majorna

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I don't hang around here much, but participated in the Winter Village contest a couple of years ago, and it was such fun I thought I'd have another go at it. I'm really impressed at the quality of the MOCs that are showing up here. Real quality work on display! The “Julbock” (Yule Goat) is a traditional holiday symbol in Scandinavia. Its pagan origins are obscure, but it is frequently depicted today as a decoration made of bundled straw with red ribbons, and can be found alongside other traditional domestic decorations such as Christmas trees, small elves, and decorative lighting. In recent decades towns and cities have begun erecting large straw goats in town squares and other public spaces during the holiday season. The most famous of these is the goat in Gävle, which is notorious for being the frequent subject of arsonist pranksters. Naturally, considering its Scandinavian origins, the Winter Village has a Julbock of its own. In what will ultimately lead to tragic consequences, the goat has been placed in the town center adjacent to the fireworks stand, selling pyrotechnics in preparation for New Year’s Eve celebrations. The seller has rockets, mortars, and what looks suspiciously like dynamite available to buy. The father and his young daughter are examining the wares when, all of a sudden… A burst of fireworks casts a stray spark upon the dry and highly flammable straw figure, causing it to burst into flames. Fortunately the Winter Village is home to legions of bored firefighters always ready to battle a blaze. Here’s a closer look at the spring-loaded mechanism. A Technic shock absorber is hidden there in the snowbank, attached to a short linkarm on an axle with a 12 tooth gear, which drives both the fireworks and julbock’s rotating flame.

This is really amazing! Would be a good candidate for Lego Ideas.

OK! Thanks for the clarification. I'll see what can be done to shorten the ship.

Both the bowsprit and a bit of the prow extend beyond the baseplate if placed diagonally. Even some of the stern greebling overhangs the plate, slightly. The hull, at waterline, would fit on a baseplate.

Hi. I'm new here, but lurk a bit in some of the other forums. My daughter got a couple of the new small pirate sets, and loves the theme. But the lack of a smallish ship is a curious omission for an ostensibly nautical theme. Her Elves ship got called to action, and I cobbled together a hull from some Technic panels. The ship is still in development, but would it qualify for the "small" category if we make it sufficiently gory? (It extends beyond a 16 square base.)

This project is great! I've seen similar ideas used in model railroads, which inspired my Winter Village competition entry (shameless self-link). I love projects that span over different Lego themes and incorporate "Technic" elements in system models. Your vehicles too are wonderful creations in their own right. More details would be very much appreciated!

I'm relatively new here and haven't waded through the 31 (!) pages of this topic, but thought I'd add a little anecdata. My daughter is six and graduated from Duplo when she was four with the great little safari "Bricks and More" set. She absolutely loved following the instructions building and taking apart the kit over and over. I showed her a little free-form building, but she really wanted instructions to follow, and it was then that I found Lego had some extra plans on the internet you could print out as PDFs. When we went looking for her next kit, her mother and I were really disappointed by the diversity of the City sets. I think Friends hadn't quite hit the shelves here in Sweden, and the advanced Creator houses were really beyond her abilities, (or patience). What we ended up getting was a camping trailer, also with a male and female figure. This was OK, but we felt it didn't really reflect our "lifestyle" that well (not that the safari did, but the animals were fun and identifiable). Again, she loved following the instructions, and acting out with the minifigs and their accessories. Her first Friends kits were gifts, and we were a bit sceptical about the very gendered theme, mainly because of the lack of male characters. The colors are great (though the diversity of nuanced colors makes uniform color freeform building almost impossible for kids with limited resources). She totally loves the Friends line now, and we all approve of the variety of buildings and activities the line represents. And the little animal kits are great little spontaneous buys with useful parts. City sets and Creator sets get purchased as well (the cement mixer and the Creator eagle were particularly popular last year). The Friends minidolls and animals have a distinct styling and scale which makes them incompatible with other System sets according to us discriminating adults, but this isn't as much an issue for my daughter. I can wish that the Friends line had been developed with minifigs, but TLG made a reasoned decision with the minidolls, and I'm just glad that there are kits at the $20- $30 price point that aren't vehicles (we are anyway drowning in wheels here) and that reflect everyday life. I wish there were more boy minidolls, but imagine that that will be rectified by TLG in coming seasons. The increasing diversity of the City sets described above (though still, vehicles...) and the pending Creator bike shop are great steps. (Though still: male minifigs excusively with the log cabin (old and new), small cottage, treehouse... why?)

My daughter is planning to make a zoo with her Friends animal polybag sets, and was thinking about what other, larger animals belonged in the zoo. She thought about brick-building animals, as in her set 4637. Digging in her toybox, however, she found her old Duplo animals from 4962, I think you'll agree that the scale, sculpting and printing of these animals is very "Friend"-ly. Something others may find useful.

Yeah, please! More information about this great project!

What a great model! The flapping motion is really elegant and natural-looking.

Here's the plotter from the 8888 Idea Book: As you can see, not nearly as evolved, though repeating the program by placing the rack gears on the treads is clever. I messed around with this arrangement a while back, and the rack gears stayed put on those single studs about as well as you'd expect. I posted my own modest experiment with rack gear programming a couple months ago in another thread, but here it is again, using one of the pull-back motors for power.

I recently stumbled upon this genius contraption, which uses a combination of normal chain sections and treads to program a simple hand-cranked plotter: It reminded me of Sariel's mechanically programmable drummer, featured on this forum less than a month ago. It occurs to me that one might use a combination of tiles and "cheese wedge" pieces to similar effect. Can we come up with other solutions for mechanically programming our Lego creations?

I got some requests to show the mechanism that makes the train run in more detail, so here are a couple screenshots of a quick LDD drawing of the model: The "motor" (from set 4093) gets placed on the purple plate and feeds the 12t double bevel gear, which in turn feeds the 20 t bevel gear attached by a 4l axle to a 40 tooth gear. The other gears are held in place on the frame by pins, and the frame itself is set on jumper plates supported by ordinary bricks. The train is built to fit on a 4l tile (the orange round 1x plate is not necessary in reality) and these are then placed over the 3 wide treads (available, for instance, in the 9391 Tracked Crane set). I couldn't find these treads in LDD, but they will get linked together snuggly around the four cogs. I hope this is of assistance!

Thanks for the comments everyone. I made these models more as an exercise in showing what could be done with these Technic parts than anything, but am relatively happy with the results. I have an idea of how to slim down the excavator a bit to allow better sculpting of the body and counterweight. The truck was made more as an afterthought, though I am much more pleased with it aesthetically. Unfortunately it is just a bit too small for a minifig. It is only 4 wide, so that's not so strange. The linear actuator would easily fit in a "Great Vehicles" scale model, and this would even allow the action to be geared up a bit. As it is the mini actuator requires 19 revolutions for full extension, but squeezing in a 24:8 gear pair somewhere in the model (as I managed in the excavator) would help this significantly.

Congratulations to all the winners. Your creations definitely deserve it!

Yeah, a GBC series, with a new model featuring new mechanisms released each year (in the fashion of the modular building series) would be great. They wouldn't even have to be that large, and the "B" models that folks would come up with for each set would be wild. I also think there's a great opportunity to introduce certain Technic parts and techniques in certain more advanced system models, to attract older kids to the potential of the Technic world. I posted a couple simple models using mini linear actuators over in the Town forum as an example of this.

These buildings really are amazing in their level of detail and architectural accuracy.

Mini linear actuators are technic parts that mimic hydraulic cylinders and convert rotary motion into linear motion. They are primarily used in combination with power functions to perform minor mechanical tasks, but their scale suggests that they could be used to mechanize smaller town models as well, though I haven't found anything after a cursory search on this forum. I made these two models to show a couple of examples of how they may be used. The excavator arm and dump truck tipping mechanism both use mini linear actuators to add mechanical complexity to otherwise small and compact models. Here they are from another angle. Here the mechanics of the excavator are exposed. The boom is operated through a worm gear mechnism by the knob on the left of the "counterweight", and the arm is extended with the one on the right. Both mechanisms are geared so that two full revolutions of the knobs is sufficient for the full range of motion. I hope others might find these parts and techniques useful in their own builds!

Does anyone else suspect we may see the new suspension components used in the much-speculated-upon Creator Mini Cooper model that is expected later in 2014? Model team redux?

I came out of my Lego dark ages when my daughter got big enough to start building, so my thoughts are really aimed at what might interest kids and be pedagogic at the same time. Lego was a huge part of my childhood and I learned a lot playing with these little plastic bricks. When I got my first universal sets they immediately got incorporated with the existing collection of bricks, which now had greater potential to create mechanized constructions. Flash forward thirty years and I bought the tiny red container truck at a discount in a grocery store to introduce these techniques to my daughter. I thought we could create elaborate drawbridges or carousels with the parts. The truck's mechanism was very charming, and my daughter enjoyed building and rebuilding it, but incorporating the parts was not as easy as I remember, in part due to the studless technique. Still, we complemented the tiny truck with the tracked crane and the little bulldozer in the same scale, to have a little construction team nearly in minifigure scale, off on the side of her lego towns. The kit that has actually taught her the most about mechanics, though, is the Klutz "Crazy Action Contraptions" which is easily the best Technic kit under $50. This book is nearly a universal building kit, particularly when paired with an existing studded collection. I'd love to see more kits like this, maybe in collaboration with Yoshihito Isogawa? Why not some simple mechanical models, like a "South Pointing Chariot" or some BEAM robotics kits that can introduce robotic principles at a pricepoint well below Mindstorms? These sorts of kits would have really appealed to me as a kid, and would appeal to my daughter, much more than an endless array of tough-looking vehicles.

48 rodiziorobs - 1 44 nieks - 1 27 galaktek - 1 26 moctown - 1 20 gazumpty - 1

Wow, a third model train in yet another scale! The station building is great: very recognizable yet so compact.

Yep, that's pretty much exactly what a Lucia ceremony looks like!

In 8888 looping is accomplished on a plotter model by placing the rack gears perpendicularly on 1x4 plates placed on 3 wide treads, looped around a couple larger gears. I have briefly experimented with this solution and found it rather fragile.