Phoxtane

So what's the deal with that packaging? Unless I'm horribly confused, there's the typical color-printed box that would sit on the shelf, and inside there was black-and-white printed bags with all the parts, and another black-and-white box? What was the idea behind all that?

I think I'll need to make a trip to Wal-Mart tomorrow. I'm running out of toothpaste (see also: Excuses, Shopping For Lego).

The technology is certainly there to be able to mold joints into the arms and legs of minifigures without need for assembly. The hands on one of my Gunpla models came on a sprue of their own, like this: While I did have to cut and trim the sprue off the hand parts, all the fingers are fully articulated along the knuckles and base of the finger. It would definitely be possible for Lego to mold elbow/knee joints into their respective parts with no need for later assembly, but I'm guessing that that particular mold technology is even MORE expensive than the current molds that Lego uses, and possibly would cost more if tooled to their exacting standards. It's worth mentioning that that image is of the hand molds in the MG RX-93 Ver. Ka kit, whereas mine came in the MG RX-78-2 Ver. 3.0 kit. They look exactly the same, which suggests to me that Bandai is using the same mold for all of their articulated hand needs, which in turn suggests that that particular mold was very expensive indeed!

It's on Steam as an Early Access title.

I've got a pair of tweezers and carpet in which to lose them. Make my day, I say.

Or for the truly dedicated, a delicate scratch-build balsa airframe that closely mimics that of the real-world design, covered in thin sheets of heat-shrunkun plastic. Servos for model airplanes are measured in tens of grams, Lego motors and battery packs are measured in hundreds. The material itself, too, is similarly an order of magnitude or two (I'm guessing) heavier, being composed of pieces whose wall thickness is much thicker than the paper covering on the foam planes or the plastic sheets on the fancier ones. I will personally eat a hat (of a type, and at a time and place, and with seasonings of my own choosing) if this actually happens with stock Lego Power Functions available at the time of posting.

On second thought, my guess is that the L motors weren't all running at the exact same speed and over time the gears would begin to bind up from not moving the exact same speed and then suddenly slip (or break gear teeth if they couldn't push past each other). The dust would come from the gears rubbing on each other by running with the slight speed differences, which explains the weird profiles these gear teeth have developed.

I'd like to give this a try, but here's some questions I have first: - Do I need to disassemble the sets I'd like to review first before I can use them for the academy? I don't have the time on hand to tear them apart and rebuild them in a quick manner. - Is there some sort of time restriction involved (as in, "do this thing that'll be open from *this date* to *date in future*", or "come back in three days or less with *thing*")? I don't know how well I can hold to these if that is the case. - While I do have access to a nice camera, it's restricted in that I certainly can't go and grab it whenever I need it. Is it fine if I use my phone's camera (HTC One M8) and touch it up in Photoshop to make them acceptable for use in the courses? For reference, the camera that comes in my phone is 4MP and has a image resolution of 2688x1520 when I pull them off the phone. It's also got some fancy dual-camera magic that allows me to do thing like refocus the image after it's taken and so on. I'm worried about the time limits because I am taking a hefty summer class and am working at the same time.

Maybe just shaving a bit of plastic off the top of the minifigure's shoulder to allow the joint there to pivot up and down a little as well as front-to-back?

Good LORD. What do all the gears do? Generally in these sort of cutaway views it's sort of obvious what does what, but all I'm seeing is a big block of gear teeth...

I like this idea - every year come out with a new color of brick separator, or just make them out of whatever color happens to be free in the production line on a given day. Limit this slightly to solid colors, as the translucent plastic has different properties than straight ABS and may not be suited for this application, and it becomes a sort of blind-bag deal, where you're never sure what color you'll get until you open the box...

I found a 1x4 brick on a playground when I was a kid. Then, about a year ago, I ran across it in my collection again when I was sorting through all my parts. It was a Megablock.

A floating studless beam may be enough to keep things from wiggling apart to cause this.

I've been grabbing more of the plastic drawer sets from the local Ace Hardware, as Wal-Mart doesn't have nearly the selection they do. With tax it ends up being about 25 USD per set, but I'm not trying to get enough drawers for my collection at once, just as I need them:

Break it down into your collection for parts. That's the eventual fate of all sets in my collection once I get tired of admiring them and decide they'd be more useful that way.

Put a notch in the bottom of the clear case that'll let a PF cable pass through. You can have a 9v transformer set up to run the motor that would be inside the case.

Oh, good, it's not just me. At least on my Volvo Loader they were worthless in holding the parts they were attached to together, because the pins were soft enough as to slip out of the beam holes.

There's a relevant XKCD comic for everything (remember this and use it well).

Real men run a continuous stream of beaten eggs through their cooling system so there's a constant supply of scrambled eggs to eat. LDD runs just perfectly for me, and I went a bit beyond what I needed for gaming only so that I could do Photoshop and the like as well: Core i5 4690k (seems to be the de facto processor for mid-to-high level rigs?), an SSD for the boot drive + programs (except for Steam games), an HDD for everything else (Steam games, files, video, etc.). The only anomalies for a modern workstation at this point is the GTX970 graphics card, which I need for games: ...and the 32 gigabytes of RAM. I do make use of nearly all of it from time to time, as Photoshop will take as much as you'll give it. If you're going to be building a general use computer, then go for something a bit more reasonable in terms of graphics cards, RAM, and processor spec, but the SSD + HDD is extremely useful because everything will load faster and you'll have the slower rust-spinner for big files and such. Edit: LDD will run on something equivalent to a potato, or the average toaster, according to Brickipedia: - OS can be Windows XP, Vista, 7, or 8 (and presumably 10, when it's released) as well as OS X 10.6.8 or higher for Macs. - CPU can be anything 1GHz or higher. - Graphics card has to have at least 128 MB of VRAM, and must be OpenGL 1.1 or higher compatible - or for Mac anything equivalent to the Geforce 5200 or Radeon 7500, or better. - You need at least 512 MB of RAM for a Windows machine, and 1GB in a Mac. - One GB of HDD space in both cases. If you don't already have a computer in your house that meets these specs, I'd be surprised. I'm pretty sure the bare minimum nowadays is something like 4-8 GB of RAM. I also just checked Newegg and you can't buy a processor lower than 1GHz clock speed anymore (and I doubt half the ones that barely clear that clock speed will fit into a recent CPU socket). Please don't spend a stupid large amount of money like I did on a computer, if it's only for LDD. My awful laptop runs it quite happily if I turn off GOOD graphics.

I can only assume that it'll be Hella Cool, based on the headlight covers.

Looks like the gearbox is actually of some use - just about every other gearbox that I've seen takes long enough to shift that the vehicle either slows dramatically or stops, which means that it loses all the momentum it had and the motor has to start it moving again in a less-than-optimal gear range.

Bucket o' warm soapy water ought to do it, perhaps with something gently agitating it so the bricks move about somewhat. Sounds like a project to build in of itself, but I haven't got any parts that need to be washed in such a manner that I'm aware of...

I'd consider buying the CUV if it was an official Lego set - I like the look!

Is there a way to export to a PDF or something similar for the final instructions? It'd be nice to be able to keep the instructions I generate on a flash drive or something in case I ever needed to use them on a PC with limited access - say, school computers where you may not be allowed to install Java or other programs - or just to distribute them without the end user having to install a program just to view the instructions. I imagine that's a bit of a stretch goal though...

I've been using Bricksafe (made by the same guy that does Rebrickable) for almost a year now and it seems to just work - there's no wait time for images to be moderated or anything, unlike Brickshelf, and it seems to be very reliable. The interface I feel is a bit clunky in some places - I'd love to be able to create folders and such like Brickshelf, unless that's already implemented and I'm missing it somehow - but it's all very smooth and nice to use.