Phoxtane

I think the grilles are black with green frames; as such, I think the black grilles work better. I really like those colors!

I played around with a bridge design for trains a while back; I think it could be adapted to supporting your bridge from underneath:

Build a robot to clean those tracks for you!

Personally, I'd love to get into GBC and various other non-vehicle mechanisms. I think it gets tiring having vehicles completely dominate the Technic MOCs

I played around a bit with some slope bricks and chain links and ended up with a hopper that I could dump some pieces into and hand-crank out one by one. I ran into some issues with clogging of the exit hole and the axles not having any grip on the chain-link belt. As such, pins would make it through occasionally, while axles would try to be jammed through two at a time and end up blocking the rest of the pieces while they were stuck. I just now tried to fix the issue by raising the slopes making up the sides of the hopper up a couple of bricks in order to end up with a narrow channel in hopes that it would force the axles to line up one at a time. That didn't work either; axles kept falling down two at a time and getting stuck. I'm beginning to think that instead of having axles fall down onto the work belt, it would be better to raise them up to the work belt in order to align them properly, as seem in akiyuki's video.

I think you'll end up with the beams that are being shimmed against receiving most of the wear, in a large circle that matches the diameter of the shim. On the other hand, the shim will be just fine.

Why not just sell the bitcoins and pay with regular money? AFAIK none of the official Lego sites will take bitcoins yet.

Is the cat a part of your entry? I'm confused.

While I consider that purist, I'd still hesitate before doing so - you're taking apart an RC unit, which could be used for something like an RC-unit powered car! I think a working, functional RC unit is way more useful than that.

You're assuming that my collection is new enough to have all these parts in their 'new' colors. Alas, that is not the case! I have a handful of 3L friction pins in black, and a handful of frictionless axle pins in light grey. That's the big problem with a robotic sorter - I would end up with 2L and 3L friction pins together - though it is manageable, I think. It would be manageable to set up an akiyuky-style machine where the pins and axles go in together. At the 3L and 2L bins, the pieces instead are brought to a robotic sorter that will then sort by color and would re-route the parts to the correct bin. Or, at that point, you could sort them by hand. But that's no fun! I'm assuming you've watched the video - if not, this will make no sense whatsoever! The axles, after they've been lined up, are sent one at a time into little segments built out from the conveyor. They're then brought over a series of holes that are offset from each other. The holes start out towards the 'top' of the conveyor segment and slowly migrate over the course of the conveyor towards the 'bottom' of the segment. As such, the longest axles overbalance and fall into their respective bins first, then the second-longest, and so on.

Well, with the Thanksgiving break in full swing, I figured I'd get a ton of Lego sorted and cataloged properly. At some point I'll want to sort my Technic, and that means delving into my 'connectors' drawer - which includes everything from axles, axle connectors, bushings, and pins. I'm not looking forward to that at all. So obviously the solution would be to sort out the parts via a contraption! Now, there have been a few devices built for this purpose; akiyukiy's Axle Sorter and these two pin sorters come to mind. However, there hasn't been one yet that will sort the axles from the pins. As far as I'm aware, there are two defining characteristics that separate the two: - Connection type is the biggest - one is an axle, the other is a pin. If a way to test this reliably could be devised, that would solve the problem of sorting the two. - A more feasible goal is to assume that all things that are longer than 3L are axles. The 'short' bin could then be sorted by hand, or by another sorting device based on the first point. Failing this, an axle sorting unit and a pin sorting unit that could run in tandem would be nice as well. I think the pneumatic Mindstorms-controlled pin sorter is the best one, but the problem is that certain pins come in two colors, especially 3L. How would you sort those then? Edit: I accidentally the formatting.

The only thing you would have to change in the models for the instructions would be to figure out how to add a battery box to them if you only have PF. Other than that, the same rules apply that apply to 9V trains!

The thread title may be a bit unwieldy, but bear with me. I've been cataloging my bricks via Rebrickable, and I've noticed something three times now that's caused me confusion, so I figured I'd ask. I keep coming across something very weird on part no. 42023 [slope, Curved 6x1 Inverted]. On the underside, where you'd expect to find the part number, there's a blank rectangle-shaped lump that stands out slightly from the rest of the underside. The part number is nowhere else to be found. The only similar thing I've heard of is the 'Pat Pend Removed' bricks. Can anyone shed some light on this? Here's a picture of the part. It's fairly common. I was unable to get a proper picture of the lump in question, so I've marked the hole in the underside where it resides in red.

Here's a locomotive that I built for this year's LUG display in my hometown: I wasn't sure what this would be categorized as until after the show was over, but I think I know now. It's a fusion-powered locomotive in retro style, but at the same time it looks too clean to my eyes to really be considered truly retro... thus the label "retro-futuristic". I'm ecstatic over how well the teal and dark green work together; overall, I believe the whole thing contains six colors [not including the various shades of trans parts] - dark and light gray, white, dark green, teal, and some black. The whole thing was kicked off by noticing how the 60025 Grand Prix Truck set used a train base plate as the base for its trailer. Up until I got that set, I had no way of utilizing the white parts I had to build something like this. The back end is very clean and smooth, which I like. The only dis-symmetry is the 1x1 round tile on the nose. It would have looked a little boring otherwise! Whee! Looks all nice and greebly, and yet not cluttered. Pointy noses make everything better. Even better news awaits; I've gone and made an LDD file for this locomotive. Download it from Dropbox here: https://dl.dropboxus... locomotive.lxf

Well, I've posted a couple things here and there over in Train Tech and the Technic forums, but I figured now is as good a time as any to present my first Sci-Fi build: Introducing the BRY-809 Scout Ship! There's no real backstory to this build, apart from the fact that I got the long trans-neon-green parts off a Galaxy Squad set, noticed that they would fit well size and color-wise with parts of the same color off an older Exo-Force set, and the whole thing kind of went from there. I started at the back and worked my way forward.

Mine says "CBFS Driver (ver 3.2.110.277) installed, service is running". That's odd, to say the least. My .lxf and .pov files share the same folder. Once I'm done rendering, if I make any changes, I'll re-generate the .pov file - it doesn't take more than a minute, max. At this point, I am suspecting a clean install of both POV-Ray and the converter will do the trick. I'll hold off until more information comes through, as I really don't want to if I don't have to.

A track-tor?

I'll provide a benchmark in that I run a quad-core AMD 9750 @ 2.4Ghz and 4 gigs of DDR2 RAM. I can handle Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 quite well, and the only time when I experience real slowdowns is when I'm trying to do something other than IRC while I'm exporting video. On the other hand, I tend to max out the RAM I have available when doing so - thus the slowdowns. I suppose as long as you have at least something similar to that, the only thing you'd need to have is patience and a big enough hard drive for the video files you'll be producing. Not that it's not impossible to do so if you don't have this, but it makes it much much easier to do so. Edit: Of course, if you want to try running anything newer than CS6, I can't help you there. RAM seems to be the thing to have a lot of when working with video; processing power encodes it faster; and hard drive space is a factor to consider when working with HD video files. RAM will also help with bottlenecking, as running out of it will make your computer try and use the hard drive as a giant RAM stick, which is extremely slow and bogs down everything else as well

As far as I am aware, which isn't quite a lot, Artic vehicles tend to be painted bright colors for better visibility. I'd like to see this in red or possibly orange

I went to try and render an LDD file, but I keep getting this error: "#include "ldd_colors_declarations.bin" It's been so long since I installed the software I may have to go back and re-install it, but I'd rather not if I don't have to. What am I doing wrong?

Personally, I use a GoPro Hero3 White Edition, but I have access to a Nikon DSLR should I need it. Another thing to consider apart from resolution is framerate and low-light performance.

My complaint is that they've gone and printed white on the bags as a background for the images and things so I can't do a proper build-in-bag challenge.

My home LUG - CoWLUG, the Colorado-Wyoming Lego User's Group - was asked to put up a display at the Laramie Train Depot Open House two weeks ago. Our setup took two and a half hours, and we ran the show more or less all day over the course of the weekend. Stuart of lifelites.com was this show's organizer. He hacked together some PF IR receivers and a couple of barrel connectors as an experiment. What we ended up with was an awesome fully remote-controlled layout for both 9v and PF trains. This allowed us to not have to take shifts in the center "pit" where all the regulator gubbins were at. In addition, we also had interactive arcade buttons set up that allowed the visitors to control various functions in the layout. This was also the button's first outing and we plan to have more functions at the next display. This year, one button controlled the track power for the elevated Chicago-style trains, another controlled the pumpjack on top of the Steampunk district, and the third controlled the steam plant for "Peter Piper's Pickled Peppers Plant". The buttons also helped keep the kids from glomming onto the trains as they went by. Of course, now you'll want images I suppose. *sigh* ok Cows are indeed a running theme, considering how the name is "CoWLUG". Hide yo' kids and hide yo' cows. Grumpy Thor is grumpy. Lego displays = srs bsns (CoWLUG displays =/= srs bsns, however). This is where the real fun happens. I feel my camera car is especially graceful. Just look at that low profile! Did I mention Stuart also had a CNC and engraved bricks for a while? It broke though and he hasn't gotten it working again yet. So there is a use for those Dino Attack pieces, at least. I still think the squid in the lower middle is the best bit of this picture. Among other things not pictured, there was a Doofenshmirtz Evil Inc. skyscraper (from the show Phineas and Ferb of the Disney Channel) and a prison complete with prison riot. There were guards dual-wielding bananas in one hand and tommy guns in the other. Ostriches were involved. Well, that should about wrap it up. Feel free to ask questions! Edit: D'oh, I forgot - I'll be posting my custom trains that I built for this event in their own thread. Look forward to that, I know I will Edit2: Oh snap, I forgot another thing. My mom took the pictures, which is why they're so good. Thanks Mom!

And here I was thinking "Well, I bet this would work great with Mindstorms!"! Looks to me like the original model worked the cables by way of a large steam piston pulling on them. Have you replicated that movement with a linear acutator, or is it still a winch setup?

They work well as feet for stationary projects.