allanp

I would love to see prototypes for the big technic sets of 1988-1996. Especially the 8480 space shuttle. Like the forklift I would fully expect it to look hideous as technic's main goal is functionality. That forklift was fully fuctional, the looks came later. I do remember seeing a prototype of the control centre 2 at legoland windsor, I soooooooooooooooooooo wish I had taken at least one picture of it. Yes it looked hideous but it was ALMOST fully functional and very interesting to see. The base was similar to this model from the 8891 ideas book http://www.peeron.com/scans/8891-1/83 and the helicoptor itself was red. I would love to see prototypes for the big technic sets of 1988-1996. Especially the 8480 space shuttle. Like the forklift I would fully expect it to look hideous as technic's main goal is functionality. That forklift was fully fuctional, the looks came later. I do remember seeing a prototype of the control centre 2 at legoland windsor, I soooooooooooooooooooo wish I had taken at least one picture of it. Yes it looked hideous but it was ALMOST fully functional and very interesting to see. The base was similar to this model from the 8891 ideas book http://www.peeron.com/scans/8891-1/83 and the helicoptor itself was red.

I really like the American 1998 "Godzilla". Sure the middle part was boring with the unessesary baby zillas storyline and he was not as tough as he should have been but for what it is, it is a fun movie. At least it didn't look hilariously rediculous like the Japanese crap fests! I also liked Ang Lee's "Hulk" from 2003 far more then the more recent version. You really got that comic book sence of power and size and the action was great. He had fights with the military, 3 massive dogs and a supervillain as a bonus at the end. He jumped across deserts, he hurled a tank across a desert and the carachters were fully developed. What more could you really expect from a hulk movie?

They were both great models but I would like a complete page one redesign of the 8455. It should be bigger, more expensive, have longer pneumatics, 4 wheel drive and possibly a motor pump for the pneumatics. A redesign of the 8466 would also be good with a motor, a gearbox and 4 wheel drive train that can handle the tourque of being motorised and that also has less friction, meaning more of the motors power is used to move the vehicle and not just wasted in the gearbox and wheel hubs.

I'm just echoing the sentiments of most people hear but the customer service in my opinion is the best iv'e ever encountered. You can tell Lego really do care.

Yes I do believe that motor to be a fair compromise. Would be awsome to have a motor that is slightly more efficient/powerful with a similar or higher output speed in a PF format.

Yes I totally agree but in those cases where there is no space for mechanisms then perhaps the XL motor isn't a good choice anyway. The XL motor has only appeared in two technic sets and in both cases there was plenty of room as they were both large sets. All that being said there is still a place for the XL motor I would just prefere to have an immensely powerful motor with a very high output speed. Besides the whole reason we are discussing a micro motor is for when there is little space as the XL and M motors are too big for these cases.

I agree that if they was to do one it should be low speed and high tourque. I would love a small motor but have reservations due to the quality issues with the last micro motor. A new PF micro motor would have to be better than the last one. (WARNING: OFF-TOPIC. what follows is just my usual ramblings!) Personally what I would prefer is a L motor that has a large, very powerful motor inside and ABSOLUTELY NO gear reduction. I mean, where's the fun in having any of the mechanics done for you? Surely that's missing the point of what lego technic is all about. Secondley, a servo motor would also be great and could be used for things like proportional steering, precise control of a pneumatic valve, etc, etc, etc.

welcome back! I guess your dark ages lasted for many years so are you aware that there have been some colour changes, namely to greys and brown. They are only slight but a grey peice from a new set will look noticeably different in colour if placed right next to a perfect, unfaded peice from your existing collection. This in not always a bad thing tho. In castles I would say it is actually a good thing as mixing old grey and new grey (often called bley for it's bluish tinge) can give things a more authentic look. Yes MOC is the right term and stands for my own creation. LOL well of course they are. Everyone knows that. They are as essential as bread and milk! As for the best, fastest or cheapest way to build up your collection of peices well if you want alot of a particular peice then www.bricklink.com is a good place to start. Could be cheap, could be very expensive (it all depends on who your buying from), but it's easy to navigate and they are bound to have what ever peice you want in their thousands. If you want to build up your collection by buying only new sets then there is a website called www.peeron.com which has inventories of most sets which will enable you to see which sets will best forfill you need for parts. It's easy to navigate and has a number of search options available. As for hints on building technique then I would say go to www.brickshelf.com and look at the thousands upon thousands of MOCs and try building some, however the best techniques will always be the ones you create yourself so I guess the best technique is to just be creative. You probably know all this but if not then I hope this helps ya out! Happy building, from England

I would love to see prototypes for the big technic sets of 1988-1996. Especially the 8480 space shuttle. Like the forklift I would fully expect it to look hideous as technic's main goal is functionality. That forklift was fully fuctional, the looks came later. I do remember seeing a prototype of the control centre 2 at legoland windsor, I soooooooooooooooooooo wish I had taken at least one picture of it. Yes it looked hideous but it was ALMOST fully functional and very interesting to see. The base was similar to this model from the 8891 ideas book http://www.peeron.com/scans/8891-1/83 and the helicoptor itself was red.

But they are going to transport the bricks to legoland to be used in an annual building event. From there it is only a short step to allowing volunteers to come in and help rebuild the house in return for some free time round legoland. Just a thought. This time, now that it has been proven possible to build a full size lego house, I would allow the use of glue and (hidden) steel framework for health and safety reasons, and also to stop people robbing the house peice by peice! I would think that to have the actual house that James May built out of lego and to be able to walk around inside it for yourself would bring in alot of extra customers/revenue for legoland.

Hello there Conchas! Nice to see ya hear! I post on TB's regualarly under the name Al. What a great place to discuss all things Technic . That was off topic. Sorry!

Agreed it is much better than the hauler. Why do you always get those people every year comparing the first half of an upcoming year to the bigger, second half of a current year Yes and I can't beleive that the flagships for the past 2 years didn't have a working steering wheel.

Another reason why it was so cheap was because it have a VERY low peice count at only 703.

I drove for 5 or 6 hours to get there and back. I waited for about 5 hours before I could build anything. I put over one and a half thousand bricks together in one hour. And that's just my small contribution to the project. I knew that it was probably gonna be torn down, but those pictures are painful to see. It's just wrong! I'm sure James feels the same way about it now where as, like me, he probably didn't give much thought to it before.

Great topic idea, gonna give this one some thought but for now the first thing that comes to mind is that when you build a yellow castle as a kid, you are probably not as aware that a castle is not, in real life, yellow. Or square. Or have perfectly smooth sides. Or have regular, perfectly shaped bricks and so on. This allows you as a child to fully submerge your imagineation into the model and become a part of a story. To a child, a perfectly square, yellow block, no roof and a few knights is a castle, they don't know any better. Now I would like you to imagine what kind of model castle would really get you excited and spark your thirst for play. It would probably be 6000 peices, have a completely irregular shape, have green hilly foundations that make the shape even more irregular, be several shades of grey with dashes of brown, have 100 mini figures and you could even have a dragon, as long as it was detailed enough to allow you to forget , just for a moment, that it's made of lego, that's the key. To allow your imagination to be fully submerged into the model it has to be realistic and detailed enough to fool your own mind on a subconscience, very basic level that it is not a model but in fact the real thing. I think it's possible that as adults this is harder simply because we know much more about the world we live in than a child. Just my 2 cents!

That's what I was thinking about the helicopter. It's got a tiny amount of parts and should be very cheap as it is only the second smallest set of the year so for me, the chopper is pretty much as expected. I won't buy it, but then I don't need to, I already know what technic is Should be good as a little introduction to the kiddies tho.

All technic related. Deeeeeeep breath in and....... Spline shaft leaf spring XL motor with a much higher output speed servo motor with automatic return to centre helecopter swash plate that allows for cyclic and collective control rotor blade/wing elements Longer pnermatic cylinders in a couple of different lengths PF pneumatic switch More efficient pneumatic motor pump Pneumatic power steering elements synchromesh gears in more than one size (like the current 16t dark bley one) Gear change gate like the 8880 but with 6 or 7 positions (8448 gear change was horrible) More realistic gear change elements tow ball socket (that would allow a beam or axle to turn into a tie rod/steering arm in any length or configuration) spring with tow ball sockets on either end who's orientation can be reconfigured large turntable with metallic or non-metallic roller/ball bearings drive/steer/suspention wheel hub that can take lots of torque but have very very little rolling resistance/friction at any angle of steering or suspention travel.

Nah bet yow cun understond every word om sayin cor ya!

Oh yes the main credit should of course go to my parents no doubt about that. But you know during the time I was at that first school nothing excercised my brain as much as building MOCs did. Lego taught me how to use my brain more than that school! No child reading this should give up school to play with lego tho! If/when I have kids, they're getting tons of lego I guess that was partly the reason for my posting this story My hearing improved as i've got older. It's now only just below average and is not a problem. My speech is fine apart from the black country accent Thankyou I will.

Ive had dreams about finding old MISB sets in a shop a few times. The sets were always slightly diferent tho like the 8868 having the suspention from the test car but being a dream, I didn't question it as if that was how the set always was. I also once had a dream (long before I heard of an actual lego shop) that there was an actual lego shop close to where I live. Some years later, to great delight, one actually opened close to me for about a year or two in the Birmingham Bullring. YEY!

Not at all thankyou for the kind comments.

Well I am 24 now and I live in England. Things may have changed but the first hearing test I remember was the one at the doctors, not school. I've only ever had one test at school and that was in secondary school so would have been a bit late by then. When I went there it was called Tividale junior and infant school. It's called something else now. I was somewhat reluctant to say the name as I do not wish to deter people from it, it's completely different now. It also underwent the "fresh start" scheme. http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/Database/S...Freshstart.html has some information on that but is wrong when it says that another school was the only primary school ever to have undergone such a scheme as my old schools own website states that it also went through the same procedure.

Thankyou

I would like to share with you all a real life Lego story. When I was a child, I was born parcially deaf. It went completely un-diagnosed. I could not hear words properly which meant that when I was leaning to speak, I would repeate words in a very distored way (which was how I heard them). Nobody could understand what I was saying. This lead them to suspect that I was maybe a bit simple. Things only got worse when I was sent to a bad school where I was bullied very badly. It was so bad I could not concentrate on my work. I was so concerned about trying to fit in with this group of bullies just so they would'nt bully me. But I would not do the things they do to others. Combined with my stupid souding voice, things got worse and worse. I had no friends, my grades were low and my shcool reports were bad. The school itself was so bad they could not see any of this bullying. The headmaster of the school even contributed to it. When I fell and split my head open, the head masted looked at me with blood all down my face and simply called me stupid. When I got sent to him for hiding from everyone under a table he said that if I wanna crawl around the floor like a bug then he would spray me with bug spray until I didn't move any more. As a small child, it was terrifying. Yet my poor communication was so bad I could not tell anybody, even my family what was happening. There was talk and plans to move me to a different school for special needs children. I felt completely lost in a maze with no way out. I felt a low that was, well, lets just say it was total. No 7 year old, or anybody, should ever be made to feel that way and so help me if I ever see it again i'll....... It was around this time that I really started to get into Lego Technic. I had been building with it for one or two years and I loved it. I could build these models without much help and using the knowledge of the way things worked by building Lego Technic I soon started to build MOCs with complicated gear trains and steering and suspention and motors and all kinds of things. For the first time I did something that I wanted to show off. For the first time I didn't feel stupid. My mom saw the kinds of things I was building and that they were good. I was learning, without even knowing it, how to solve problems, how to be patient, spacial awarness, hand-eye co-odination, mechanical physics and even mathematics when figuring out gear ratios. I was learning fast. Very fast. It was then that things started to change. And oh boy did things change. My mother realised then that I was no dumb kid. I was smart. But why the inability to speak properly? Why the low grades? She took me to see someone and my hearing problems were diagnosed. Until then they didn't know I had hearing problems and did not fully realise my other problems in school either. How could they, I couldn't tell them. Progress with my hearing and speech were slow, but it was there. My speech was getting better but there was still the problem of the low grades. My parents were not content with it all being down to not hearing the teacher properly. They went to the school and wanted to know more. Make no mistake, my parents were always kind, loving and attentive, they just didn't have a reason to believe anything was wrong until now. My parents were told that there might be a slight problem with bullying but not to worry and they said that to solve the problem they were gonna no longer allow me to play outside at break times. Problem solved. My dad went berserk at the teacher! "You make out like my son is the bully, he's the victim here. Why are you gonna punish him by not allowing him out side at break times. It should be the bully that is not allowed outside, NOT MY SON!" My parents ammediatly stopped looking at me for the reasons my grades were low and looked towards the school. They asked what kind of school can't prevent an 8 year old from bullying another 8 year old to the extent that I was failing everything. What kind of school punishes the person being bullied and not the bully. They wanted answers. They did not get any and so went to the board of governers. This matter was getting bigger and bigger until they decided that they had enough. They took me out of that school and refused to send me back there. The school begged and pleaded and did all kinds of things. They even gave me a phony report card that had the word "excellent" in every subject, no need for improvement which was obviously not the case. You see the board of governors was involved now and they could not be seen to have a child being taken out of the school by his parents as the consequences for them would be big. Just how big, nobody could have guessed, but i'll get to that later. My parents sat me down and said that they were sorry for all that has happened (to this day I maintain they have absolutely nothing to be sorry for) and asked me to make a decision. They said "you are gonna have to be brave and tell us if you want to be moved to a different school. If you do then it will be your decision alone, and we will make it happen. whatever you want" They told me everything about how I would have to make all new friends (not that I had any in school) and that my old school would be investigated from a high level and that would all revolve around me. Non the less the decision is yours and yours alone. Were gonna listen to you from now on, forget everyone else. Just you son. So I made my choice. Soon after that I started a new school, this time a roman catholic school. It was the best school ever. My grades shot up. I made the first friends i've ever made there. Friends that would remain friends for years to come. I left that school to go onto high school with the second highest grades in the entire school. And also because it was a roman catholic school I got to go to a school that I would not have been able to go to before. It was there that I met life long friends, took an IQ test and discovered I was in the top 0.1%, got 10 GCSE's and where I also met a girl that I am still with today and someday I would love to call her my wife. During those years I was in that good primary school it turns out that my old primary school was indeed investigated due to my deciding to leave. During that investigation they found many other things they did not like concerning many other pupils aswell. I do not know the details but what they found must not have been good as EVERY SINGLE MEMBER OF STAFF WAS FIRED. That school is completely different now. Completely restaffed and restructured it is now, thank God, a good place to go to school. Looking back I wonder, was I building Lego, or was Lego building me. Either way i'm glad that one christmas, when I was 5 or 6, a present was opened from my nan (to my older brother actually) and it was an 8838 Shock Cycle. From then on Lego Technic would always be, and I suspect always will be, top of my list. Thankyou.

Thanks for the pic. So far this is the only pic iv'e seen. To me it looks like it's either a moc or a prototype racers set that needs some improvement, and a change of colour like metallic dark grey or white. Either way it is not a technic set IMO.