cgarison

I found this picture of some ExoSuits having fun on the DelVaLUG Windfarm layout. The one is riding the windmill that belongs to Kreative Snail. I have no clue how I missed the action as I am standing at the moonbase (in the green shirt). Fazoom and his friends were good at not attracting attention. His photo stream is full of the ExoSuit adventure at BrickFair VA. https://www.flickr.com/photos/fazoom/with/14791048656/

Mike from DelVaLug has started a group on Facebook for the improved "2012" standard Moonbase that we use as a part of our Delvalug layout. The link to the group is here: https://www.facebook...448842361848374 Pictures of the DelVaLug Moonbase 2012 Layout can be found here: https://www.flickr.c...roups/delvalug/ Essentially, the 2012 standard is the same except we have replaced the single base plate to a base plate, one brick and two plates (5 plates higher than the baseplate.) Or you can set a plate on 2X4 bricks turned on their side to achieve the same effect. By increasing the height of the baseplates, we can now build craters into the layout and well as create a foundation to anchor the elevated parts of the moon base so a train or monorail derailment will not know down the structures.

Those colors work well with me. Nice throw back style with theme which does a great job capturing the essence of Classic Space without the in your face scheme. Keep up the good work.

Now that is a proper station. Good work!

Very nice rigs. Lego needs to take some lessons to build a North American fire truck. Great work.

Yes, I am running two train motors from a single AAA battery pack with no issues. The train easily runs 3 hours on a single charge using the AAA battery pack. The only quirky part of this is that the rear motor has to be turned 180 degrees opposite of the other motor so they move in the same direction. (Note that I am not any LED lights at this time but they should have minimum current draw.) This setup ran for 2 public days at Brickfair VA with no issues. I brought the train home and have had minimal maintenance and only had to wipe it down and clean the ABS dust from the train. It is a very nice setup. Speed with this train is the scariest factor when running it on a display because it can easily override the rails in the corners and slide into the floor. I did not get a chance to talk to the person who runs 9V motors on their HE on the WaMu LTC layout because I noticed they had them on each end of the train. I am not sure how that works for them, but I would like to try power functions on each end myself. That might come sometime next year.

Nice work on pulling together the train. The color scheme works well components on the cars tie in nicely to the theme for overall playability.

I would feel guilty going back to TLG for them to replace motors that we wore out over the course of an AFOL show. Lego makes wonderful toys that are reliable but when I look at the amount of use (to the threshold of abuse) we throw at a MOC over the course of a 3 day show and compare that to the time that a child would play with that toy over a period of several years, I can see where we might be pushing the limits of their testing program. There is nothing like rolling a train over a layout for hours and hours to find all the week clutch points in Lego parts and make the running gear scream for mercy. I know we have one unit that will need a complete overhaul because the clutch on the Lego pieces has worn to the point where it drops parts off the MOC as it rolls around the moonbase. With that said, I have not seen many of these issues on the old monorail that AFOL's want back in production or the traditional track powered train motors. But that represents a different era where childrens were using system to build decortive trains compared to today when we build the entire running gear with parts from the Technic bins. So another level of building detail leads to another level of trouble to keep these pieces chugging reliably for a long time.

The colors that I like are: Orange Lime Medium Blue For neutrals (side of buildings) Light Bley Tan White

I agree this definitely has a Jersey Shore vibe. Very nice build.

Even the little M-motors have way more torque than you would expect given the general experience that we have in using them to motivate MOCs. A few years back at BrickFair VA, I got tired of the little 12 tooth gears slipping off the rounded ends of 3L axles so I cut down longer, black axles to a lenth of about 3.25 studs long and then filed the ends of my axle to get the most square end possible to mount my 12 tooth gear. After this was completed, the train turned into power monster and instead of slipping or stalling, the bogeys would twist and override the rails on the track. With some improvements and running the train at a slower speed, we fixed that issue. Going forward, all the new "diesel" style locomotives that I build are going to incorporate these improvements to make life on a layout at a Lego AFOL show just a little bit easier. And as I side note, elliminating the rounded end of a technic axle increases the difficulty of attaching a gear to the end by a factor of 3. Children would be quite frustrated if Lego did not put that chamfer the ends of the axles.

Very Nice work. I love the detail and the remake of the scenes from the best three movies of the series. This is a definite winner and would be a hoot to see the reaction of fans at a show like one of the local Comic-Cons.

I have a hard time believing that TLG has run out of ideas for Friends and needs to repeat already. I can live without another Vet Office as I was not very interested in the first one. I could use one more foal for my collection, but I have enough Friend's horses to make a slighlty different style of farm from most layouts. Baby Rabbits may be interesting to mix into my darker, spooky/horror layouts and I have enough trans-r...... you get the point. The hot air baloon would be nice as I have not seen this concept in any Lego theme that I can rememeber and this would be a nice twist for corner in one of the town layouts.

I want to thank everyone on this thread because I finally have some working concepts to improve the boiler on my 4-4-0 MOC. As the cars grew to be closer to 8 wide, I needed to increase the width of the 6 wide cab of the train which has left me with what now looks like a very tiny boiler. Looks like my show in a couple of weeks will be the dry run for the MOC and PhilCon will be the debut now that I want to make even more changes. On to Bricklink to get more parts! Do we ever get done improving our MOCs?

Wow! You caught the essence of the classic Jeep. Very nice build! And I love how you captured the rounded CJ5 shape of the area where the door cut-out meets the top of the tub. Excellent detail!

There were some really good sales at Amazon from April through July so I have a pretty nice stock of City, Caste, and Creator sets to build. I have been working through them slowly and eventually they will get built and then recycled into my parts. Currently, my latest MOCs have been taking the majority of my Lego time. My version of the "Ghost Train" is nearly copmplete for Philly BrickFest in 3 weeks and then I have the haunted station to build for PhilCon at the end of November. Looks like we will have a full "spooky" layout of MOCs for the convention.

As the former manager of a rigging company, that minifig illustrates my worst nightmare come to life.

Superb detail with the valves and the rails on the ends of the hopper. The curve on the ends has a nice look as well. Very Nice Build.

In my "unscientific" observations, Eneloop batteries provide as much power and have a pattern of battery drain that is very similar to that of the Li-Ion battery pack from Lego. With the way we run the batteries and with our use of very fast 20 minute chargers, we only see about 75% of the runtime that you would expect to see from the Lego Li-Ion battery pack which uses a slower charger (About 3-4 hours), but using a more conventional charger (or a more expensive Maha "fast" charger that would take 3-4 hours to charge 4 batteries) would yield run times more on the level of the Lego battery pack. When running multiple trains for a show, we have 4 Rapid Chargers and 6 sets of 6 AAA Eneloop batteries plus a dozen Energizer AAA backup plus 2 Lego Li-Ion packs. Yes, we do sacrifice about an hour of runtime from our Eneloop Batteries when we are at the shows, but we are able to keep a nice cache of battery packs charged all the time for a smaller investment than what it would cost to purchase the Lego battery pack. Where there is a big difference, the Lego battery pack weighs a fraction of the weight of the AAA battery packs loaded with the Eneloop batteries, but in our trains, the weight of the batteries are not as much of an issue as it may be in a remote controlled Technic Model. Even our hanging monorail runs fine with additional weight of the AAA batteries. My thought is the added weight helps keep some of the "wiggle" out of the piece which can cause it to hang up on the stations that is passes.

I like the design of the train car, but the thing that concerns me is the weight of the car if you plan to pull it around the track and the high center of gravity when you go around a turn. Keep the speed down and make sure you have plenty of torque in your engine and you should be just fine. I can't wait to see it in bricks.

I have two HE trains and I run two power functions train motors on lead engine and I am very care not to get the train too fast when going into the turns when the batteries are fully charged. I have run this train with a single power functions motor and it worked fine on a 10' x 8' layout, but on anything smaller than 5' in length you will want two motors for the train to run nicely. I have seen the train with 9V train motors with a power unit in the first and last engine and this works nicely and is much easier to control than the power functions train. Sadly, I do not have any 9V track so this is not an option for me.

Mixing Power Functions trains and tunnels is the scariest scenario that you can have with any layout at a Lego show. I watched my train speed up to "four clicks" in speed when I only clicked the remote three and then it entered a tunnel with a sharp turn and the edge of the layout at the the other end of the tunnel. It was only a row of brick built trees that were mowed down by the engine that slowed it enough to keep it train from having enough inertia to slide off the table and onto the floor. I am looking to use IR Transmitters, color sensors and a Mindstorm bricks connected to each other with Bluetooth to sense the position of the train on the layout and issue IR commands to the Power Functions receiver based on the position of the train. Maybe I will have something by next Spring with this solution, but that is how I am going to handle the quirks of PF with my sections of our layouts.

Those are sweet! I am trying to think on how I can incorporate that into my graveyard..... OK... Time to think about a normal layout or a moonbase version. Great Job!

Very nice MOC and what an impressive collection.

Very Nice Build!