Hopey

I agree that the 8043 is a must-have if you want to do PF MOCs. Almost every MOC you see is RC, and the 8043 is the only set that includes 2 recievers and 2 remotes, along with 4 M motors. I had to say "wow" to myself a few times while I was building it. At first I thought that committing a whole motor to just switching the driving rings over was a waste, but it works superbly. It does only have M motors, of course, but there's a lot you can do with M motors. XL motors are hard to come by in sets these days, but you can get them pretty cheap from shop.lego.com. On the other hand, in terms of good use of limited PF parts (rather than having lots of parts) I'd say that 8109 is worth a mention. It's got two functions, both of which have multiple stages; One moves the bed back in a cool arc while lowering the rear end of the truck, the other extends the towing doodad and folds out the wheel-holders when it's extended. Both use quite cool linkages & mechanisms, and it really adds a lot to the set.

Makerbot and other currently available 3D printers use ABS as its medium, the same plastic that Lego uses. I have no idea if there are different grades of ABS, but I don't think it's too much to assume that the same or similar grades will at some point be available. Lego parts are made with tolerances as low as 10 micron, or 0.01mm. (source) Doing a little research, I've found that the makerbot replicator 2 has a resolution of 100 microns (0.1mm), while its rival Formlabs Form 1 has confusing specs, claiming "layers as thin as 25 microns and with x/y features as small as 300 microns". (source) So they're clearly not there yet, and I never said they were. These machines cost several thousand dollars each. But give it 5 or 10 years, and consider where they might be at. The makerbot 1 was released in January 2012 (I think) and had a resolution of 200 to 300 micron (source). The makerbot 2 had reduced this to 100 micron by September 2012. Time will tell...

How similar are the tyres to the 8880 ones? Are they pretty much interchangeable?

I'd say that I'm predicting that widespread, cheap, reasonable-quality 3D printing will provide an impetus for TLG to re-think the way in which parts are supplied to the community, rather than assuming. I could well be wrong; it could be that 3D printing is the next virtual reality, and it never really takes off. It could be that it never reaches the quality or price point that anyone would bother to print LEGO parts. Time will tell. I'm not sure your analogy is correct. Yes, cheap knock-offs exist, but from what I've seen on the forums, they're basically only full sets. I don't currently having the option of going to a website and ordering cheap fake red 5x11 panels or yellow 6L half liftarms, or whatever other rare pieces I can't find on bricklink. It's not the same as being able to create them yourself without leaving your house. Using the music industry as an analogy again, there were always cheap Chinese bootleg CDs available if you knew where to look. But music piracy didn't reach the point of threatening the industry until CD burners and MP3 players matured as technologies, and people could do the piracy themselves. The analogy fails, of course, with the quality issue; fake parts, either commercially produced knock-offs or home-printed ones will never match the quality of genuine parts. Again, I personally would most likely not use them; I'd just do without. But that's a long way from saying no-one will ever do it, or that it's not something that TLG might need to take into account in the future. If someone really wanted to make a white Gallardo, and the right parts simply weren't available legitimately, how bad would the quality have to be before you could say for sure that they wouldn't resort to printing them themself, if they had the capability? I hope it doesn't become widespread. I'd hate nothing more than buying a used set from eBay only to find that some of the parts were home-printed. What I'm hoping is that TLG gets on the front foot and in recognition of the threat, takes steps to ensure that genuine parts are more readily available, however that might be.

Having had a quick read of this topic, there's one issue that I think will affect it in the not-too-distant future: cheap, widely available 3D printers. At the moment, if I really want a 5x11 red panel, and there's none available on bricklink, from TLG, in set, etc, then I've got no option and have to do without one. But I predict that within a few years there will be another option: to print one myself. Now obviously it won't be as good as a genuine one, and there will be many people (probably myself included) who won't resort to this at all. But some people will. And I'm interested to see how TLG handles it. If we liken printing your own Lego parts to pirating music or movies, then I'm hoping that TLG goes down the path that iTunes and Netflix has: if you make the product easily available for purchase, then most (or at least many) people will prefer to legitimately purchase them rather than resorting to piracy. It's currently not a problem, so there's no real pressure at the moment for them to address it. But 3D printing is coming, and I'm sure that some folks at TLG are already considering strategies to address it. They're probably more concerned about people printing General Grievous than a 5x11 panel though. What I'd love to see is a community-based system where people vote for what parts they'd like to see made available, and TLG takes this into account (with certain limits of course) and perhaps opens a huge bricklink-style online store, or monthly releases of parts packs, or even just using this to stock the pick-a-brick at the shops. Anyway, that's my 2c.

Go for it. I got one for £46, and was going to just sell it on, trying to make a profit, but after I built it I decided I had to keep it. In fact, it's my avatar now. Although, I'm currently building an 8880 I bought last week...

Well, poop. Just got my receiver, bought through the UK site and shipped from the Netherlands, and it's V1 . Or at least it doesn't have "V2" printed on it.

"Fine" might be an overstatement, without qualifications. The V1 receivers don't work very well at all; if you put any significant load on it, it cuts out. You really need a V2 receiver. You may also need to "shunt" the battery pack, to prevent the battery pack's overload protection from cutting the power under load. The adapter cable you need is this one: Details here. In the UK at least, the cheapest place to get the cable is probably lego S@H at £2.99. Just to be clear though, the old-style cable in this is optional, and is just an extension cable. You can connect the adapter cable directly to the motor.

The colours can be weird. I've noticed many times with non-technic sets that internal parts which you can't see when the model is completed tend to be completely random colours. E.g. in the blue and white 7286 police van, there's two green 1x2 plates; in the yellow 3221 truck, there's a number of blue, red or white plates, all of which get hidden when it's completed. I've not noticed this as much with Technic, partly because there's generally fewer areas that are completely hidden, and partly because the standardised colouring inevitably makes it a bit of a mish-mash anyway. I wholeheartedly support the concept of standardised part colouring, by the way, as it makes finding parts so much simpler. I've started buying old sets recently, and I've made a point of separating out the black 3L pins and black 2L, 3L and 5L axles and keeping them away from the rest, as I've already rote learned that black = even, grey = odd for axles, and black = 2L and blue = 3L for pins. It's frustrating to have to look at each piece individually to find what I'm after. As for the instructions & complexity; when I was a kid, I had pretty much every set I owned. Nowadays, not a chance. I don't know if that's due to the size of the sets, as the biggest I had when I was a kid was the 8858 "rebel wrecker" at 461 pieces, whereas now I've got 8043, 8110, 9396, etc, or it could be that I just don't spend as much time building the same set over and over again, as I've now got the disposable income to go and buy more of them. Or maybe I'm just getting old, and my memory's not what it used to be. Or maybe it's because I don't spend as much time building each set over and over again. What I don't quite understand is the colour choices; I don't like having a bunch of blue everywhere that there's a 3L pin or axle pin with friction. Couldn't they have gone with dark bluish grey, or even dark reddish brown? I've also got no idea why they change it. Apparently 1.5L pins are now tan?

I got me a buggy motor this week, and wanted to try it out. Here's a very minimal chassis I whipped up. It's got a simple return-to-centre mechanism which doesn't really work, no suspension, no structural integrity above what's required to stop it falling apart, and no style whatsoever, but it's quick! (Sorry about the video quality) The battery pack is modified to output 9.6V and has been shunted to prevent it cutting out. As is obvious from the constant wheelspin in the video, it's got torque to spare, but when I tried it with bigger wheels, the power cut out, so I might have to try again when I get a V2 receiver. I could probably have made it a few studs shorter if I'd planned further ahead. Anyone made a smaller buggy-motored car?

I fear that there may soon be a shortage of red 61678 curved slopes on bricklink pretty soon, among other parts...

You've got me worried now about the one I ordered. I'll let you know whether the UK store stocks V2s in up to 5 working days, I guess.

Cool, I just ordered one for £11.50 and 2 XL motors for £7.99 each. Cheaper than bricklink and ebay, to my surprise.

Still not sure if I'm supposed to bump old topics for small questions... I noticed on this page, in the summary at the bottom, that I'm a little confused by this; it appears to have slightly less torque, speed and efficiency than an M motor. Is this just an outdated statement, or is there something to this motor that I'm not aware of? I have one of them (from a power puller), but hadn't really considered using it in MOCs as it seems easier in most cases to just use one of the many M motor's that I've got.

Bumpety bump: If I buy a receiver from the lego website, will I get a V2 one?

I just this afternoon bought on eBay an 8880 with no wheels for £45, and I've ordered replacement wheels from bricklink for about €9. Not the deal of the century (£36 is crazy), but far below the bricklink average used price of over £80. Now I've just got to wait for it to arrive. I've waited nearly 20 years to get one; you'd think waiting another week or so wouldn't be a problem...

I can't post a video, since I don't have the set, but I think I get it. Get a unimog/crawler portal axle + hub. Put a wheel on it, including gears within the portals. Note how much play there is in the wheel, i.e. how much it can move around, other than just rotating like it's supposed to. Now take out the axles and gears, and try it again. The axles stabilises the hub somewhat, so there's a little bit more play now, although I can't really notice it. The new hubs, when driven via a CV joint, or not driven at all, don't have such an axle, so have this amount of play. I think that's it.

I don't see how the ones you circled will work; they'd make it even higher. You need to either attach the top end somewhere higher and/or the bottom end somewhere lower, while still having enough room and degrees of freedom to allow it to move. Precisely how to achieve this is up to you. Alternatively you could get hold of some of the hard 6.5L springs: , and use those instead. You may only have to swap a blue axle pin for a black friction pin on the yellow end, or may have to do a little engineering.

I haven't got mine put together at the moment, but I had a quick look at the instructions. The yellow 2x4 L-beam that forms the one-way catch sits directly above this part (I think). The yellow bit's got a bush on it that stops it from falling down too far, but the grey liftarm in question also achieves this. Note that the yellow L beam doesn't pivot about its endmost hole, so when it lifts up, the part with the axle hole goes down. I think the blue axle pin stops it going too far, so that it doesn't swing too far out of the way, so when power is applied in the correct direction, it engages straight away. Edit: too slow :(

Cool. I've been thinking of picking up an NXT2.0 set, might hold off for a bit. I wonder if this'll mean that V2 sets might go on sale...

Explanation video: Basically they blow air onto the teeth of one of those great big ye-olde gears such as these: and it works kind of like a paddle wheel. This produces very little torque but at very high rpm (100,000rpm, apparently!), which is then geared down to high torque at useful speed.

Bumpety bump. I've now got two of these, each with 8 very cheap rechargeable AAAs in series (I re-did the AA one with AAAs) I just put one of them on to charge for a few hours, after which I switched it on, and the light on it didn't come on. So to begin troubleshooting, I measured the voltage across the two charging wires, which connect directly to either end of the battery series. 0V would mean that one of the inter-battery connections has come undone, ~9.6V would mean that something was up in the circuitry, switch, or connection from the batteries to the circuit. But I got 0.3V. Does this mean I've cooked one or more of my super-cheap batteries, and I should have been less cheap and bought some eneloops?

Yes, that's kind of what I meant. If it's driving forward, the rear sprocket is doing all of the driving, and th front one is just introducing unneccesary tension. Maybe, I dunno.

Could that be the cause of the treads breaking? I'm far from an expert in this, but I think most, if not all tracked vehicles drive a single sprocket per track. Wouldn't having driven sprockets at both ends introduce extra tension whenever the suspension moves?

To each their own. I'll admit that the colour scheme's a bit off, and only having two gearbox functions is a bit weak, but the intermeshing rotors are very cool. I also like that the functions (limited though they are) are driven via the tail propeller rather than a little knob on the side, so you can get quite a bit of speed up.