Mithrandir

I have always been a huge fan of the old technic sets; nostalgia from when I was a kid. So when I got back into Lego last year (in May), I thought I might delve into technic again, just to see how things have changed. My first set was 8419, the Technic Excavator. Building it was ... interesting. I couldn't really tell what the hell I was building until I was nearly done with it, and all of the new pieces really confused the heck out of me. But when I finished it, I had a serious "whoa that's neat" effect going on, and I was happy. It took me a while to figure out how the hell they got the excavator arm to work like that. So, Okay, that was cool. Let's get some more. I got the Technic Aircraft (8434), which was kind of blah. Again, all the new pieces confused me and it didn't really feel like Lego. I was bored though, so I kept buying sets, and I'll tell you what... the studless technic grew on me. In fact, I think I prefer the studless lego over the studded now, but... I'm finding out that things work best when you combine the two. The best example of this is set 8421 (Mobile Crane). They use mostly studless, adding a bunch of studded pieces where needed, and the result is truly amazing. I can safely say that this is single handedly the best technic set I have ever built; they just pack so much functionality into it, it's amazing. It's not without it's problems, of course, but it's still great. The main problem with the set is the crane lowering mechanism; the boom crashes down because the air leaves the pneumatic cylinders too fast. I still haven't figured out a graceful way to fix this though; the only way I can think of is to put a pin-hole in a closed pneumatic loop on the output valve (small piece of hose, T-piece, small loop connecting the other two ends of the T), and I don't want to have to resort to that kind of a "hack" to get it to work. Plus I initially thought using the RC motor was a little weird, seeing as how its speed is so damned high, but it worked well in the end; just have to gear it down a lot. But the 6-wheel steering, 6-cylinder engine, the outriggers, boom extender (with clutch!!), and pneumatics make it really packed full of functioning. Over the past month I've been playing around with building small modular "function blocks". For example, one I made was a 4-pump pneumatic auto-pump connected to a motor. For my first design, I tried all studded, since I think the RC motor is too fast and I wanted to use either the Old 9V or the Clear 9V motors, which are studded. This looked ugly and was pretty clunky; it's very difficult to get gearing right when dealing with the odd heights of the studded bricks. My second design was all studless... which was slightly less ugly, but not as stable. The problem with this design was that I was trying to shoehorn a studded motor into a studless design, and I needed to use a lot of small half-beams to adopt it into the form factor. This is because studded beams are even-lengths, and studless beams are odd-lengths. Finally, yesterday I bit the bullet, and completely redesigned it. I decided to make the pumping mechanism and the gear train all studless, but use studded beams to secure the motor. While I was at it, I managed to shave 4 13x beams off of each side by using the newer bevel gears (which tend to fit into designs better, because their gear teeth don't stick out beyond stud boundaries), so the new design is smaller. Of course, one tradeoff I made when switching to the newer gears is that I used a 12t->36t gear down, rather than the 24t->24t even gear I had on the old design, so the newer design is 3x slower... but I switched out the grey motor with the clear motor (which is 1.5x faster than the grey one), so my new design pumps at half the speed of the old one, but has far more torque and doesn't stall when the air pressure gets high. I also designed several screw-gear controlled pneumatic switches (for fine-control of how much air is allowed through a valve; I was hoping to use this as a solution to the 8421 boom crashing problem *sweet* ). After three huge and clumsy designs, I found out that when I mixed studded and studless beams, it worked out pretty well, and my final design is 8 studs shorter and 4 studs narrower than the other solutions. I guess the moral of the story is that both studded and studless beams are very useful, and judging from 8421, I think Lego has realised that as well.

Personally I don't get all this hate about the new gray ("bley"? What the heck does that even mean anyways, blah-grey?). It's just a different color, and the Lego company is NOT going back to the old gray no matter what, so you're either going to have to go on and megablocks about it for the rest of your life, or realise that it's beyond your control and embrace the new gray.

Heck Yes! I just got back into lego this year, and I've voraciously tried to grab every technic set that I can find, but I'm finding that once I hit the 2003 sets (going backwards), they started ... well... sucking, except for the occasional gem which is nearly impossible to find (4x4, Williams racer, super street sensation). Throwbots? Slizers? Roboriders? Speed Slammers? ugh...

I dunno, they seemed pretty reasonable to me. 8281 - $10/121p = 8.26 cents per piece 8282 - $20/200p = 10 cents per piece 8283 - $30/322p = 9.31 cents per piece Considering that 8282 came with chainlinks, I found that to be worth the higher price :)

For some odd reason, my local TRU had 8281 abd 8282 back in December; I scarfed up one of each and they've since disappeared (I guess the official release date is March?). Anyway, they're both very cool. The tractor features a moving rear seed spreader, which is linked to the wheels. I wish to god more sets came in green. I had fun and built a duplicate of this in Blue too :) The quad features chain links, a single piston engine, and rear suspension. I wish I could get my hands on 8283 though. *sigh*

This sounds absolutely amazing. I imagine it will be something like the Skyline set (5526), and that's really cool. I'd like to see more technic cars that are more functional than the current line of Ferrari cars. The F1 (8386) and Enzo (8653) are just okay; I would have been far more impressed with them if they were like the Williams F1 (8451) and the Super Street Sensation (8448). Also, I'm getting a little sick of red cars... it would be awesome if we could have a slick navy blue sports car for once. The Nitro Menace was a step in the right direction, but again, it didn't have as much technical elements as I would have liked (CV joints, a transmission, suspension, etc). It looks like the new designer set (4896 Roaring Roadsters) is going to be absolutely wonderful, so looking good! Definitely yes! Airplanes rock. I've had my eyes on the Wright Flyer for a while now and the only thing that's holding me back from it is that many people say it's kind of flimsy. A DC-7 or 747 would definitely be cool. While you're at it, how about making a new technic airplane with more features than the last one? :) I bought a K'Nex rollercoaster recently and thought to myself "Now why the heck doesn't Lego have anything like this?". It was great and you should think about it. As far as an Oil Rig, I think that would make an excellent technic set.

I am disappointed. Very. I guess we can look forward to 20 more different X-Wings/TIE Fighters/A-Wings/ISD's/etc over the next few years. Whoop-de-doo. And of course, because they're doing StarWars, they can't do any REAL space sets. I was SOOO looking forward to new original space sets in 2007. *sigh*

Okay. I recently got back into Lego (about a year ago), and since then, I've gotten my hands on almost every technic set I can find (as well as various other SW, Alpha Team, Viking and Designer sets), so I now have a nice inventory of 22,654 parts. I've gotten bored of my sets, taken them apart, rebuilt them as alternates, took those apart, and organized most of the tiny pieces into neat little containers. Now I want to build my own neat stuff. For my very first idea, I want to rebuild the Nitro Menace; which is a really cool looking car; but I want to add an engine, linked steering wheel, and a rear differential. Furthermore, even though the lime is cool... I want to make it blue, because I love blue sports cars. So, I start digging into my gigantic box of technic beams (I haven't sorted them yet), digging out all of the blue beams I can find. During my search, I find one rare gem... This one right here. That is the PERFECT color for a sports car. I figured... well there's one navy blue beam, there's got to be more, right? So I race to the internet, frantic to find sets with navy blue beams... and I find that most of the beams I need aren't made in the navy blue color. Well crap. Okay, so I got carried away; maybe I can make one in the standard blue, right? Not a chance. Did you know that they don't even make 'Technic Angle Connector #4' in blue? You can't find them anywhere. Same goes with the flexible axles and panel fairings. Ok, you can find blue panel fairings... but only from the Williams F1 racer. I'm not spending $350 on that set just for panel fairings!! Gyah!! So I have over 22,000 lego pieces, but every time I want to build something, I run into a snag. Oh, I don't have any technic driving clutches. Or I don't have the right kind of wheel (because, you know almost every technic set has a different wheel on it!!! They need to stop going crazy with the wheels!!). Or I have the right pieces, but the wrong color. And so on. Really, I can build anything in red or yellow. But any other color... well... out of luck there. It's even worse if you're looking for green! I would personally love it if Lego would release this and this in multiple colors. Say, White, Black, Yellow, Red, Blue, Green, Navy, Grey, and Dk Grey. Hell, maybe even orange. *sigh*, one can only dream, right?

The F1 racers have to be red as TLC's licence is with Ferrari If the were a different coulor this might be seen as favouring another F1 team Argh, I figured as much. I'm just frustrated that I got back into lego after the Williams F1 racer was discontinued. It looks far cooler than the Ferarri F1's.

Roughly; I usually rounded down to the lowest $5. The site lists some existing sets at these prices: Mini-tractor - $10 Quad Bike - $20 Motor Bike - $55 Dump Truck - $25 So they're roughly the same after conversion. http://www.legomarkabolt.hu/adat/etc/kaffe...p?group=technic

From a hungarian site, it looks like the prices on the new sets will be... 8283 (red shoveller thing) - $30 8284 (Big Tractor) - $75 8285 (Tow Truck) - $140 8287 (Technic Motor) - $35 8288 (Crane) - $90 8674 (1:8 F1) - $175 (jaw dropping) Yikes! Time to start saving moneys :)

brickshelf seems to be down:( BUT!!! OMG. Look closely!!! It looks like this comes with a technic driving ring clutch!!! WOOHOO!!! ok, brickshelf back up. Question: Why did they make another red F1 racer? It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. I already bought the 1:10 one; wouldn't it make more sense to make one in a different color? I'm disappointed. Plus that tractor does seem fugly to me. Lime green... yuck. Around here all the tractors are John Deere Green (like dark forest green) or Blue. In fact the color on the Mini-tractor is almost perfect, and I rebuilt it using extra blue parts too, so I've got two mini-tractors :)