Phoxtane

As any competent player of city building games would tell you, it's important to get the utilities in place before you start inviting people to come live in your city. I've gone ahead and started the process by building my own modified (improved) version of the promotional Vestas wind turbine model, set #4999: The biggest change is that I've nearly doubled the height of the tower in order to bring the blades into scale with the tower; the Vestas turbine is quite short, at least compared to the wind farms I see here in Wyoming. From the look of it, the towers are a bit more than twice as tall as the blade radius; currently in these images I'm waiting on one more segment in order to bring the turbine up to full height. I also did some work in and around the nacelle, hub, and blades in order to remove gaps and increase the color uniformity in exposed areas, as well as make some small shape changes. The very last addition I made was that of a service door at the base of the tower to allow for workers to enter the turbine for maintenance and such. In the context of my layout, the turbine was built and installed by the 'Mikroelectric' utility company, which services the town and the surrounding areas. I'm hoping to make some custom window cling-style signage to complete the green stripe down the side of the turbine nacelle with the Mikroelectric logo. Most of the gap-filling happened at the little back door that allows access to the motor. Currently in order to power it, I have to hang a battery box out the back. I made the tip of the hub a bit pointier, and smoothed out some of the gaps at the root of the blades. There's even steps leading up to the access door. They're a little off-kilter from how it fits onto the baseplate, but once the tower is mounted onto a MILS-style module it won't matter - and the tower will be a lot less wobbly.

Well, it just doesn't SEEM right - although if it's official, it's official. As for smart motors: what about the current servo motor? Can you think of any other applications for a smart motor? I sure can - full rotation control similar to that of a stepper motor would be useful to many here who build mechanisms. If I had a Lego motor that incremented one step forward every time I turn the dial on my remote, I'm sure I could find a use for it. Not that you're wrong, of course.

I'm still not totally convinced this isn't a hoax or anything. It's almost too good to be true. I'm wondering if this is pretty much the end of PF 1.0 and the beginning of PF 2.0, since the motors in this aren't just on-off left-right motors, but have some sort of position control apparently built in.

If you are changing it to be wider, you'll want to make it noticeably longer as well; otherwise it'll look incredibly boxy.

It was the first decent picture of a generic 9-gram hobby servo that I could find. At least now I know that they should work for my application, assuming I can get them mounted and connected properly. You have the advantage of using custom parts to help you out!

Are you using some of the generic 9-gram hobby servos for this? Is there a custom part that's connecting to the switch mechanism itself? I've been investigating using this style of servo (see below) to drive the switches, but the trick has been figuring out how to have them actuate the switch - let alone them having enough power to actuate it in the first place.

Try this: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/84375076/LEGO Dacta - Teaching the Turtle.pdf

About the only thing I can recommend is to avoid worm gears if at all possible - worm gears will slide back and forth on their axle and grind up against their mount, causing it to wear away very quickly.

About the only thing that kept me from suggesting such a thing was how it'd interact with the somewhat limited track geometry. Having it adjustable would help with adapting to various radii of track, but you'd probably need special length straight pieces to connect up to it properly... which increases the number of parts that have to have molds made and so on. It's more expensive, of course!

I'm definitely keeping an eye on these. It's perfect!

I think maybe the problem was trying to do too much at once. What if you tried to cover the market that ME Models and Lego currently doesn't, with crossovers? A 90-degree crossover would be fantastic, as well as one that isn't 90 degrees - I'm not sure what it would have to be to work with the Lego track geometry... What about double-length straights? If they're cheaper than two standard straight tracks, that could be a good seller. Half-length track would be useful too - nobody likes flex track. Maybe stick to only the next size up radius from the R40 track - that way you can still sell to the people who want larger radii, but don't have to go through the task of making molds and manufacturing five different radii. Offer more as demand grows (maybe set up something similar to a group buy, where once a certain number of people sign up for the product you can make and sell a batch as needed). As for switches, keep the nice mechanism, and stick to the next-size-up radii only - don't try to compete with Lego on standard switches. I bet you'd do well with some double crossover switches - but for those, do both the standard and next-size-up radii. That way you can fill the market demand for the double crossovers, at a much lower price than they're currently going for. I think the biggest problem is that the market demand for all this is pretty low already - you're having to compete with ME Models (and the current attitude towards third-party track manufacturers). Not only that, but track doesn't wear out; once somebody has enough, they won't buy more unless they expand their layout. It's not a constant demand like batteries or basic brick for filling out buildings and such. Definitely work as hard as possible towards keeping the costs as low as possible, so that the price of your final product is low enough to become an impulse purchase (relatively speaking), and you can make decent margins. For what it's worth, I'm against selling 9V alongside the PF track to begin with; the market for that is only going to shrink or stay constant, whereas PF is going to keep growing, since it's the current system and it's what newcomers to the hobby will be getting. If anything, a killer product there would be new, Lego-compatible 9V motors and accessories for trains.

I saw this on The Brothers Brick. Looks nice!

I think everybody's still waiting on ME Models to start shipping out the rails ordered from their own Kickstarter - I suspect this is why we aren't seeing much in the way of support for this project.

I'm updating the track plan for the first phase of my long-term layout, but I can't decide between two versions: The one on the right keeps the cool curves from the original, but the one on the left gives me more useable space to build things in the center, and I also get an access point with some bridges. Both layouts have the added improvement of two tracks instead of one, but they take up more space. Here's the original to compare:

I think the walkway is a good thing to have, if you're building up a modular town with square blocks instead of rectangular ones - you need some sort of access into the dead space in the center of the block, and this set provides that. Otherwise, if you wanted to put some sort of park in that empty space, minifigures would have to go through the buildings to get at it! I think when I get this I'll be building a 32x16 apartment block to fill the gap that it would add in the lineup...

Whoops, there goes the car fund.

This image (rightmost mini building): From this thread: http://bricksetforum.com/discussion/comment/474712/#Comment_474712 - but I see now that it's the mini Palace Cinema. Never mind, then...

Looks a bit like a toy store to me - maybe it's a Lego store, but with miniature versions of the old wooden toys?

So does that mean that the more funding you get now, the cheaper the final product will be overall, and we'll get a larger selection of track geometries?

You know, I think we may have cleared out the supply of these bearings - I can't imagine there's much demand for bearings that small. That, or like so many other cheap Ebay finds (think high-power LEDs), they're factory rejects, and we have to wait until the factory rejects more before we can buy them!

My hope is that the bearings will take the place of the holders on the wheel sets somehow, rather than just being added on.

How did you oil the bearings if they're sealed? I'm considering some for my builds, but I'm waiting patiently for Redimus's results before I try and kit out my trains with them. If this works without any modifications to the wheelsets, I'll definitely get my hands on these. If anything, it would mean I can pull longer trains for a longer amount of time on the same batteries (or, my batteries would last twice as long!).

Looking at ball bearings of similar OD at McMaster Carr, even the ones with the lowest maximum RPM top out at 80k RPM - even if you derate the Ebay bearings by 50%, you could still push them to 40k RPM... That's with lubrication, of course!

I'm interested in how this works out, since I don't do too many brick built wheelsets myself.

As above: How big is the 'standard' modular city block? I was thinking of going with a 3x3 block, which would give me an equal number of corner and not-corner modular buildings.