Heppeng

You could try using a Relco electronic track cleaner - needs a 16V AC supply to work.

Black. And sometimes very, very, dark grey...

A simple 'yes I have been taken in by these phoney perpetual motion machines ' would have sufficed...

One of the issues with Milton Keynes is that not only are there lots of roundabouts, many are joined by short sections of high speed limit (70mph) road. When you have done your fifth stop from 70mph in four minutes your brakes are starting to get a bit warm! Of course I could drive more slowly and brake earlier, but the roundabouts are delaying me enough as it is!

You know, I never even thought about it, until I read this post. I am a pretty normal guy and now I have thought about it and it does not bother me in the slightest. And I probably won't think about it again!!!

I would love a Deltic or a Mallard, but I am a little biased. I have to agree it is hard to justify the condor as famous, when only a few keen enthusiasts, let alone members of the public will have heard of it. As for Flying Scotsman it has already been done in the form of Emerald Night, Albeit in Later Brirish Railways Dark Green with black wheels and smoke deflectors as she appeared in about 1962.

An IR sensor may be a better option, it's what a lot of model railroaders use for train detection, and would also have many possibilities beyond trains which would help increase sales. I think their range is sufficiently narrow that they would not interfere with, or pick up interference from any PF elements either.

That's brilliant! They could give away an empty sealed box! The box itself would be exclusive, there would be no unique parts for people to get upset about not having, and the collectors can't open the box to prove its not there!!! And even if they did, you could just send them another empty sealed box!!

Erm, a magnet is not a source of energy - I hope you have not been taken in by any of those phoney perpetual motion machines!!

They can be mixed, but not really indescriminately. Blue rails won't fit on to the dark grey sleepers/ties with clips as they do not have the required slots, but both will fit on the standard 2x8 plate, so they can be used together if required.

If you are worried about pulling power, rather than adding an extra motor, just change the gearing so that the engine runs half as fast. That way you will get the same 'pulling power' as two motors. Its basically what the real thing does - it has a very slow top speed (15mph) due to it having a double reduction gear drive, but can shift trains almost as heavy as its full size companions!

Its a good point, I often find that when a two store solution is found, it is worth checking a three store solution because the three store solution is often cheaper than the difference in the extra postage required. I suspect that it would be somewhat complex for brickficiency to include postage costs in the search, if it is indeed possible at all! It would also be helpful if solutions where the cost of a few bricks from one store is below their minimum order value there could be an option to disregard that solution, but it is not too hard to go through the list manually to do that.

I have tried clone brands of Sluban and Enlighten, and found that their quality is far superior to what the nay sayers wanted me to believe. However, having said that the quality they have is not as consistent as lego. For example, the dark bluish gray plates I have from Enlighten are indistinguishable from Lego, save that they do not have lego on the studs. Perfect colour match, same clutch power and so on. However some of their parts and design is not up to that of Lego, but for the price you get a lot of bang for your buck. the only problem I have had with anything falling apart was due to poor model design - too few studs holding things together rather than a lack of clutch power. Sluban was not so good in this respect. Some bricks had less clutch power than lego, and the one model I got from them - a double decker bus, had badly made wheels. It did however have fantastic plug doors, where the best that lego could manage is either a train door or a building door. and it was very cheap. So you pays yer money and makes your choice! YMMV and all that too!

Rats, looks like I did not get the Lego track after all. They had just shipped the other parts and refunded me for the track so all I got was a small envelope instead of a big box. Oh well.

Are you sure about that? (He writes with his plastic keyboard, sitting on his plastic chair dressed in polyester shirt and trousers etc. etc.) You don't want to make the mistake of being as inaccurate as Greenpeace do you? I think that lego must be pretty small beer compared to the vast amount of other plastic products produced.

I had this issue - held closed under a hair dryer for a few seconds did the trick.

Interesting. The design I was going for was the glider style. Power requirement 100W/kilo or less. The RC motor on a good day produces 112W/kg not counting batteries/propeller. I was anticipating a large plane using multiple RC motors and one battery, maybe two to overvolt them for more power. Lego propeller efficiency would probably be pretty dire, which would not help. Its so excruiciatingly close!

Ok, back to the world of heavier than air flight with lego. Wings have passed proof of concept. They are buildable, provide loads of lift, but may be a bit marginal on strength. I think its possible to resolve that so its not a show stopper. These wings have been optimised to get the greatest lift/weight ratio with lego I think that is technically possible. You could make the wings smaller, but as the thickness of the lego remains the same whatever size you build, the lift/weight ratio is degraded. Make them (even) bigger and they will be too thin for their size, too flexible and require extra strengthening which will add to the weight and probably be detrimental. Why did I say even bigger? Well having a wing that works, or at least can be made to work, further research was required and I thought that looking at existing electric powered model aircraft would be a good place to start. This is where things start to get a little scary! - an aircraft with this wing would fit in the IMAA category of 'giant electric aircraft' !!!! It is also noteable that the general design requirement is big motor + small battery. If I have a set up that takes any longer than ten minutes for the battery to go from fully charged to flat, then I am carrying excessive battery weight. Indeed due to the experimental nature of this project I would say its necessary for the battery to go from fully charged to flat in under five minutes - it just needs to last long enough to provide proof of flight, any more is a waste. This of course requires the battery to supply a very high current for a short time, possibly to the detriment of the battery. Now this wing is designed to fly slowly, simply to try and give lego electric motors a chance of being able to power it. the idea being that hopefully the drag, which goes up with the square of the speed, might be something lego motors could cope with. So what about motor requirements? Well its a little tricky as there are many variables. Unfortunately Model aircraft seem to use a non-standard measure of power which I am not sure how it translates in to Watts. An airplane may have a motor of say 200kv fitted. Now clearly this is not a 200,000V motor, so the normal meaning of Kilovolts applied to this abbrieviation is not right. I suspect however that this might not be too far away from 200 watts. Why they can't just use watts I don't know... And this is where it starts getting tricky. I think that the next stage would be to make a towed glider with this wing. The towline would need a spring balance to measure how much drag needs to be overcome. The glider would need weights adding to simulate batteries and motors. By progressively adding one motor and battery weight as required then measuring the additional drag required to get it to fly, a graph can be plotted. From ZBLJ experiments, knowing the weight of the RC motors we can get an approximate idea of how much thrust per motor we can get. We can then plot this on the graph, and see if the 'thrust available ' vs drag plots are diverging or converging. If diverging, then we know flight won't happen, if converging, we should be able to work out how many motors/batteries we need. So this is where I am at. I am likely to need a number of RC motors. They are not cheap. I will also need expensive batteries that I am likely to ruin. It will also take a long time to do all this development work. Reliable Electric RC planes, with absolutely everything optimized only became practical comparitively recently, presumably to the development of the motors and batteries required becoming available. Lego components are no where near as advanced or efficient as these beasts, which is a huge disadvantage. The problem is I can't take this project forward without spending lots of time and money on it which I cannot justify. Which is a pity because I would really like to prove that flight is possible. If someone else was mad enough to take it forward I can perhaps provide photographs of the wing as is - but it will need work!

Dangerous assumption to make, you clearly do not know my background at all, and are making wild guesses!!!

Can't start building anything until tomorrow.

I can, if the Emerald Night sold well enough with one coach, why change a winning formula? But I would hope that a new model did not have the design flaws the EN did, especially as they are so simple and straightforward to correct.

Nice try! Yes I suppose it is lighter, but unfortunately it is too light and the resulting complete model is not heavier than air, and is floating as opposed to flying, but I suppose it is technically airborne lego!!

Why? Its a very thin sheet of plastic with some holes in it. If you know of any lighter lego please tell us. If not, then please do not make uninformed suggestions!

Dunno about withdrawn from market, lego UK shows 'temporarily out of stock'.

You bet! I think 'adictive' might be a better choice of words, and with the new sets introduced and the old ones still available, there is a great choice right now.