allanp

Excellent! Can't wait to see more

Fantastic video HOWEVER..... .....whilst I am a huge fan of this man and what he does, I do have one tiny bone to pick. He says that Lego is teaching kids wrong when it come to suspention with the unimog, which may be true in many ways (like the pivot point being far outside the wheel). However whilst the geometry is all wrong and could be greatly improved it is still mechanicly closer to real life than this modified version. A real unimog does not have multi link suspention and I appreciate it when Lego invests in new parts in order to make things more life like, like they have done with the Unimog. However I am not letting Lego off the hook that easily . Whilst his solution to the steering problems are incorrect by his own standards in that they are not life like, they do highlight the fact that there ARE problems and that, despite the fact that the unimog is probably the best technic set ever released, it is still not perfect due to the geometry problems. It always seems to be that Lego comes soooo close to perfection but never quite gets there even tho they easily could have. They could have made it perfect had they designed the parts a bit differently, They could have made the hubs much deeper (like real life) to allow a slightly different portal gearbox to fit much further into the wheel. They could have made the hubs black (never seen grey hubs on a real Unimog). They could have made the tyre tread like the cevron pattern on the real tyre, and all with no extra cost as it's not more, just different. It's infuriating sometimes that they seem to keep doing things like that!

From the looks of it, it's an unusual setup. The three small pumps are there I think just because three works better than one. The manual pump is there it seems because there is no electrical switch coupled onto one of the valves to supply power to the compressor motor, so a manual pump is used instead. I haven't built it tho so I could be wrong. I also have a question regaurding the pneumatics. It looks as tho there are two switches coupled to two of the valves, each one can activate the compressor motor. Is that correct? If so, is there anything preventing both switches being on but in opposite directions? (apart from lack of forsight on the part of the opperator!).

I'm very impressed with this model, surprised I haven't noticed it here till now.

Have you tried having a long train of cars, like 6 or 7 together?

I'm really liking all these reviews of older sets. This motorbike was the first set I had in 1991.

Yeah, i'm secretly one of them but I keep complaining about not having this part or that part (read longer pneumatics and so on) to help conceal my identity, you know, a double bluff, so this is now a triple bluff, which is now a quadruple bluff, which is now a....um..... fivethingemagigger bluff!

Well, yeah, a micro motor should have lots of internal gearing, but for any other motor i'de rather they left it out.

Always thought the helmet from the technic darth vader set would make a good ready made nose cone, the cut out for the eyes would be where the landing gear goes.

I really like em, but as with most lego wheels they don't really look like any real life wheel (except for maybe a Power puller, but even then the edges are too rounded). The hubs are a bit too large in diameter to be a monster truck wheel and the tread pattern i've never seen on a real life tyre before. I think technic wheels in general are all too shallow in the hubs (one reason I like the PP wheels is for their deeper hubs as well as the 8448 wheels) and could do with looking much more like their real world counterparts.

Now i'm glad I bought 4 PP wheels and tyres for £13 (for all 4) from Lego when they were first released.

You could use 2 recievers set to the same channel.

Yeah, we have not used these motors yet and a proper servo motor is deffinately not redundant. If the L-motor is the same as the buggy motor (similar speed/torque) or faster at the cost of less torque i'll be very happy with it.

Sweet!

Thanks man

You mean a hybrid of electric motor power and giant pushing you along the floor power? I think 2013 is gonna give us something we've all been waiting for, the designers blog have already mentioned their excitement about 2013 sets and can't wait till they can show us. Of course by "us" they don't necessarily mean AFOLs, but who knows! I still believe there is a trend for brilliant flagship one year followed by awesome parts pack if nothing else kinda set the next year (exceptions granted), so with 8110 being one of the best ever, followed this year by the crawler which gives us HOPEFULLY amazing new motors, 2013 should be amazing.

Just to add a bit more choice there is also some of my designs. By shear co-incidence, Sheepo came up with the same 5f+1r design for his landrover defender 110.

It really depends what you want from a set. 8043 has alot of PF. 8110 has not so much PF but a good amount of everything. 8043 has toy like playability, whereas 8110 has mechanical authenticity, it very closely matches the real thing unlike 8043. So if you want more of a childs RC toy with alot of motors get 8043. If you want a vast amount of parts with a variety of different things like PF, pneumatics and pretty much everything else so you can build a wide variety of your own designs and authenticity then get 8110. Remember 8043 does not have differentials, wheels, suspention elements, engine elements and so on, so it's really very limited for parts. You also have to consider if you would prefere to have pneumatics (with motor compressor pump so they work with PF in the case of 8110) or LAs.

8110 has pretty much everything in one set, so you will have no problems building your own MOCs from just this one set, and it's probably the best technic set ever released, up there with the legends from the early-mid 90's.

Personally I think I would motorise the car with a really high speed but not very much torque, so little in fact that it can hardly move itslf, but enough so that you don't lose much speed and can have a long train of cars like on most real rollercoasters.

This is a fantasic idea. You are not limited at all, you can make any shape trak you like. Bring on the corkscrews!

Whoops, I apologize I didn't see that! I would say your version is the most authentic I have seen, thanks for posting.

Well you've got the easy part Like I said, the difficult part is the differential. You have one side of the differencial driving both the front wheels. What you need for it to be like a modern tatra is to have both driven shafts of the differential exiting from the same side, one rotating inside the other, these then go to drive each wheel separately. It's not impossible. You can try something like this: The yellow cage is the outer cage of the differential. You would drive this from the back so that it rotates. More bracing is needed to prevent gears slipping but the idea should be sound.

In a modern tatra, each wheel is suspended independantly on half shafts. The wheel is fixed to the angle of the shaft (except when steering obviously). This means that when the suspention is uncompressed the tops of the wheels lean outwards. When the suspention is compressed the wheels rotate to a more vertical position. This creates simplicity and therefore an inherant toughness and adds to the reliability. This part is easy to recreate in lego, but from here it gets more difficult. Each half shaft rotates about the same axis longitudinal to the vehicle, which in itself is not difficult to recreate, difficulty comes with the differential. It is not mounted directly between the wheels and it is not driven by an outer gear. Instead the outer case is fixed directly to a drive staft mounted from one end. Both the driven axles exit the differencial from the other side, one rotating inside the other. These then go to bevel gears which drive the half shafts going to the wheels. Incidentally the half shafts are offset to give the needed clearance between opposing bevel gears. As always, a picture speaks a thousand words, and a video is thousands of pictures!