CP5670

This has been brought up before by several people. Someone posted a picture of dark gray slopes with the same kinds of cracks in the quality thread. I haven't seen it on my own cheese slopes (in any color), but it seems to be a semi-widespread issue. I would think it might be related to air temperatures, but from what people are saying here the conditions sound pretty normal.

I do this all the time. There are often minor things in official sets that I don't like but are easy to fix. If I know from the outset what I want to change, I do it during the initial build.

Black. I tend to buy way more black than any other color, as it goes well with just about any theme and any other color. All the models I build use a substantial amount of black. It's also one of the few basic colors to have (essentially) no quality problems. If I buy black parts from Bricklink, I can be sure that they're the good stuff and that I will always have a use for them sooner or later. I also like trans-neon green, probably my favorite transparent color, as well as lime green as an accent color. They both go together nicely with darker colors.

This is very common with parts in a variety of colors (white, yellow, red, etc.), regardless of where they were produced. As fred67 said, it is a result of the coloring process they use today. This has been very widespread since late 2006, but at this point TLG is not going to try to fix it since most people never noticed it. I have never actually seen this with black bricks though. The color injection process for black is supposed to be simpler and easier to get right than any of the other colors. A translucent black piece would look pretty odd, now that I think about it.

I would make a distinction between studless building in general and 100% studless models. 2003 was probably the beginning of the latter, starting with sets like 8455 and 8454. There was also a significant shift towards it in 1999, although studded beams were still used a lot at that point. Some amount of studless construction has been around for almost as long as Technic has existed.

I think what is meant by an "idea" should be clarified here. Even if you don't explicitly credit people, it doesn't mean that you are claiming every little technique used in a model as your own invention. It's only the model as a whole that is yours. In the vast majority of such cases, the other person wouldn't have been the first to use that idea either. I often pick up concepts and techniques from Brickshelf (and expect people to do the same with my models), and most things I find worth using have already been done by many people.

Bricks do lose some grip over time if left assembled, but if the temperature is well controlled then the grip only drops up to a certain level, which still provides good clasping power. I don't think it's anything to worry about. This effect is actually a good thing for some old sets that have very firmly gripping bricks (partly due to heat exposure). Leaving them built up restores them to a normal state after a few years. I've seen this with a few 80s sets too. This can actually happen on shorter time scales and showed up after just a year or so on my 6395. The marks can be removed using alcohol.

I agree with fred67 on this. It's one thing if someone basically copies an entire model, but this becomes a lot more murky when it comes to small components of models. Those bots in the first post are kind of a borderline case in my opinion. If it's merely a building technique or functional mechanism that you copied, then chances are that the guy you copied it from also picked it up somewhere else (and most likely the TLG designers used it internally long before any AFOL "invented" it). The same applied to a generic conceptual idea, like a spacecraft with a certain overall shape. I might credit such things but would not necessarily feel obliged to do so.

Doing it on both sides actually provides an advantage here since it allows the blue geartrain (36t gears) to move independently of the other two geartrains. The gears inside the gray liftarms would behave like planetary gears. That's what I especially like about his idea. The other solutions I've seen for doing this involve quite a bit of dependency and backlash between the different geartrains, which make them useless in practice. All the geartrains will still be affected by the movements of the main turntable, but that seems to be harder to avoid and happens in the usual method for two geartrains too (8258/8043).

This actually looks a great idea, although I think the gray liftarms need to be more firmly attached to the 36t gears for this to work well. I like how you made the gearing symmetric on both sides of the turntable, which allows the 36t gears to spin without affecting the other geartrains at all (if there is enough friction on both sides).

They changed the Technic box art in the middle of that set's production period. The yellow boxes are from 2003 and the black ones are from 2004. Back then, the sets were in production longer than most modern sets are, 2 years or more. The same thing can be seen with some City boxes around 1990, when they moved from the yellow Legoland boxes to the blue System ones.

If you buy something from the Lego Education website, you seem to automatically get subscribed to their catalog. I haven't bought anything from them in a while but get the catalog every now and then. The catalogs are pretty thick and include a lot of non-Lego stuff, but come with some neat Lego tape flags for marking pages.

This battery box has more convenient dimensions than the Technic one, but as someone else said that old 9V box is the best for this purpose. They're still pretty easy to come by on Bricklink. I find that annoying too. The IR remotes are like that as well. Being forced to use tools to get your model working kind of runs against the philosophy that Lego is intuitive and easy to build with.

There is no practically useful way to do this as far as I know. This is actually something people have tried to do for decades and there have been many discussions about it on Lugnet in the past. The best solution is as Blakbird said, to have a switching mechanism on the turntable. If you have two independent geartrains, you can in principle get arbitrarily many functions out of them. The turntable idea is pretty cool, but I think it would only be realistic for a stack of 2 or 3 of them. The studless turntables may also have too much friction for it to work smoothly. It would work better with the old studded turntables. I used this once a long time ago. It works but it limits the turntable's range of movement to a 90 degree arc or so, before the flex cables get caught up in the center axle. You can also do something similar with the flexible Znap axles.

The US prices for those sets were $120 (8285, 8297), $150 (8421, 8275, 8258) and $200 (8043). 8043 was a big bump up in price around here, while in Europe it seems to have been about the same as previous sets. I hope the $200 flagship price is not a trend that is here to stay. The Unimog looks great but if it costs that much, the price would be even less justified than 8043's markup was.

I got an extra sticker sheet in my Space Police Central, which I just assumed was a fluke. The stickers in my recent sets were placed inside the instructions like you said. They do seem to be addressing the issues with crumpled stickers and instructions now, after many years of complaints.

I've had a couple of old MISB sets with this issue. The bricks aren't necessarily weak or brittle, but just have a very strong gripping power. This thread has an explanation of why it happens. The bricks also seem to return to normal if you leave them in a built up model for some years.

Yeah, the original 1999 batches of these parts were notorious for breaking. The later ones were more reliable. TLG was sending out free replacements back then, but I'm not sure if those parts are still in production today.

I just turn it off manually when the pressure is high enough. The hoses and fittings are designed to automatically pop off if the pressure goes too high. In practice, it's better not to go above 30psi or so for extended periods anyway.

I've noticed the same thing. Fluorescent lighting can definitely discolor bricks over time, while incandescent lighting seems to cause no problems, even after several years of exposure.

It's definitely worth buying if it's in display model condition. I have two of these sets for which I paid about $100 each on ebay (in that condition with box), but that was 10 years ago. Well, I would pay a little more if it did have the box. The boxes back then were actually worth keeping. I still remember the look of all the pneumatics in the parts tray.

I would say go ahead and enjoy it. I have accumulated a ton of MISB sets over the years and open them without a second thought, although I space out the builds over time. It might be fun to take a picture of the boxes with all the stuff in the parts trays. I've started doing that these days, just because the old boxes looked so cool while still packaged. I think the prices of classic 80s/90s Technic sets have actually dropped in the last few years, both new and used ones. The flagship sets will always command a high premium, but I got a bunch of nice deals on MISB sets last year.

I agree with Anio on this, although I don't really have a problem with TLG for their stance. They are simply doing what they think is in their own interests. However, what is good for TLG is not necessarily good for me, and I care about myself, not TLG's profits. (the point someone made about the Maersk train and ship is one example where this can happen) The argument about leaked images not being finalized is an often made but spurious one, as I can hardly think of any cases where we actually had major changes between the leaked images and the final product. The vast majority of sets come out just as they looked in the preliminary images. It's more accurate to say that they have every right to try to control that. However, the internet simply does not work that way. It always remains trivial to find any leaked pictures you like despite their efforts.

I love the look of this train. I've never gotten much into trains and only have one train in my collection (the Metroliner and its addon car), but this might just be too cool to pass up.

This is very bad news. I only knew him from his postings on EB, but he was always a great guy to have around and discuss Lego with. He will be missed.