Jeroen Ottens

Actually the black A-pillars were modifed after the photoshoot. In the final model they are more horizontal, following the lime flexaxle more closely. It does lower the stiffness of the roof a bit, because the angle is now shallower, but it doesn't look so weird anymore.

My bad. I used the wrong custom list . The link should now be right (and visible): https://rebrickable.com/users/Jeroen Ottens/lists/124358/

Thx. The photos are made by Fredric Landragin. He is a real genius with that. Ah, the list was still private. Should be fixed now.

Good to hear you enjoyed the WIP. More photos can be found on Flickr, but here is one of the rear

Hi, It has taken a while, but I can finally present my 1:8 scale Hennessey Venom F5 replica. It has the following features: - Independent suspension on all wheels - Working steering wheel - Scissor doors (operated through HoG gears behind the chairs) - A 8-DNR sequential gearbox (based on the compact gearbox of @Anto, operated through a HoG behind the rear numberplate) - A detailed twinturbo V8 engine - Semi modular build The real thing is quite a curveous animal, so it was a fun challenge to try to replicate those curves with the existing parts. I am especially pleased with the front fenders. Those new triangular panels from the Sian just were perfect for this. Speaking of the Sian: I optimized the design towards using the Sian parts. Over three quarters of the parts come from the Sian. If you are interested, instructions are for sale on my website. It was great fun to design this model and I'd like to thank all the Eurobrickers that helped with their feedback during the design process (and @Ivan_M for the high quality instructions).

Nice different project. As a suggestion for the reel you can maybe use wheelrims. They come in all kind of diameters.

That is a beautiful beast. I am always amazed at these rope shovel excavators. Some nostalgia to the times that mechanics ruled the world I guess. If I am critical I would say the video is a bit long and repetitive. And I can imagine that you wanted to make the body with system parts. Adding more details to such a big area would have helped to make it more than a yellow cube, but budget constraints are a perfect excuse. Maybe stickers as a cheaper cop-out? Do you have any issues keeping the ropes on all the pulleys? And how is that bucket opening rope independent from the arm elongation?

That will connect to the steering motor Ah, my bad. I indeed tried to use that for the pivotpoint, but that made for a very bulky solution to get it stiff enough.

Here is the link to the patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20050252188 The small turntable will not work because the grey hexagon rotates on a virtual crank, which means it needs a central hole of at least 3 studs. Which is exactly the size of the hole in a large turntable. I found it really difficult to wrap my head around it, even with the patent pictures. Don't be, just copy what you like

After being reunited with my bricks I was able to make in bricks what I had been thinking about in my head in the past week. Here is the reel mechanism: The reel is the big red rotating spidery thing at the top of the header. In 1935 a patent was filed to keep the tines (that are the vertical sprung wires that stick out) vertical during the rotation of the reel. That has been in use ever since. As you can see the tines (the LBG 3L half liftarms) are all vertical on this reel as well. The way it works is that there are two hexagons (a red one from the reel itself and a LBG idler hexagon). These two hexagons have a one stud offset. Six cranks are used to couple the two hexagons to each other. The tinebars (or axles in this case) where the tines are connected to are hard coupled to the cranks. By rotating one hexagon, the other is taken along and the cranks stay horizontal during the whole cycle and therefor the tines stay in the same (vertical) orientation during the cycle as well. Easy to understand once you see it working, but I needed to find the patent before I could wrap my head around how this mechanism works. I made two versions of this, one uses the big turntable at the side. The advantage of that is that the central axle of the reel can pass through the idler hexagon and the drive can be on the outside, like the real thing. However it looks quite bulky and it has a lot more friction, so I decided to go for the better playability. This means that the drive will be somewhere in the middle instead. I also did some more research on the Terra Trac. On the Lexion there is no 'headland protection', ie the front idler of the track doesn't lift when steering. Instead the whole track pivots around its center point. Now I am in a bit of a pickle. It will be a challenge to create a pivot point that is sufficiently strong to carry the weight to tracks without the tracks bending sideways. Plus I loose the cool lifting mechanism... So I'll give the strong pivot point a try, but if that proves too difficult I'll revert back to a less realistic, but cool front idler lift only. ... trying different pivot solutions... all too bulky or too flimsy... So here is the 'headland protection mechanism': The yellow axles are for the steering of the rear wheels and the lifting of the front idler. The steering axle can rotate 90 degrees either way. As a result the yellow 5L beams will be lifted one stud by the black 36T gears independent of the direction it is steered. The black 36T gears are driven. This way the load on the tranversal yellow axles is minimized. The four DBG 9L beams are needed to fix the beam between the front idlers in x,y, Rx and Rz. Ry is fixed by the two 5L beams, so only z is left as a degree of freedom on that front axle.

Nice . I especially like the smooth blend of technic and system parts

If you have the partslist you can let Bricklink automatically find the best combination of stores for you. You can even indicate that you only want stores from a specific country or continent. It is a bit unclear though which algorithm is used to determine what the best combination is. Rebrickable has a similar service.

I mean lifting the front wheels of the Terratrac when the model steers. But I agree that lifting the header will require quite some force. For me the disadvantage of pneumatics are indeed the spacerequirements of all the tubing, the fact that tubes always go perpendicular from the actuators and the limited selection of actuators (although that has improved a bit with the extra long cilinders) On the positive side, routing the ‘signals’ from the gearbox to the actuators is very flexible with the tubing. And it is more authentic as @allanp would argue .

Thanks @1gor and @eric trax for the scaling info. I’ll probably will not be superaccurate with the scaling, but the broad dimensions should be OK I think. I am currently away from my bricks, so no design update. I have however spend some time thinking about the motor configuration. The first constraint I set myself was that I don’t want to use more than two hubs. Drive needs to have it’s own XL motor as this will be a heavy model. I might couple a fake engine and the fan in the top to this motor as well. Steering and lifting the front idler will be done with an L motor. I then have another eight (!) functions to add: switching high/low gear (1p) Lock differentials (2p) Rotate unloading pipe (3p) Open top hatch (4p) Raise header (5p) Raise reel (6p) Dispense grain (7) Harvesting functions (8) ie all the conveyor belts, trashing units etc. The functions with a ‘p’ in brackets could be done with pneumatics. The only way to drive eight functions without using three hubs is by using a gearbox. That requires one L motor to rotate a wave selector that is surrounded by four driving rings. In each position the wave selector engages two clutchgears. By using two motors to drive the functions you can get eight functions with just three motors. If I would use pneumatics the function gearbox all but two of the outputs go to pneumatic valves. I would probably want a separate L motor to drive a pneumatic pump as well then. Since only two functions can be operated at the same time the high/low gearswitch and the difflock must be a pair. So at a minimum I now need five motors. I may need a sixth for a pneumatic pump and probably it is wiser to have all the harvesting functions on a separate motor as well, so that makes seven motors. Now the question to you fellow Eurobrickers is: should I make this an RC pneumatic combo with six RC pneumatic functions or should I keep everything electrical?

Is it me, or can’t the thin tan 20T gear idlers at the bottom rotate? I assume their axle is locked, right?

A bit late to the party, but what a beautiful model. To build something this well proportioned and with all the right colours takes some serious skill. I also especially like the sideview with the panels removed.

Nice clean little model. The cabin has quite a high pivot point, why did you choose that? How are the rear differentials connected?

That is a high bar that has been set! What a beauty . I hope that my development time doesn’t need to be three years before it is finished though .

Ooh, that is a nice feature… That will be a challenge to make robust, but I like it a lot. Ideally I would like to couple it mechanically to the steeringaxle. I then just have to figure out a way to turn a two directional proportional input to a one directional digital output. Two directional to one directional is easy, but proportional to digital is more challenging. Thinking out loud it will need to be able to take some load when in the down position, so the lifting mechanism will probably be a knee-mechanism (which unfortunately does have a cosine like behaviour for small inputs, whereas ideally you would like to have a sine like behaviour at small inputs to get some lifting action at small angles). Compromise would be to make the lifting proportional with the steering. So a little lift at small steeringangles and a bigger lift at large steeringangles. thanks for the suggestion!

I’ll be not supertight on the scale, so the rearaxle is probably a bit too wide Thx. I also found a brochure with front view with dimensions. My rear axle is a big too wide, but the frontaxle is really much too wide. Should be 5 studs smaller. I’ll compromise on 4 studs less wide. Hmm.. good point, hadn’t thought of that… The small wheels have pendular suspension, I forgot to mention. Thx I’ll try to regular update I have couple of these rubber studs, that should help indeed. All wheels and tracks are powered, but only the rearaxle has a difflock (so far). I actually don’t know how ghe real drivetrain is done, but I assumed it would be all wheel/track drive. If anybody knows (especially if there are more difflocks I’d be interested to know. I have been playing a bit with the motorlayout and the 2-speed gearbox. I realized that I can add two more functions that are driven by the XL drive motor, but these functions will only work when the vehicle is not moving. Any suggestions?

Hi, Time for another WIP topic. This time an agricultural machine. The Claas Lexion combine harvester: So far I have only worked on the rear axle and the front Terra Trac: Now before I commit myself to the dimensions, I was wondering whether someone with more knowledge about these machines (@eric trax ? )can help a bit on the dimensions. My current axle is 29 studs wide (in the rear) and 30 studs wide at the tracks. But I absolutely have no feeling whether this is sort of ballpark OK with the big tractor tires. The current rear axle is driven, has pendular suspension, difflock and Ackerman steering. The tracks will also be driven and the gear train will have a 2 speed gearbox (just like the real one) that drives the central differential. I plan to stuff this thing to the max with functions, probably using one or maybe two hubs. I plan to get some nice SW features in there as well, such as automatic engaing/disengaging of the difflock depending on the steering angle and speed. At the moment I do not envision the use of pneumatics, as they are relatively expensive in terms of motors to switch (unless of course I can think of a way to use a gearbox to switch the pneumatic valves, so that I would only need three motors to switch eight valves... hmm... walks away mumbling to himself...) As I also have a lot of other commitments progress will be slow though.

Looks like this could be a lot of fun for your son if you get that firingmechanism to work. The colourscheme is certainly creative The turret is quite boxy though. Modern tankturrets are more trapezoid shaped.

If I may, I’d like to offer some constructive criticism. It looks quite boxy ATM. Modern cars nearly all are quite boxy by default, so it is really the small angles that make the shape. It is almost universal now to have an upward slope between the front and rear wheels. In my BMW X3 and my Ferrari F50GT I actually made a separate subframe in which the doors were mounted just to get that angle in. The same will apply to the roofline. You’ll be amazed how much a small angle will change the looks. Anyways, no matter what just enjoy the process

Wow! That is an incredible great B-model. I am always a sucker for aerospace vehicles and this one ticks a lot of like boxes: Functional flightcontrols, suspension in the landinggear, great overal shape. I have been wondering how to use the changeover catch for this purpose when I was building my helicopter, but I never figured out a way how to do it, so I am pleased to see it is possible after all

You’re right, I saw what I wanted to see. Indeed