zephyr1934

The valve gear bars are now listed in my store. See my earlier post for my thoughts on working with the bars. The rods are fairly strong, but I suspect they are not as strong as technic elements. I do not know the breaking point. As far as I know none of the rods have failed (aside from an incident with a bubble mailer and the postal service, but now I ship in boxes).

Big box retail in the US is big enough that they can demand lower wholesale prices, exclusives, first shot at new sets, etc..

You are quite welcome. You've made great use of the rods, that locomotive is just slick. Is the black technic beam on the eccentric prototypical or will that be replaced with a gray one? After seeing the center of the rods colored in on your locomotive and Duq's, I am definitely going to have to start doing that on some of my locomotives, it adds so much (first I need to finish the new locomotive I'm working on though).

I believe lego rolls out themes in different countries at different times, so Europe gets some sets before the US and vice versa (might be slanted in favor of the US though due to the walmart effect). Presumably they do this to pace production to meet global demand.

You are most welcome and thank you for the kind words. The rods look great on your Mallet.

Nope, it is indeed a cable car (though it might be viewed as a subset of streetcars). For a quick history see here. They pre-date electric streetcars by a few decades. First came horse drawn omnibuses, then came horse cars, then came cable cars, then came electric trollies. The cars are unpowered and grip a cable that runs in a slot under the street. You can imagine how much of a pain it is to keep all of that mechanics working. Cable cars survived for a few decades in some cities after electric trollies became dominant because of their ability to climb hills, and only remain in San Francisco today. While it might look hokey and touristy, I highly recommend riding them if you are ever in San Francisco (though go in the evening to avoid the 1 hr wait in line during the day), Powell-Hyde is the best of the lines. As another bit of useless trivia, the Washington DC streetcar system used a similar slot in the street only they put the "overhead power line" under the pavement.

GMLTC is still displaying the bipolar at their shows, so you might want to try contacting them.

Great work.

I finally had time to finish updating v3 using the 2mm bars. This unit will ultimately evolve into a PF locomotive and I was contemplating powering the rear axle. I came up with a working solution, but I decided that I would be able to get more power by putting the motor in the tender. (click on the image to see the individual frames and a short movie showing v3 being pushed by a PF tender once the folder is moderated) When using the lego wheels and the eccentric on a blind driver, the 3x3 half beams cut down to 2x2 appear to be the superior solution- you can use a 3 long axle and it winds up being pretty thin. If you put the eccentric on a flanged driver, you would not even have to cut the half beams down. Another advantage of using a 3 long axle is the fact that they are common in gray. So what do I think? I think they are great, but I would not recommend attempting full valve gear on your first steam MOC. Getting the valve gear to work right definitely takes a bit of trial and error, but once you have them working they are pretty slick. As I said before, they are best viewed at slower speeds, so PF is probably a better propulsion if you want to show off the full glory of the valve gear. Of course you do not have to build the full valve gear, just the eccentric to rocker bar captures most of the motion and eliminates the tricky termination at the cylinder. I like the light appearance of the 2mm bars but I think the 3mm bars are easier too work with. You have the cuff to protect pin heads from hitting the rods behind them. You can also flip the 3mm bars over so that you have a full 3mm thickness on the pin, again handy in preventing unintended conflicts with the rods behind (6mm will fit on the side of one pin- it will be a little snug but the pin can still rotate). I just got a fab in with A LOT of valve gear bars, some out to 8 long. These bars are certainly strong enough to be valve gear, but if you put a heavy load on them, they will bend (the 3mm thick are stronger than the 2mm thick). I plan to list the valve gear bars within the week (I'll post again when they are up). In other news, I also got my second fab of black. Oh those holes are killing me. The gray fabs fine, but in black the same holes tend to come up too small. I spent way too much time drilling the holes out. So for the time being, I probably will not offer black rods.

You could build a second tender that is powered. Or perhaps simply build a power unit that runs right behind the tender, disguised as a boxcar or baggage car. Even better, make the shell of the powered car easily removable so that you can then put it behind a locomotive of a different era with one quick swap. Oh, and here's more info on the prototype.

Yeah, you don't want to do that, as soon as you do, the whole neighborhood starts going to !@#$% (grin). BTW, it's a very nice signal box.

Well, the hard part is that you'll probably have about a 3 stud gap in the skirting next to an added Jacob's Bogie between two HE's. Probably not too hard to fill, but you'll need a few orange tiles (hopefully Lego thought to toss those in extra with the set).

Muchas gracias, and will do with "MOC" in the future. The index is a very handy tool for pulling MOCs from the past.

We live in a strange world. Nudge nudge

If I can fly an XL motor under the radar, imagine what I could do with fishing line (grin). In all seriousness though, it did take a bit of fine tuning to get it working right. As I said earlier, I'm hoping the servo motor will make it a lot simpler. Oh, you are too kind, and yes, the XL motor does look like a detergent bottle cap, doesn't it (heh heh). As for the uncoupler- I don't have any good shots of the back of the tender and she is on display for another month where I can't get to it. So imagine you were looking straight down on the tender. I have a pull-string on the coupler (or the magnet on the modern buffers). When the string is loose, the coupler can pivot freely left or right as the train goes around curves. When I pull the string perpendicular to the tracks, it will pull the magnet all the way to one side, breaking the coupling with the car behind. If the string was not mounted on the truck I'd probably pull the tender off the tracks before breaking the coupling. Instead, the string has a few mounting points on the truck and I pull it through these. I just have to make sure the string still pulls the magnet perpendicular to the tracks.

Welcome aboard tra8cer. See my related comments here, to summarize, I'd suggest joining GFLUG to test the waters and perhaps find a few like-minded folks there that might live closer to you. Even if you only participate in one show a year and are active on the discussion board you'll get a good idea of what is involved. There are also some great folks in GFLUG.

Thanks Legoroni, eurotrash, and Daedalus304 for the kind words. I believe the positioning of the XL motor is what caused the problems with the bevel gears (I think I was off by half a plate). Not a problem when pulling small loads, but with 20+ cars it could be fatal. Hopefully my redesigned drivetrain solved the problem, but I'll update this thread as I see how well it performs. Meanwhile, if you haven't done so, definitely check out one of the videos of the engine uncoupling. The quickest movie is here, but more can be found here. Hey, LEGO Guy Bri, you slipped in while I was responding to the earlier posts. Likewise, thank you for the kind words. In the top picture of my first post you can see the fishing line on the left side of the rear tender truck. That is tied around the near edge of the magnet holder. The fishing line goes in between the two wheels and up the hole in the center of the bogie plate. Inside the tender is a spool driven by a PF M motor. Driven one way, the fishing line has enough slack that the coupler can swing freely, driven the other way, it pulls the line taught and snaps the coupler to the side. There is a little delay as the fishing line initially stretches for a fraction of a second, e.g., as in the detail video. If the train is heavy occasionally I will have to back the locomotive up to give enough slack for the coupler to break the magnets. To maximize power I did not build in a clutch. So the motor stalls whenever you uncouple or release. As long as I quickly hit the stop button on the remote it hasn't been a problem for me. Once or twice at a noisy display I did not hear that the M motor did not stop, it remained stalled and inadvertently wasted a lot of the battery power. I contemplated using an indicator light, but I couldn't come up with a version I like. Perhaps the new Servo motor will eliminate the need to be vigilant on the controls.

That is a fantastic build with lots of great detail. She looks great in the curves too.

Indexed by Moderator (full gallery) This post is about my little 0-6-0 USRA switcher that I debuted at Brickworld 2010, but have not had time to write about until now (and really didn't get many good photographs of either). More on the prototype can be found here. My locomotive is actually part of a larger system, so let me start with the back story of the system. For Brickworld 2009 I built up an automated switchyard controlled completely by two RCX's using a pair of 9V locomotives, remote controlled switches, a trackside decoupler, and a few isolated blocks. The four car train would come in to the yard, the sensor would position it to uncouple the caboose, then the train would pull forward and a shunter would push the caboose back on the main line. The train would back up, drop a car, the shunter pushes it to one siding, then repeat for the next car and a different siding, and so forth until the train has completely swapped two cars. The full circuit is split over two videos, part a and part b. These videos are the best overview of the components. Here's an overview shot of the layout (without the motion of the videos it is unremarkable) and a detail shot while I was fine tuning the RCX program. While it was great fun to work out all of the quirks, a viewer had to stand there and watch it for five minutes to appreciate the nuances and from an operating standpoint... well, with an automated system all the fun work has already been done. So for Brickworld 2010, I wanted to retain the remote control, but drop the automation. I kept the switch design functionally unchanged, updated a great modular 9V modular switching block to PF 2004 original by Philippe "Frogleap" Label My 2010 PF update I had originally intended to build my SP Pacific powered through the drivers, but I got side tracked with the insane power that a pair of XL motors could deliver through the tender trucks. So to experiment with a driver powered locomotive, I built up this 0-6-0 based on the USRA standard design that was used by many railroads in the US. Several folks watching the switcher working have asked me where I hid the motor, but it should be painfully evident in the above shot. I borrowed details from my earlier locomotives, like the vent doors on the cab roof. And I also borrowed great ideas from others, like the cab windows from Garret and I improved upon one of his cylinder designs. I also liked my use of the old technic connectors for the side rods (something I have since replaced with custom rods, but that's another story, grin) and my pilot design (see the photo at the top of this post). The real magic is in the tender. Exploiting the fact that I had a second channel on the tender-mounted IR receiver, I used it to control a PF M motor at the back of the tender. While there had been a few earlier locomotives with an on-board uncoupler, e.g., this one, none of them seemed to retain the full freedom of a normal coupler and bogie truck. Ultimately I found my solution with the 12v uncoupling track (7862). The 12v couplers had a pin that hung down and would allow an uncoupling track to split the magnets. I wanted to do similar, but pull the magnet from onboard the train. I quickly discovered that this goal is far from trivial on a bogie that also has to rotate around curves when it is not uncoupling. You also need a lot of force to overcome the bond of the magnets. Ultimately my design snaked a fishing line tied to the coupler, to a toggle point on the side of the truck, then up through the hole in the bogie plate and to a spool driven by the M motor, all without modifying any of the parts. Here to, pictures cannot do it justice and I was having too much fun when playing with it at shows to shoot movies, which is part of the reason why it has taken me so long to post about it. I shot a couple of movies a few months back, right before I rebuilt the locomotive to address an operational problem with the XL motor (discussed below) and added the custom drive rods. The quickest movie is here, but more can be found here. So here's the problem with an onboard uncoupler- you can pick up as many cars as you want, but all you can do is drop the entire string of cars. You cannot actually switch things around like this. You also need the ability to drop some cars while keeping some coupled to the locomotive. To this end, I rebuilt the trackside uncoupler to be capable of working between buffers. This shot shows the uncoupler along with two switches The white 1x1 rounds should be between the rails to show the "cut line" (which is not the case in the shot) and indicate that this unit has the white control switch. In the top right of this photo you can see the unit as installed. That's the complete system. It worked well at Brickworld 2010, and then I came up with an ambitious yard for the World's Greatest Hobby show in 2011. The trouble was, I now could assemble a cut of 20+ boxcars. Pulling them through the curves, however, proved to be too much for my poor little bevel gears off of the XL motor. So as noted above, I have redesigned the powertrain and have hopefully solved the problem. I am hoping to build up the yard again at another show some time soon and take her for a spin (I'm packing spare gears from now on). The kids love to work the switches while I drive the locomotive ("red away... white towards you," locomotive moves, "white away," etc.). (full gallery)

At the moment, no, I don't think I could fab clear parts. But you might be able to cut the prisms out of Plexiglas or similar stock. Or you could cut up some of the fiber optic cables from ExoForce I would love it if Lego made red/green LEDs for signals (though 3mm LEDs do fit well in the small radar dishes)

Hey Brickster, did this topic generate posts on new topics on its own when it was pinned, or did most new topics come by way of you moving things in? If it did generate activity on its own, perhaps pinning it again but not policing the other topics could be a way to go (if someone wants to post to this general thread they can, and if they want to start their own, they can).

Brilliant solution! With a little tweaking and a few panels, one could probably turn this into a 4 wide vertical solution for hood diesels too.

I would strongly suggest joining an existing club (perhaps at a bit of a drive) and see how they set up shows, etc.. Then once you have a feel for it, decide whether you want to take the lead on forming a club closer to home. If you do decide to, you can either slowly or rapidly build up the infrastructure you'd need to do a decent display (tables, road plates, ballasted track, detailing, a trailer, etc.) while still in your original club. I've been told that the seed idea for my club, COLTC, was formed this way and our members have since spun off two other groups in Ohio (proximity proximity proximity, both of these groups are about two hours drive from central Ohio, in opposite directions). It looks like there are at least two active clubs that are in or near your state: HARDLUG and WamaLTC. Heck, you might even find a few folks from your area in one of these groups and that could be your nucleating point.

There are a surprising large number of x-10-x locomotives out there. I would assume most use two pairs of flanged and three pairs of blind drivers. I've seen a few GG1's and other electrics that wind up having four independent sets of wheels under one body. Shuppiluliumas has some crazy large engines, including a 4-12-2 and a 2-10-10-2 My #1 rule for building a steam engine is to get the mechanicals worked out first. So actually physically build up the wheels, cylinders, and any connection points. Test, revise, and repeat as many times as necessary until you get it working satisfactorily. It is a lot easier to redesign when you only have the wheels built up. At this stage you are concerned with clearance and strength, so if you wind up using parts of the wrong color or that have a few extra studs in spots that don't matter, that is not a problem.

Oh that is a great part. Pins and axles require tolerances beyond what I can reliably fabricate at the moment. However, as long as you do not need a tight fit (e.g., because it is held on with a bushing), I might be able to come up with a loose fitting axle hole that would stay aligned with the axle. I might even be able to incorporate the bushing into the design. So what are you thinking, a pin hole and an axle hole? Is the "counterweight" appearance important or just the holes? I think that part has a half stud spacing, I might need to go a little larger to make it around a bushing, what sort of constraints would you have on the hole spacing?