. The error has nothing to do with color. It will be easier to spot if you go to the full size versions of the pictures on Brickshelf. It has to do with the position of certain parts.

I love practical machines made from Lego. Very well done.

I've always wanted to build this walker. The chances of me reproducing it are nil.....

Can't be real. The main problem is not even the lift, the problem is stability. Even if you could produce an acceptable amount of lift, the rotors are not all exactly the same so the lift would be uneven and the model would immediately become unstable and crash. The rotors are geared together so there is no way to adjust them independently. I fly quad rotors every day and it takes a sophisticated gyro (or an awesome pilot) to keep them in the air.

Here are some recently completed renders of the color possibilities. Let's see if anyone is clever enough to spot what I did wrong in two of the images but corrected in the third.

Set 8305 had some large, colorful, unique wheels. But they weren't yellow. I think the Megabloks answer is correct.

No. That file is used for mapping LDD parts to LDraw parts when you select "Export" from LDD. It doesn't control anything about parts in LDD itself.

Thanks for posting, I didn't know about this. I use an ISP owned by a friend of mine who shares my other hobby, amateur rocketry. He hosts a lot of rocketry related web sites as well. Looks like something got messed up in the DNS registry so it is routing people to the wrong site. I have contacted him and will get it corrected as soon as possible. Edit: fixed.

The longest one that I can think of is the Elphinstone road train by 2legoornotto2lego.

A pitman arm is attached to the output spline a steering gearbox. The gearbox itself usually uses a ballscrew. Can't say I've ever seen that in Lego. However, the steering of some vehicles that use a link instead of a gear rack is similar in concept. 9392 is an example. If you want better advice you should present some more information on your project. What scale is it? What kind of space do you have in the area? Maybe show us some pictures of you chassis.

By switching channels on the small remote. You could use more remotes, but there is really no reason to ever use channels 2, 3, or 4 at the same time anyway. Channel 1 (the speed control remote) controls a V2 receiver for driving and steering. Channel 2 is the wings of the truck (left and right). Channel 3 is extending and raising the lift gate. Channel 4 is tilting the cab and turning the lights on and off. By the way, this is the first time I have ever seen someone use a motor to turn lights on and off. The motor turns a mechanism which operates a pole reverser switch. The mechanism is stopped so it can only go one way and not go past center. Clever. If anyone has done such a thing before, it would be Sariel. I know he used a motor for flashing lights. I've made some renders of the internals of the truck, both electrical and mechanical. In the electrical image you can see how densely the motors are spaced. Perhaps someday after Alasdair synthesizes the wires I'll update this one. The other one shows all the mechanical functions including suspension. As always, bigger versions at my Bricksafe.

Personally, I don't really care if the car is all Lego or not, I just want to know a lot about the engine and how he made it work. Hopefully more information will be posted.

Last night I completed construction of Madoca's wing body truck. I don't throw around the word "perfect" very often, but I think this might be the perfect MOC. Every part is braced, every part has a purpose. Everything is lined up, strong, and functional. Everything looks great, even the wiring. Occasionally I would find a section that was different on one side than the other and I would think "Aha! I finally found a mistake!". But in every case there turned out to be a very good reason for the asymmetry and it was in fact genius. My congratulations to Madoca on an incredible model. Below are a few of my photos. More (and larger) photos at Bricksafe. Here is a shot of the massive pile of parts. I don't think I've ever seen more liftarms or panels for a single model. Here is an interim photo of the chassis. In the center of this chassis all 9 motors are sandwiched in close proximity. Here is an image of how carefully the wires are routed. Madoca's photo instructions are VERY good. It is going to be hard to improve upon them. Final model before the box is added. And the completed model. Later this weekend I make take some photos of this model with other models to show the scale. Any suggestions on models for comparison?

No, but it would make your car pretty cool. To be fair, did the builders ever actually claim that the car was entirely Lego, or is it only the people writing the news articles who are getting it wrong? Reporters get everything wrong. Thanks!

Let's do some simple calculations and figure it out. The inside diameter of a pneumatic cylinder is 36 LDraw units or 14.4mm. The outside diameter of a piston rod is 12 LDraw units or 4.8mm. The means that the available area for extending the piston is 162.86 mm^2 (1.6286 cm^2) and the area available for retracting the piston is 144.76 mm^2 (1.4476 cm^2). Let's assume that any given cylinder is fed a maximum of 2 bar of pressure (which is very generous). This is about 2.04 kg/cm^2. This means that the actuator can generate 3.32 kg (32.6 N) in compression and 2.95 kg (28.9 N) in tension. Respectable! (My own experiments with Lego pneumatic cylinders indicate that they can actually react about this much load without leaking, so let's use this as a baseline.) An LPE Power engine uses a crankshaft with a throw of 1 stud = 20 LDU = 8 mm = 0.8 cm. An inline 4 at top dead center has 2 cylinders which aren't producing any torque. The other 2 are opposite: one pushing and one pulling. So the maximum amount of torque you could get out of an LPE Power inline 4 at any given instant is (32.6 N + 28.9 N)*0.8 cm = 49.2 N-cm. Note that the fact that this is a double acting engine almost doubles the amount of torque it can produce compared with a regular 2 stroke engine. The video indicates that this car has 256 pneumatic cylinders, so that means it has a total of 64 inline 4 engines. Add them all up and you get 3148 N-cm of torque. For the Americans out there, this is 23.2 ft-lb of torque. Let's compare this with a pathetically underpowered road car. A Smart car is rated at about 92 N-m (68 ft-lb) of torque, so this Lego car makes 34% as much torque as a Smart car. If this is true, there is no reason it couldn't travel 25 kph on level ground. Of course, all of this neglects friction and, more importantly, it neglects air distribution. The problem is that the volume of air that needs to be delivered to run an inline 4 at that pressure is considerable. Nijasno bores out the inlet ports of the actuators and the T-fittings and also uses larger tubing. This allows you to get enough air to one engine. However, if you look at the photos you'll see that all the engines in a given ring are running off of a single pneumatic hose! They are not split at the source so that each engine has an independent supply. Rather, each engine gets air only after the previous engine in the series has withdrawn its own air flow from the same line. This means that each of the 4 banks of engines (16 engines worth 64 cylinders) has to get its air from a single tiny pneumatic line. You'd need thousands of psi of pressure (hundreds of bar) to get that much flow. That much pneumatic pressure would be hugely dangerous. So I can believe the car from a strictly torque standpoint, but I am having a hard time imaging how the air distribution can be effective. Personally, I don't think a purely Lego car is structurally possible. While burf has created a few wonders that will hold a human, they are very compact and the weight is distributed to the wheels very directly. Something shaped like a real car would simply not be anywhere near strong enough to support a human. Even if you were to add enough bricks to make it possible, it would be as heavy or heavier than a real car. The Lego sphere that Mythbusters built weighed thousands of pounds and it fell apart immediately when rolling. Granted this used studs and not Technic pins. Edit: Despite all the skepticism, I don't want to forget to mention that this is really cool. Building a rotary LPE out of 64 inline 4's is awesome, regardless of whether or not it is strictly powering the car. Covering a metal car frame in Lego is also pretty cool. So kudos to the builders no matter what.

I'd be interested to see your model, but my employer (and many others) blocks dropbox so I can't see the images. I like the description though! I am a little surprised you had problems with the treads on the B-model because I have had the B-model built for years and it works wonderfully.

I spent the night working on a new animation which also includes the wheels rolling so it is much more realistic. The file so big that I decided to make it a YouTube video instead of an animated GIF. Let me know if it was worth the effort!

That's a new one to me. What kind of image are you trying to post? Here is one of your Flickr photos: Your Spitfire images from Brickshelf are too large (over 2000 pixels!) to post here.

I've embedded a couple of pictures for you in your earlier post to show you how it works. Just paste in the URL of the picture from Bricksafe.

What you are suggesting has been discussed from time to time, but it is usually considered that the additional fragmentation of the community will have more negative effects than positive. Now that we have a conscientious regulator (Jim), you should start to see more thread consolidation and organization that should help reduce the topic count. We're also trying to encourage people NOT to start new topics for things like "What set should I buy?", but rather roll these into a larger single topic.

Yes, you can post a picture hosted anywhere as long as you have the link to it. Just use the button above the edit window to insert an image link. Note that if you are using Eurobricks on a mobile device you will have the "lite" version of the editor and won't see the buttons.

Black looks great on a chassis, but so does gray. The nice thing about using LDraw is that you have complete control over the instructions. For example, you can go into LDconfig and change the definition of black to make it easier to see. Even better, you can change the outline color for black to white or gray. This makes instructions very easy to read. I use a light gray for all my black outlines, and I distinguish rubber color by using a black outline. You can see the difference between the two in a picture like this:

I've posted a parts list for you here. 501 parts. Sorry, I've not had any time to look into it and probably won't soon. For the moment I'll concede that you are correct about the date and add it to my list of errata to correct some day.

It seems like what you are suggesting would be possible with a buffer exchange that spans a large number of steps. However, the final solution I used worked very well once I got the margins adjusted and the resize script written. I noticed the same thing after 5 hours of rendering. I could fairly easily straighten the front wheels, but they would still be skidding. Making them roll is technically possible, but very difficult since all the motion would have to be programmed by hand. Perhaps in the future! I did create a newer version of the animation with 300 frames instead of 100 so it is more smooth. However, it is also correspondingly larger so I won't embed it here. Link. Send me a PM with your email address and I will send them to you. Put them in your parts folder. For the motors I just use the standard LDraw parts without the wires for the parts list.

I've made a bunch more renders of the truck from various angles, and in various configurations (open, closed, without box). Tiny versions below, big versions at my Bricksafe. I'm also working on a new type of animation in which the camera will sweep past the truck to make it look like the truck is driving. It will take a while to generate the 100+ frames, but I'll post the result when I am done. Edit: Finished it!