Phoxtane

It seems that prior to the introduction of the studless Technic beams, Lego designers were afraid to try running drive axles down the chassis of vehicles instead of chaining loads of gears together. Or, was there no good way to do that prior to their introduction?

I built an experimental train MOC about a week ago [my first Train MOC] and it looks very similar to this; I was designing it after a generic high-speed train, and wanted an excuse to use my orange parts. Now I've upstaged by the company who produced my bricks!

Do you think you could whip up a .lxf file for these claw designs? They look extremely promising! EDIT: I was able to reverse-engineer the third claw from the photos posted. Here's my mockup in LDD: I colored the parts that wouldn't connect easily in bright colors. When assembling it in real life, all you have to do is connect those colors! I've included the original model and a design that I modified to attach an M-motor easily. Download the .lxf here: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/84375076/firkygrabber.lxf [All credit goes to Firky for the original re-make!]

What's the illegal build step in the Unimog? I just got mine and didn't notice any issues with how it was put together.

How does the return-to-center steering work?

I dunno, I think that you'd be limiting yourself on certain MOCs with that rule. The best example I can think of would be a modified 8043 with a pneumatic gripper - I'd keep the LAs since they can be positioned precisely and aren't limited to either full extent or minimum extent. Heck, since my pneumatic pumps don't work anymore, I have to use LAs! Makes sense, that way sideways forces from the gears don't tear their mounts apart. I think you could make a geartrain that would span between the ends of two beams as long as you attached the two beams together.

Blender is free, but I have heard that the UI is horrible. You could try Google Sketchup, but that program is very limited from what I can tell. 3DS Max may be your best bet, but it costs a lot of money if you can't get it on a student license. There's others, but those are the three that I've tried out.

I feel that we should all strive to use as many blue and lime green parts as possible. It'd make the set very valuable on the second-hand market and possibly bump up sales for TLG, simply because it'd a bonanza of rare-colored parts.

I think that to keep the costs for PF parts down, the ideal crawler would use a combination of M-motors, XL-motors and the AA battery boxes, which means that you'd have to scale down the entire crawler so you're not lugging around too much weight. I may actually try this with some of the 8081 Extreme Cruiser wheels.

Impressive! It's things like this that convinced me to subscribe.

Ultrasonic sensors rank at the top of my list in usefulness. You could probably pick up another one of those. It never hurts to get more touch sensors as well; HiTechnic sells a multiplexer that allows you to attach up to four touch sensors to one NXT sensor port!

Very nice! I haven't seen a variable pitch prop design yet, though I'd love to see some close-ups of the mechanism. Are you planning to add a linear actuator to motorize the pitching mechanism?

I've had hardly any luck finding a steering module that offers steered-wheel drive and Ackermann geometries. I tried building one myself, but I now see why there aren't hardly any. It gets complicated fast... So, has anyone seen/used/designed a steering module with these abilities?

Looks like you could fit a standard AA battery box in there as well. Nice!

What about setting the L-Motor on its side? You could get some stronger gears in there, or perhaps even use a chain drive.

Well, I'm done. Anybody want my collection? [ ]

To embed a video, use the "media" "/media" tags. You'll need to replace the quotation marks with brackets. Nice module as well!

What makes the V2 receiver special - that is, what is different about it that makes it "Version 2"?

Well, I would imagine if all headpieces were tight enough that turning them turned minifig heads, it would be very difficult to remove and attach the headpieces. I prefer it this way, though I imagine that brickfilm creators would disagree!

Well, I can get very small models done in a reasonable amount of time! I'm using this in a larger size for my desktop. It's quite wonderful! I have an older Vista computer lying around that I may try and use as a singular render farm.

"The Carver is a tilting three-wheeled vehicle using an automatic balancing technology to balance the passenger compartment under all conditions. The Carver vehicle combines aspects of a motorcycle and a car, both in appearance and design and was produced by Carver Europe in the Netherlands. Vmln8 a builder from New Zeland made a nice LEGO version with Technic parts, months ago, quite successfully as you can see from his video below." "Look at the solution used to implement the steering and dynamic cornering behavior for this kind of motorcycle. In fact a car/motorcycle hybrid. You can find further pictures at Vmln8's flickr account and even building instructions from Rebrickable." I quite like this zippy little car - it's fast! Too bad I don't have the parts to build it.

I only have the 8043 Excavator, but I really want the Unimog for its many functions and parts and the Crawler because of its new motors and being able to drive it over stuff.

I tried putting the four-cylinder engine into my Extreme Cruiser LDD once. It was AWFUL.

Alternatively, you could resize the images in a image editor like Photoshop or Paint.NET to 800x600, then upload them to a site like Imgur [What I use]. Chrome allows you to right-click an image and find its URL from there. Then, you can just use the "insert image" tab at the top of the post editor to easily put an image into your post. It's two icons to the left of the smiley insert icon.

Video description: "A black supercar. It has 7+R gearbox, all wheel drive, V12 engine, spring assisted openable doors, bonnet, adjustable steering wheel, new interlinked suspension and more.." It looks quite nice! The V12 sits over the back wheels and the gearbox's shifter is in between the two seats. I think it looks like a Lamboghini Gallardo in black, but with a shorter nose: