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Commander Wolf

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Everything posted by Commander Wolf

  1. Commander Wolf
    ... annnd here it is in the flesh! After placing and receiving all the various bricklink orders I needed, it took another week to put the thing together and work out the first round of mechanical issues. I would say it's in a good 'beta' state now where the appearance is close to final and it'll drive forward and backward through all the Lego track geometries and pull a decent amount going forward as well. I was pretty replused by the BFBFB driver arrangement for a long time, but it looks a bit better in brick than in LDD and probably is more accurate in the end. This wheel arrangement still tracks more poorly than the fully articulated wheel arrangement though; the wide spacing between flanged wheels (idle and driver) tends to make all wheels more prone to picking switches, and even moreso the little guide channels in the switches. Still don't have a LiPo battery so I haven't tested the configuration where the battery box and receiver are in the loco rather than the tender, but I'm pretty confident it should work - it'll also get rid of those damn wires between the cab and tender. I really like this tender though; almost as cool as the one on the T1. Still on the to do list: Stickers for logos, etc. Fix/replace a number of greebles that are crappy/don't work Gear ratio is currently 1:1, but ideally should be more like 1:1.5/2ish; currently there's really not much torque until you get to notch 3ish. Make it not derail going backwards through s-curves while pulling/pushing something heavy Still missing various parts from window panes to lipo battery Lubricate - maybe Load test
  2. Commander Wolf
    Well, this project got derailed for a while because a) World of Warships open beta came out and b) I messed up. Long story short, I read some numbers wrong, and very late in the game I found out that I was making the loco too big relative to all of my other locos - the scale was about 15% bigger. This was really annoying because things were already tight and I'd have to make a lot of compromises to shrink the loco just 15% - but after a lot of Warships and mulling over it occasionally, I acquiesced and completed what I call the 'Small QJ'. Fundamentally, the idea is the same as the big QJ: The engines are in the body and connected to the chassis via a series of universal joints going through the pivots. This is such that I don't have huge amounts of overhang when going through turns, and it will be more stable than having the body fixed to what is effectively a very short center chassis. The main difference is that due to the smaller scale, the chassis has to have a non-articulated BFBFB arrangement, which I consider a huge tradeoff as I really don't like the difference in apparent size between the B and F drivers and how the drivers hang off the rail... Otherwise, much of the construction, layout, and greebles are about the same as the larger iteration. At this point, the first version of this design is more or less complete; much of the work that needs to be done is tweaking the drivetrain - there's a lot of funny business in trying to keep the weight on the drivers, especially on the axle with tires - and then just making sure the model actually builds in brick. It's probably in a state where I can start ordering parts, and looking at the inventory it might not be that many, Hopefully won't be another 2 months before the next update. At the very least I should be done before our LUG's Christmas show -_-
  3. Commander Wolf
    Is it a permanent display? If so, does it gather a lot of dust and/or how do you keep it clean? I leave Lego in my room, and after a month it's already covered in dust...
  4. Commander Wolf
    Made a fair amount of progress on this model over the past few days: Placing the battery box and receiver was more annoying than I'd have hoped. There's a lot of lengthwise room in this boiler, but the placement of the sliding-rotational joint above the front driver means that the receiver and battery box can't go right next to each other, and that there will be a lot of dead space. I tried to keep all the dead space together in order to fit cabling, etc, and initially put the battery box directly in front of the motors and the receiver all the way at the front of the boiler. There's actually a trick here that I'm using to get wires around the battery box to the receiver: I've made the bulk of the boiler 6-wide using the curved slope tiles which are 2 plates tall - this means that on each side of the 4-wide battery box, there's 1LU of space in which I can run wires, and hopefully that will take care of that. There's another trick here, though I'm not sure how well it will work. In jtlan's AGEIR boxcab he put a "len"s above his pf receiver such that the receiver could be recessed. I tried this in my FM H-10-44 and it work pretty well, so I'm trying a similar thing here with a 1x1 clear cylinder such that the receiver can fit within the diameter of the boiler. With the chassis in what I thought was more or less good shape, I spent time sketching out the body of the locomotive in more detail. As you can see, the general process for me is to first find the part and placement to suggest a particular feature, and then go back and see how to support that part (if possible). The idea is to start with the ideal and then backtrack or compromise if that isn't possible. Then did some work filling out details on the cab and making some greeble for the valve gear. You can see a close to final rendering of the cab: Typically, I only use the drawing to determine the placement of large features, and a model to determine what to do for individual details. It was at this point that I found some potentially showstopping flaws in the chassis while doing load testing with rubber tires. Because of the way this chassis is geared, with the motor driving the 5th driven axle and each subsequent axle then driving the axle ahead of it, the gear on the 4th driven axle tends to climb up on the gear ahead of it and derail the 4th axle if there is a lot of load. I've temporarily solved the issue by making the sliding rotational joint not loading bearing and redistributing that weight right between the 4th and 3rd axles, but there's going to be some balance between the derailing force and the weight of the locomotive that I'm not sure will balance out. That being said, here's a clip of the current chassis pulling some heavy stuff:
  5. Commander Wolf
    I think all the aforementioned solutions are reasonable depending on what you value. Some quick tradeoffs I can see: For 9v the big benefit is that you can run the trains forever without swapping batteries, etc. The biggest drawback is the price. For the rechargeable Lego battery, it's still expensive compared to other batteries, but cheaper than 9v and probably has better energy density than Eneloops in the AAA box. Another drawback is that you can only use it with Lego. Eneloops are cheaper than the Lego battery, but it's easier to loose them, more trouble to charge them, and again, probably has less energy density than the Lego battery. Another plus is that you can use them for other things as well.
  6. Commander Wolf
    Are you sure you weren't just looking when Brickshelf was down? I've been seeing it go down on and off the past few days, and I'd be surprised that it's blocked, even in China. I actually first saw this thing in "Ben" Beneke's 2006 BR39, and have since implemented it twice with various modifications. In my opinion, the biggest weakness of Ben's original implementation is that the "bogies" with the pairs of drivers are held toward each other only by the friction of the #1 connector on an axle, and this can easily loosen up over time and cause the gears to fall out of sync. As you can see, my previous implementations both involved having something to reinforce that connection. That being said, while running on fairly flat track the reinforced mechanism does do a good job keeping the axles in sync, and it's mainly when you pick up the loco and slide the bogies around that you can mess up the synchronization. The point about the ridge on the 20-tooth double bevels preventing them from sliding against each other smoothly is interesting: now that I think about it, I would think that it would be a problem, but in practice it has not been. However, I have not actually been transmitting significant torque through these assemblies until now (because my previous models were not powered), so it remains to be seen if that will be an issue in that case.
  7. Commander Wolf
    By definition a "tank engine" wouldn't generally have a tender attached to it, but at least in the US and UK there were definitely non-tank 0-6-0s that had tenders.
  8. Commander Wolf
    You're missing another loco behind the Big Boy This is actually a pretty unique train to model though; I doubt we'll see anything like it soon. That being said, I can't wait to see the real thing back in action, though I've also read ominous things about UP's steam program imploding...
  9. Commander Wolf
    Well, been a little distracted from this project, but managed to make some progress the last few days. Worked on polishing up the chassis including detailing the front and back trucks: On the back truck I couldn't think of a way to get a rounded corner on each side of the frame over the bearing, so that's kind of annoying. Around the front truck, I think the cylinder block is pretty decent, but as is often the case it needs to be shortened to accomodate the pivoting motion of the front axle. Making sure the support of the front axle (green) fit between the cylinders (blue) was also a big issue, even though the cylinders go out to 9-wide (and this would be like triply bad if I used a rigid 10-coupled section). I think I got good mileage out of this (purple) technic joiner though: With most of the chassis figured out, it's time to build some of the "real thing". This is mainly a sanity check to see if I've still got stupid things in the assembly (like using two 1x1 bricks where I could use a 1x2 - it happens a lot!) and to double check that everything comes in the colors I think they come in. And of course it gives me a chance to start seeing what said "real thing" will look like. To Redimus' point I was fairly comfortable not connecting axle 3 to axle 4 at all at first, but I'd be open to re-evaluation.The flex connection has definitely crossed my mind, but it could add a lot of friction to an already large mechanism (but admittedly I've never tried). That being said, my first inclination was to extend the connecting rods toward each other, but 7 is not too different from 6. I'd have to think on this one more. Next task is probably to find out if it's possible to fit the battery box (and that darn receiver) in the boiler.
  10. Commander Wolf
    EDIT: This model has gone through a lot of revisions over the years and much of the info in this thread is outdated. This video shows the latest version and provides a link to instructions on Rebrickable:
  11. Commander Wolf
    To the first point I think custom cables are the way to go. It's not hard to do and the PF cables are pretty cheap. I'm not actually sure you're "losing power" with the hack Duq posted, but I haven't studied the wiring too carefully on the PF stuff. jtlan could tell you more. To the second point we looked at 3 or 4 used micromotors and we've found they can vary quite a bit in performance. Presumably if you got two brand new ones they should be the same, but we didn't look at that. Either way if you have enough weight on the bogies and the wheels have enough traction it should even out the performance. I wouldn't worry too much about this second point in general.
  12. Commander Wolf
    I've found that most people have no idea how to pack something (or are too lazy to do it?). I have gotten laptops in USPS flat rate boxes with absolutely no padding whatsoever. It's a good thing most Lego is pretty much indestructible. Have fun putting it back together!
  13. Commander Wolf
    Yeah, given that a 60052 is already $200, I'm pretty sure Lego isn't going to make longer trains anytime soon, especially if it's a nice train set like the Maersk train or HE. Extra cars is pretty much the best thing you can hope for, and even that doesn't seem likely...
  14. Commander Wolf
    Don't quote me on this, but I think the main difference is that some of the printed parts in 4558 are stickers in 10001... otherwise it should be the same. I'm really glad I picked up a 10001 when it came out; I wish Lego would be more re-releases like this.
  15. Commander Wolf
    Nice work! It seems to me that the cars are a little short relative to the prototype, but I assume the actual scale length would be something absurd... Are those supposed to be bunks in the first car? Do minifigs actually fit?
  16. Commander Wolf
    I'm actually working on a 3 meter-ish train set now, but currently my longest is a 2.1 meter-ish T1 + P54 set: It doesn't actually have a lot of cars, it's just that each car is ginormous.
  17. Commander Wolf
    Not my usual cup of tea, but I actually really like this. It's got a nice shape, palette and selection of detail. I especially like the (to me) retro-ish nose. I think the body could be a little shorter or the trucks a little taller, but meh. What do you have under there is it just the usual train motors?
  18. Commander Wolf
    The micromotor is probably geared down alot to make it turn so slowly, and thus it does have significant torque for its size. A bigger difficulty was actually transferring that torque to the wheels because you have to stick something with a hole (rather than a crossaxle hole) onto the end of the micromotor. We both independently experimented with belt drives at first and deemed it insufficient because power wasn't being transferred uniformly.
  19. Commander Wolf
    Ahem, yes, mine is black because I'll build in any color as long as it's black. The biggest driver behind my design was that I wanted to keep the battery box upright and the switch easily accessible. To that end, the final result is probably mediocre. The roof isn't studded onto anything and comes on and off easily enough, but as you can see it doesn't sit quite flush with the top of the body when the switch isn't depressed. It's also considerably wider because I thought it was important to have a perceptible outward step between the body and the frame and a perceptible inward step between the frame and the chassis. This is probably the part I'm least happy with: the sides are held on by those fence pieces down at the chassis, and everything lines up really nicely in LDD, but in practice the walls tend to cave in and out a little and don't line up perfectly with the front and back walls. And you can see that we both decided to use the same drivetrain. And because of that, you can see that both locos travel at exactly the same speed, as shown in the following video: That's all my pics, so there is no full gallery. Til next time!
  20. Commander Wolf
    I also think the quarter domes are a better nose than the brick-built solution. Maybe a stud's worth of transition would help as well. The dark red arches at the front of the running board are also pretty clever, even if it's not quite the right shape.
  21. Commander Wolf
    This is a lovely diorama, but aren't the wheels/chassis on these German steamers supposed to be red? I looked on Google images and the only two color schemes I could see for the BR 86 was black/red and full grey.
  22. Commander Wolf
    Can you link to the clear inkjet labels you use? I've been printing on mailing-label stickers, and it's pretty mediocre. They work and they don't peel or anything, but they also don't blend very well, and colors are impossible to match.
  23. Commander Wolf
    We've done some things like film our local LUG's layout with a camera on a dedicated car, but interesting that you've put the camera inside the loco. Now you just gotta try running it on a full-blown display!
  24. Commander Wolf
    Nice to see something other than a western locomotive! I agree that the two bogies should share a unified design. How did you make the China Railway logo on the 2x2 round tile? Is it just a really clean sticker?
  25. Commander Wolf
    Dem wide radius curves! Nice!
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