legoman666

wut

I thought this would be obvious. Just hooking up an unmetered power source to any battery type is a terrible idea. That's why you need a charger to manage the charge current.

Why can't your batteries be used while charging? The current flowing in to and the current flowing out of them would cancel (to varying degrees). Put a couple diodes in there to keep polarity correct, and you'll have no problems. For example, you'd have 300mA from the batteries feeding the motors, and (for example) 500mA charging the batteries at the same time. The net effect on the batteries would be a 200mA charging current. If you stopped the train, the 300mA drain on the batteries would stop and the net charge being applied would be 500mA. My main loco picks up 24V from the rails, passes it through a bridge rectifier, and feeds a DC-DC converter that chops it down to 10V for a PF IR Receiver. Additionally, there is a 7.2V battery pack (6 NIMH rechargeables) protected by a diode that also feed the same DC-DC converter when the train is on plastic rails. If I had a DC powered battery charger, I could use the track voltage to top up the batteries when the train was powered rails (alas, I do not).

I'm what most of you would consider a casual Lego investor mixed with a hobbyist. If I see sets on clearance at retail stores or online, I buy as many as I can. About 80% of the time, I open these sets, put the minifigs together to sell on eBay, and keep the pieces for my MOCs. I sell the figs at the current going rate. Sometimes I end up making money over what I paid for the set. Sometimes I break even. Sometimes I lose money. Regardless of the outcome, it doesn't matter to me because I end up with a bunch of brick that I either paid very little for, paid nothing for, or got paid for. Win-win-win. Plus, if someone on eBay can buy my minifig for $5 rather than the whole set for $40, I'm sure he's happy too. I also apply the same method to buying large lots from eBay and Craigslist. For example, a woman sold me 1 Fire Brigade, 1 Green Grocer, 1 Cafe Corner, 1 Town Hall , 2 Pet Shops, 1 Market Street, 1 Palace Cinema and 2 Grand Emporiums and about 50-100 other less valuable sets.... all for $700 USD. It took 2 trips to get it all home. I sold $700 of the less valuable sets on eBay to cover my purchase price and now I own every single modular released and it didn't cost me a dime. On the other hand, occasionally, I will buy multiples of a set for the explicit purpose of reselling later. You all would call this investing. Typically I do this when sets are nearing their EOL, like the most recent Harry Potter sets did ~1 year ago. I just sold them recently to help pay for the down payment on a house. I made between 50% to 300% profit on all of them and I only held on to them for 1-2 years. The thing that blew my mind is when I sold every piece unique to the Grand Carousel for $425. That included the 48x48 green baseplate, the cloth sails, the sound brick (valued at $100! WTF!) and all of the pieces with stickers. It was less than 100 pieces. I was absolutely blown away that someone paid that much for the lot. Anyway, if people didn't pay for these things, the sellers wouldn't be here trying to make a buck. They are fulfilling a market niche, if Lego gave a shit, they'd re-release old sets occasionally. Clearly they do not, seeing as how there have been .... 10? http://lego.wikia.com/wiki/Legends sets that saw an identical re-release years after their original. As for the limited run sets I've seen people complaining about in this thread, a la 41999, the Mars Rover and such, if Lego cared, they would have released more after the initial run sold out, like they did for Minecraft.

They mentioned it as one of the stretch goals on their kickstarter.

The video is marked as private.

Agreed, it would be nice to have the radius embossed on the bottom. I suppose I could always write on it with a sharpie....

Awesome. Any plans for adding driving rods?

I've got 4 L's in one of my loco's and it doesn't slow down at all in turns either, love em. Your build looks great, would love to see a video.

I bumped my pledge to the $360 level. I had checked with 14 hours to go and the campaign was $10k short. Only 2 hours later, the campaign was $1k over! Awesome, can't wait to get my track.

Gentlemen, you've given me some good ideas. I'll see what I can cook up.

Thanks! To be honest, the running board never occurred to me :P I might be able to get something 1 stud wide on there but I think it'd look too wide. And making it 1/2 stud wide would be difficult or impossible. The thing I couldn't figure out how to do like the photo was the shield thingie on the leading side of the tender. Thin, rounded objects are not the easiest to do with Lego... But then, I really only used that photo to get the proportions correct. I did take several liberties by the end, most notably being the shield on the tender and the bits that stick up from the boiler. Also, no valve gear :(

Honestly the only reason they're gray instead of black is because I didn't have the exact pieces I needed in black and I didn't feel like making a BL order just for a few Technic pieces. As for the height of the pistons, unfortunately the front set of 4 wheels need it for clearance. I'll take another photo to show exactly.

Thanks guys! A short video. Sorry for the blurriness, new camera. No idea what I'm doing :)

Hi folks, my latest creation. Complete with steam rods from Zephyr and wheels from Big Ben's Bricks. My inspiration. I took a few liberties but I tried to keep the proportions correct. I even printed out a copy and made a scale. The tender contains 2 PF train motors, a AAA battery pack and the IR receiver. Plenty of power, but the locomotive will derail in turns if it gets going too fast. I painted the rims. I might make a few changes, but nothing major. It already ran for a weekend at the Kentucky Brick Expo. Ran very well except that I had to add some weight to the front set of 4 wheels. There's $2.00 in change taped to it to make it less bouncy :)

I think my lug is going to put down for about $650.

Can you post a longer video? :) I'd love to see it run around for a couple minutes.

Spectacular. How does it handle on bumps in the track?

I honestly think he set the bar too high by trying to offer so many sizes, colors and options. Just offer 1 or 2 radii and maybe 9v straights. Everything else is superfluous. Throw the 9v straights on ebay and he could sell 200-500/week at $4 each.

I backed for as much as I could afford :)

http://youtu.be/U5CiqUofdik Latest modification allows it to run on powered track and unpowered track seamlessly. The reason it's slipping is because I killed one of the motors in it so one of the bogies is unpowered. Schottky diodes prevents the track voltage from cooking the batteries and a bridge rectifier prevents reverse polarity from cooking my electronics and the batteries from back feeding to the track. Dc-Dc converter keeps a constant 10V to the IR receiver regardless of power source. Going to add a fan next, it gets warm in there! Technically, the two wheel sets can be on 2 sections of track that are opposite voltages and it should function as normal, although I'm not sure why it would ever happen...

http://i.imgur.com/BeLfGwQ.jpg 7w windshield on my loco. Might be adaptable to your purposes. It's not curved though...

DC wall supplies will work fine in lieu of the AC adapters because rectified DC is just... DC. I had a lot of problems testing my latest loco with 4 motors. I had 3 of the 9v regulators hooked up in parallel and it still wasn't enough. They really are just too weak. I had to switch to a 12v rail off of a PC power supply to get the current I needed.

Fantastic detail work. It takes me forever to get the details right on a 7w model, can't imagine the time spent perfecting that beauty!

I lied. Its in Burlington :) OKILUG presents: Kentucky Brick Expo! http://okilug.com/?page_id=89 Come see us at the Boone County Fair Grounds (5819 Idlewild Rd, Burlington, Boone, Kentucky 41005) this weekend. Weather should be glorious if the forecast is to be believed. Admission is $7 for adults, $4 for kids, and free for infants. There will be vendors, contests, scavenger hunts and goodie bags. I built most of the trains, so you should pay special attention to them ;)