CP5670

There are other free sites that have larger or no limits (and a much less cluttered interface as well). The fact that Flickr's basic accounts are free is irrelevant because most of the alternative sites are also free. Anyway, at the moment Brickshelf is up and running. For those of you who don't have backup copies of your pictures stored locally, you should get them now in case it goes down again.

I love the crash dummy. It's unlike anything TLG has made before. The white space guy is also great and might make a nice SP3 commander.

Nice review. This system is an interesting and very unique concept, but I think all the paper cutting and hole punching would make it tedious to build anything substantial with it. I can see how it would appeal to kids though. I actually used to make various things out of paper and cardboard as a kid (a life-size computer and a micro machines scale parking garage come to mind), although I never really integrated them with my Lego. I can believe that. I got the same impression with the paper pad that came with the old 8094 set. It's thicker and glossier than your average printer paper.

The differences would be significant in some cases. Pieces containing metal or rubber components would generally be heavier than purely plastic pieces. A control center (even without batteries) or the 8466 tires are much heavier than raised mountain baseplates, for example.

I think it's only Europe and Australia that don't have the piece counts listed. I have gotten a few old sets from Japan and South Korea in the past (with text in the corresponding languages), and they have the piece counts listed like the US boxes. As Lord Admiral said, it's a marketing tactic. It might actually be cheaper for TLG to put the piece counts on all boxes (simply due to economies of scale), but not having it there may result in more impulse buys from casual shoppers. The store employees aren't going to sit there and count several hundred Lego pieces though.

I keep copies of anything I upload on the internet and have plenty of space for images on my ISP account, but Brickshelf's main attraction is the exposure your pictures get. I'm not sure if Flickr or MOCpages compare to it in that respect. I didn't realize Brickfactory (the hccamsterdam site) was down too. Does anyone know how long it has been? That site had more instructions and catalogs than Peeron. I never understood why people like it either. The free accounts are very limited and the interface is also lousy. The standard view shows pictures at too small a size and you can only see a few other thumbnails at once, while the flash-based slideshow mode is sluggish and unresponsive due to the animated transitions.

I'll probably go, but it's a long ways off at this point. It depends on what I'm doing next summer.

Why are people assuming it's down for good? It's only been one day. Their server host is probably closed for the Thanksgiving weekend and would take longer than usual to fix the problem.

Looks great. I'll try it out soon. I've been using this program over MLCad lately, as it's much more powerful once you get the hang of the interface.

I don't go out of my way to tell everyone about my Lego collection, but I make no attempt to hide it either and will readily tell people if they ask what I do. I have links to my Brickshelf gallery on other, non-Lego forums I post on as well as my university page. My thesis advisor and a few other grad students have seen my models and they all think it's an awesome hobby.

Awesome model. You have been quite prolific with these MOCs lately. This is packed with functions like 8455 but it has the precision of LAs. I look forward to seeing the rest of the pictures. As others said, I think the model somehow looks smaller than it actually is. I only got an idea of the size from the black turntable in the back. Are the rear wheels the 8466/8457 ones? You might try using 3x3 or 4x4 black dishes instead of the 2x2 ones. I like how you used the yellow dishes, but the black hubs in front look a little small compared to the size of the wheels.

Good explanation. I find that it often takes a little trial and error to determine where exactly the clutch should go in a geartrain. As you said, you have to get a balance between transmitting enough torque for the mechanism to work while still making sure it slips if something stalls. 8479 is a special case because it's meant to use the original light gray clutch gears from 1997, which behave a little differently from the modern kind. See my post here.

The ship is a nice enough design, although I don't like the sticker control panel. I'll probably get it just for the minifigs, especially Rench. It's a little pricey at $10 but it does include a number of good parts, and the extra trans-red visor is a nice bonus. Until now, those have been very rare since they only previously appeared in the 1989 SP1 sets.

This rumor seems to be the kind of thing that a random guy said on a forum somewhere. I wouldn't pay any attention to it. I think we're long overdue for a large helicopter in general. It's one of the few basic concepts that TLG has never fully realized in the past. As you say, rotors with a proper variable pitch would be great to see.

I didn't know there was a separate Technic club at that point. I had subscribed to the general Lego club and still have the Mania magazines from that period.

Very nice. I like the large scale of this truck, and how you have managed to get a studless look despite the size. That custom u-joint also looks especially interesting. Is this based on the same chassis as your crane? I remember you posted some in-progress shots of the crane a while ago, which looked similar.

Looking through my collection, here are some thing that come to mind: Any kind of Technic mechanism in minifig models is always great to see. Many of the old Space ground vehicles like 6895, 6896 and 6989 had steering systems, usually made up of a four-bar swivel mechanism. Another example that comes to mind is the opening launch bay system in 6953 and 6987. In recent times, some of the Power Miners vehicles have had drills and other things that spin when the vehicle moves. I've increasingly been trying to do more of these kinds of things in my MOCs. Modularity was also a common thing in some Space themes, especially on larger ships. 6984, 6973, and most of the Blacktron 1 ships had a couple of separate sections, which could be combined in various ways to get new ships. The 5974 Galactic Enforcer continues this tradition as well. The 6339 Shuttle Launch Pad had a cool system for lifting the shuttle and boosters into place. This and this from the manual describe it best. The 7033 Armored Car Action set had a neat setup where the rear doors are locked, and you have to use two included keys (1x1 tap pieces) to unlock the compartment. As mentioned earlier, any use of light, sound or magnets is good too. One of the best uses of lights was 6781, with its flashing cannons and light-up computer panel. Yes, this is an impressive and unique design. I don't remember seeing a mechanism anything like it in other sets.

I think they are well aware of everything we've discussed here, but they won't admit anything in public (or have any incentive to fix the problems, for that matter) unless enough people notice and complain. As for yellow, at this point it's safe to say that the TLG quality engineer at Brickfair 2008 was either misinformed (he turned out to be wrong about purple too), or was being intentionally misleading. It's been 15 months since then and we have seen little improvement on that color, even on new types of parts as you said.

Nice to see some official input. I wonder what exactly he is referring to though. If he's talking about the general color inconsistency, that issue doesn't have anything to do with minifigs specifically. It affects all kinds of bricks, including minifigs. This has been brought up before, and I've noticed it too. It's an especially prominent example of the weak clasping power problem. From what I can see though, it's not the chairs but the minifig legs that are the issue. If you try to put the minifigs on older chairs, you will notice the same loose grip.

Yeah, they use the same ldr/mpd format. It does have some kind of bug where some parts might not show up when you first load a model. If you just click on some part and deselect it though, all the missing stuff appears.

I also found it hard to get used to at first, coming from MLCad. I still think its default keyboard bindings are confusing, but I made custom mouse and keyboard profiles for it that remap some of the keys. Once you get the hang of it, it has a lot more potential than MLCad, especially for SNOT and Technic construction. I can make such things in it much faster now than I could in MLCad. MLCad often fails to correctly position parts that are oriented sideways (like Technic pins and axles) and forces you to do it manually, which is very time consuming, while SR3D detects the actual connections between parts and has no problems with this. The is also very cool, although it only works on some kinds of parts right now.

I used to use MLCad in the past, but have started using SR3D Builder lately. The interface is a little unintuitive and takes some getting used to, but it's far more powerful than MLCad or LDD. It has a good OpenGL renderer and checks physical connections like LDD, but uses the LDraw parts library like MLCad. It can even do collision-based animations for Technic models, although I haven't really looked into that. I like MLCad's four-panel interface but the program hasn't been updated in a long time, and its software renderer looks ugly and goes very slow when your model has a lot of pieces. I'm guessing by LDraw, you mean the various programs that use the LDraw parts standard. Nobody uses the actual LDraw program anymore, which I think runs in DOS only.

At least they are telling us this in advance. As people have said, color changes have occurred several times in the last five or six years without any announcement (and sometimes unintentionally), some of which were noticed by fans more than others. The first two are rather specialized and will only affect a few parts, but trans-black would be a huge change. That's probably the single most common transparent color today, especially for larger parts. This is what really bothers me about these color changes. Most of them are not actually considered separate colors on BL or Peeron. Determining what exactly a given BL seller is carrying can be tricky these days, as you have to look at the rest of his selection and make educated guesses on what time period his pieces came from. For large bulk orders, I tend to stick to a couple of specific sellers since I know what they have.

Thanks for the explanation. If it's simply due to sloppiness on the printing company's part, it might explain why the colors don't seem to be consistent for everyone and among all sets. As for the size and alignment issues, I have noticed that too. It used to be a common issue at one point in the 80s too, but wasn't seen in the 90s as far as I can remember. I saw it intermittently again in 2006 and 2007, around when all the color problems started, but haven't seen it in a while now. Have you gotten any recent pieces with this problem?

Interesting observation. I looked at some of my recent sets more carefully and what you say is quite right for the normal, ABS versions of this piece. However, the transparent colored ones, which are made of PC, have no connection point on the side and instead have a clear injection mark on the Lego logo on top, which suggests that they are produced with a different mold. (unlike the pre-1992 ones)