Ralph_S

Thanks. I am glad you like it. It seemed like a fun way of doing something slightly different farm what I normally do. I do have a few others, but I don't build them very often. Cheers, Ralph

I'm still enjoying my time off work and decided to use some of it to crank out one more MOC. The use of Technic parts in this one is very limited, but its style is probably fits to Model Team.Various different types of motorcycles are used by Dutch Police including the Yamaha FJR 1300P, Honda ST1100P/ ST1300P and the BMW 1200P. The latter was the inspiration for my model. Building a motorcycle closely based on a real one was tricky on this scale and there are few details where I had to seriously compromise, but overall I like the look. As with many Dutch emergency vehicles, Police bikes have a pattern of stripes running along their sides. Replicating this pattern was hard enough on a VW Golf on this scale, but on the bike it was properly difficult. The construction of the model owes a great deal to motorbikes built for LEGOLand parks. The figure of the policeman is not an integral part of the design of the bike. Black would probably be a better colour for the saddle, but I made it dark (blueish) grey to distinguish it from the policeman's bottom! Cheers, Ralph

Those do look rather a bit too similar for it to be a coincidence....

It's nicer to ask why people make a certain choice than to jump to conclusions. I've used the same wheels for rear wheels on some of my trucks, not because I am not aware that they use double rear wheels in the real world, but for a range of other reasons. 1) A single wide tyre is narrower than two narrow (model team) tyres of the same diameter side-by side. This means more space in between to make the construction sturdy -on a 14 wide truck you have a space of 8 rather than 6 studs wide to work with. 2) I have the distinct impression that the wider tyres are softer and give more grip on a smooth surface than the model team tyres. 3) The rims for the narrower tyre are pretty rare in light bley. Most bricklink sellers sell them in twos or threes. 4) When seen from the side, the wider wheels look better and look more like double rear wheels than actual double rear wheels. 1) and 2) can be particularly important for trucks driven by power functions. When covered by a mudguard, you'd be hard-pressed to tell that it the single fat tyre isn't actually a double tyre. Lego have brought out some new narrow tyres with the same diameter as the model team tyres, but with a nicer rim. I'm hoping to be able to use more of those in the future, but for the time being they're rare. Light bley ones are only available in one set so far. Cheers, Ralph

Thanks. I only linked to it to illustrate that I like the idea. In many respects it's easier to build this sort of thing to a larger scale. Building a realistic representation of a real vehicle to minifig scale is difficult in general and I think Brickwild has done a nice job. Cheers, Ralph

I don't really have a city as such. It's more like part of one street. A competition involving building to the Cafe-corner standard is what got me back into building town, after a break of probably around 20 years. The result was 'A Taste of India', which you can see in the picture. I love the kind of detail I can put into buildings of that size, even if it does mean I can't build quite as many of them as I could if I'd leave out stairs and rear facades. The same goes for the cars. I can understand some of the nostalgia people feel for four-wides, but slightly larger cars and larger trucks offer more scope for detailing and look more realistic to me. New school all the way Cheers, Ralph

I'm not quite sure how this is a MOD rather than a MOC, because I can't think of any sets that look similar. Is it because the pickup truck is based on a set? I do have two recommendations that I think would improve the looks. Lego bright blue and medium blue are fairly close matches for the colours used by Penske and although you obviously can't make the lettering in bricks/plates, having some stripes along the side of the aft body would make it look more like the real thing. You could even put a white brick where the Penske lettering is on the real truck. I'd also suggest trying to make the front of the van narrower than the back and to have the rear wheels tucked under the body as on the real truck. It would make the model a lot more complicated, though. I built a combination like this on a larger scale many years ago, so I obviously like the idea and it's nice to see it done to minifig scale. I like the detailing and the trailer, in particular, is really well done Cheers, Ralph

It's the same from my side. We don't quite do the same things, but we're obviously both having fun and I always love to see your models (and to see them on TBB for instance) I'll admit that my presence on EB is a bit intermittent, but it's great to see you here too. Cheers, Ralph

Thank you. Studless is the norm for many builders, but as I've written before (both on EB and elsewehere) I'm a fan of both Model Team and the vehicles built for LEGOLand parks. They tend to have studs showing and it's never bothered me the slightest. I read on the Joh v/d Zand company website that they'd be taking this truck to various shows, so I am not at all surprised that you've seen it. I'm not sure whether I'll make it to any meeting, but it would be nice to display some trucks together (and to actually meet!). So do I. It's great to see that it too was front-paged here on EB. I think the closest to this we'll be seeing are the kind of trucks they bring out in the Creator series. set 6753 could be rebuilt into a decent tow truck. A friend of mine from Brickish has been trying to convince me to put it into LDRAW and make instructions, but I'm not quite sure I'm up for it. I've made instructions for two smaller models recently and while not as horrible as I expected, it was still a lot of work. Thank you. Cheers, Ralph

Welcome to eurobricks! I see you've already got a well-deserved 'MOC-expert' tag under your name. The truck is spectacular, as are all your models. About diffs: my power functions fire truck has one and it creates problems on uneven surfaces. If just one wheel looses traction it's had it; the truck is not going anywhere any more. A solution would be to have some sort of suspension that keeps both wheels on the axle firmly planted on the ground no matter what, but that raises a whole load of new problems. For my recovery truck I decided to leave the diff out. It seems to work fine. It corners at least as well as the fire engine does. Cheers, Ralph

Thank you. I haven't counted the parts, but I reckon it uses about 1500. It would be an expensive set! Thanks. As I've mentioned before, Technic isn't really my thing either. People do some really clever stuff with it, but certainly the studless stuff takes some getting used to. Power Functions motors do produce a lot of torque and making everything sufficiently strong took some effort, but the underpinnings of this truck are all fairly basic stuff that most experienced Technic builders could probably do better. Thank you. That's neat. I'm sure my slightly larger scale really helps with covering the Power Functions elements. It's also a matter of choosing the subject. Part of the reason why I've used Power Functions in a fire engine and in this truck, rather than in a tractor-trailer combo like your Scania, is because they have bodies with a decent-sized internal volume. That meant that in this case I didn't have to fit the battery box into the cab, but could fit it inside the aft body and I could fit both motors underneath the body. Cheers, Ralph

One of the things that may surprise people is that we didn't actually see each other's vehicles until Sunday. It was all done using pictures of the real truck. I enjoyed this project. I think it's really neat to see how recognisable the 8-wide is despite being so much smaller than my 14-wide model. Cheers, Ralph

Scale is always a bit of a contentious issue. For me, many years ago, whether or not the tyres I used on my ten-wide cars looked good was what defined the cars' width and therefore their scale. The widths of my other vehicles are derived from that. I am a bit surprised to find that according to your calculation, the tyres I used for this 1/22 truck are actually slightly on the large side! On my American trucks I always they looked a bit small. Oddly enough, trucks in the LEGOLand parks, scaled 1/20 (16-18 studs wide), tend to have considerably larger tyres. It's obviously a compromise. I know your Scania has all kinds of clever stuff hidden inside 12 studs, but I really struggled to fit everything I wanted into 14 studs. I have a suspicion that the scale used by doublebricks for their hard truck challenges isn't a complete coincidence. I know that one of the people who is involved in starting it (brickshelf user ZED) has been a bit of a fan of my trucks for a while. If true, it would be rather flattering, because they do great stuff. Cheers, Ralph

Thank you. I'm glad you like it. Thanks. There are several other people on eurobricks who have built Power Functions remote controlled vehicles with or without self-centring steering. It's certainly not my idea or particularly new. There are a few threads about it. These two, for instance: http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=39827 http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=36045 Opinions differ a bit on whether self-centring steering is preferable. In most alternative systems I've seen an M-motor and some gears (sometimes including a worm gear) are used to move the steering shaft. I've tried both. My older fire truck started with the alternative system. It was reasonably good in corners, but a bastard to drive in a straight line. I rebuilt it with a self-centring system and found that much nicer to drive. It was the obvious solution for this truck as well. There was a bit of discussion on flickr about whether it would work with a lot of weight on the front wheels. What made the steering complicated on this is that the middle axle also steers. Working out how to get that to work was one of the biggest challenges of this project. I'm very happy with your remark about the curves at the back of the cab. In pictures of Scanias I looked at when I started researching this project their shape stood out to me. The curvature is much more pronounced than on most other modern European trucks I looked at and I felt it was important to come up with a nice solution for them on my model. I'm really not much of a Technic builder myself, but this is the Technic, Mindstorms and Model Team sub-forum, with the inclusion of Model Team, this is probably the place for my truck. Even before the Model Team sets came out (way back in 1986), I liked adding some Technic elements to my own 'system' models in order to have some added functionality. Very nice to see it on the front-page. Thanks. I appreciate it. A quick question, but one with a long answer. Many years ago I started building regular cars at 10 studs wide, dictated by the size of the wheels I had at the time. In order to have trucks that were in proportion to those, they ended up 14 studs wide. Later, when I started thinking more about scale, I found that this corresponds quite well to 1/22 and I stuck to that ever since, even if it does mean that large parts of models may end up being an odd number of studs wide. I have noticed I am not alone in using this scale. Cheers, Ralph

Well, I start with one brick and then another and I keep doing that until it's finished. I'm not sure monkeys can do it, but we're all just big apes anyway... Thank you. I bought a book on recovery trucks sometime last year and it had several pages of trucks used by this company and they all look great. Their colour scheme is both distinctive and attractive. I've had a Dutch theme going on with some of my MOCs lately, so this fit into that nicely. Thank you. The company uses MANs, Volvos, DAFs and Scania's. Of those the Scania was probably the most difficult one to model, but that made it all the more interesting. I owe some credit to Lasse Deleuran and kamilm for some of the ideas I've used on my Scania cab. Thank you. I am glad to know those instructions are appreciated. It actually enjoyed making the instructions, but it doesn't come close to building with real parts. Thanks. I've fixed that. By default non-flickr users can't see the larger images. Clicking the images here ought to take you to flickr. If you then click the 'all sizes' link above the picture, you should be able to see the larger ones. Cheers, Ralph

I have never gone and bought a mega bloks set, but several years ago they did release what I thought was a really nice set: a fire engine based on those used by the New York Fire Department. It obviously has a lot of parts for which there are no LEGO equivalents and, as an AFOL I'd rather build my own design than something from somebody else's instructions, but it certainly was an inspiration for building my own. Their M1 Abrams set wasn't all that horrible either, but I still much prefer my own. Cheers, Ralph

Having started a new job two months ago I currently live far away from my LEGO (in temporary accommodation). I've been feeding my LEGO-habit by dabbling with ML-CAD. However, compared to building with actual LEGO is like comparing non-alcoholic beer with the real stuff. Two months without building something. Agony! Fortunately I've got two weeks of vacation time and I've used the first of those for some frantic LEGO-building. I chose to build something I've been thinking about for a while now. After building my Power Functions fire engine and Neo-classic space LURCH I felt it was time for a bit more Power Functions goodness, this time with a Scania truck wrapped around it It is a Scania R500 (built in Sweden) operated by the company Johan van der Zand (aka. Joh v/d Zand) based in The Netherlands. The company recovers stranded vehicles all over Europe and far into the former Soviet Union. The drive and the steering are remote-controlled. Raising the arm, unfortunately, is done manually (by turning a little wheel built into the side of the truck). I couldn't find the space to include one more IR receiver and a third motor. I've used a hockey spring for the self-centring steering and it works like a charm, as you can see in my short video of it in action. Cheers, Ralph

No problem. Thanks for the comments. It would seem that military stuff simply isn't particularly popular on eurobricks. Cheers, Ralph

I haven't been particularly active on Eurobricks in the last two months. I started a new job and have been very busy. However, I have bene doing a few LEGO-related things. Some of you may remember that I have been working on a series of aircraft models for USS Intrepid, an aircraft carrier that is being built by Ed Diment (Lego Monster). I've posted most of them here. F6F Hellcat TBF Avenger F4U Corsair SB2C Helldiver The intention is to build several copies of each of them. Ed has already built 5 more Avengers based on my prototype. The aircraft that we want to have the largest numbers of are the last two, the Corsair and the Helldiver. Because of that I decided to make instructions for those (using MLcar/ LDraw and LPub). Since it seems a shame to keep them to ourselves, I've decided to share them with the on-line LEGO-building community, free for downloading. Here is a sample image: The Corsair has 516 parts and the instructions have 27 pages. You can download them in .pdf format by clicking the image below: The Helldiver has 703 parts and the instructions have 44 pages. You can download them by clicking the following image. These are not simple models and they require fairly large numbers of parts that aren't readily available in large numbers, but perhaps some of you may be able to build them or, at least, enjoy looking at how I build this sort of thing. Cheers, Ralph

Very nice helicopter of an unusual design. I like the coaxial rotors and the landing gear in particular. Congratulations on winning the competition. Cheers, Ralph

You can't expect to just show up on the day with a lorry full of stuff, as there obviously needs to be some space allocated and the organisers would also like to have a degree of control over who is bringing what. You can register separately on the official site that Dr S. provided the link to. I don't know whether your membership application has already been processed, so you might want to wait a few days. If it doesn't work, I'd suggest contacting the organisers through the contact form on the site. I look forward to seeing you there. Cheers, Ralph

Yes. You have to a member of Brickish. I've displayed models at the show several years in a row and even though I don't live in the UK any more I will be there this year as well. I've already booked a few days off work for it and booked a hotel and flights. Cheers, Ralph

You've been building a lot of cars and vans etc in the last few weeks. Perhaps a picture of the whole lot together might be a nice idea. Many of them are quite nice when seen on their own, but I cannot help but feel that they're not always as nicely proportioned as they could be. Your Holden doesn't seem to be all that much lower than the SUV, for instance, or the TV van you posted a while ago. Almost all of the cars have the same size wheels, including the much wider bus. One thing I also don't really like is how short the wheelbase is compared to the length of the cars. It's mostly visible on the Holden. I realise that this is because you've used 45 degree inverted slopes to fill the gaps around the mudguards, but it looks odd and I'm sure there are alternatives that look nicer. I like these vehicles, but I think they could be a better if you'd put a bit more thought into the proportions and their respective sizes. I wrote a post about building minifig vehicles a few months ago that might be of use to you. Cheers, Ralph

I remember seeing some of your older military vehicles. This one looks a lot more coherent and well thought out. It's got a chunky look to it that is well suited for a military truck. Cheers, Ralph

Nice work. V2 looks a lot nicer than v1 and that already wasn't bad Cheers, Ralph