legolijntje

Oh, yeah, I did get a response. As I expected, I got a standard customer-service reply stating that they don't know of any issues and that the gear shouldn't cause any problems. Nevertheless, they did send me a set of new gears for my set (42082) which will arrive soon. They also said that if the issue persists, I can always send a video or something. I did reply with a link to this topic, but I haven't had any response on that yet. I received their first message on wednesday and I replied on wednesday. So, I think there's still a chance they'd reply again, but I'm beginning to doubt a bit. I invite anyone else having noticeable problems (I mean, to be fair, it's still plastic toys) with the gear to write to Lego too. The more people, the more chance they might take a serious look at it instead of just sending back standard responses.

Parts in sets are combined from all factories right? There's no way to know which factory a specific part came from as far as I know.

This is great! 5935 holds a special place in my heart. I have great memories related to it as a child

Yes, this is what I'm thinking too. The old design is clearly somehow better than the new design that's for sure, but within the new design I seem to have pretty good gears and awfully bad gears (the ones I got with 42082). Seems to be a combination of a little worse design with an even worse production run or something. I sent a message about it to Lego yesterday, I'm curious if they have to say anything about it. Though, to be honest I don't expect much more than a standard customer-service speech and *maybe* the option to replace the gears I got with my set for new ones (which is not the point of my message at all). Ah well, we'll see.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/wLmKNdyzdxLH4dFaA First video is (part of) the superstructure of 42082 with the supplied gears. Second video is the same thing, but with old(er) gears from my collection. You might have to turn up the volume a bit, and through a video the difference is not as big as in real life, but there's clearly a difference. Less rattle and everything works very noticeably smoother.

Interesting. With the naked eye I couldn't notice any thickness differences. What gears did you compare? The old and new design, or were they both new design with one just being older than the other? Any idea from what set/year your new (thicker) gear is?

Haha, it wasn't meant as a tip perse but cool it worked out that way So, just to clarify/sum up a bit. I tested 3 gears: Old design New design, old batch (maybe 2 years old or so) New design, new batch (one from my recently purchased 42082) The old design works best, but the new design/old batch works fine too. A little more rough than the old design one, but very much acceptable. It's the newest one from my 42082 that works horrible. So much so (in my opinion at least) that I think lesser experienced builders would note it too. However, they probably aren't experienced enough to know that... it isn't supposed to be that way and they end up with a model that rattles and doesn't work very smoothly. Seems to me that would be a shame, since Lego Technic can work very well. So I was wondering if I just happened to have gears from a somehow wrong batch. And if so, how widespread those gears are.

Yeah, I feel like the problematic gears from my 42082 were worst when sandwiched between two liftarms. I don't think I have a scale precise enough to measure a difference, if any. Yeah. I compared three gears. The new ones from my set 42082, the same ones but from an older set and the old-old ones with the previous design. The oldest ones clearly worked the best. But even the older new ones (new design) (if that makes sense) worked noticeably better than the new ones from my 42082.

Last week I bought said 42082. While building the chassis, I noticed that mechanisms using part 18575 tan bevel gear 20 tooth were working a bit rough. The gears made a rattling sound, and didn't work very well. Well, they worked and did their job, but not how I expected it. I thought I was just being picky and continued on. But the more I used those gears, the more it caught my attention. Until somewhere in the superstructure I decided to compare them to the same gear but form my collection instead of set 42082. I made a simple test setup compare the old and new gear (please note that with old I just mean the same gear but from an older set). And low and behold, the new gear worked very noticeably worse than the old one. The new one made a much harder rattling sound and it turned less smooth. It felt like it was popping into each gear (like a click hinge, but less clicky) instead of turning smoothly. The old one worked perfectly fine. I then decided to break down the superstructure I had so far to replace all the tan bevel gears with older ones from my collection. And the result: everything worked very noticeably better, smoother and less noisy. I find this very peculiar. How is it possible that this batch of gears I received works not as good? They seem exactly the same as all the other ones I have. I was wondering if anyone here who recently (or maybe last year even, as my set is technically a 2018 set I have no idea when it was produced) had similar issues with this gear? I also sent a message to Lego about this btw.

I try to take that into account when creating instructions, but oftentimes designers (in general, not specifically onecase) don't want to change their design too much. And understandably so, the model was almost always designed not with selling (instructions) as a goal. But, I can tell you that models I work on I do try to keep rare parts, high lot numbers etc. to a minimum by working together with the designer. The Monarch used to be even more expensive to make :P Also, the reason the new Lego set has much less pieces than the Monarch is twofold I think: 1) most importantly the inner frame is made of technic parts. It's honestly a great frame and efficient on parts usage yet very stable (at least from the looks of it). And secondly: tile usage. The Lego model is a lot more studded on the outside. The Monarch is using a ton of tiles to cover up the studs.

https://rebrickable.com/sets/compare/slow/?1-set=MOC-9018&1-inv=19040&1-user_list=&2-set=MOC-23556&2-inv=34177&2-user_list=

Extremely late reply, but... yes. Yes that's right

A bit late, but just wanted to confirm to you that the Monarch uses the same planet pieces

Yes they are

That's very true. Both builders have completely different building styles. Both inside and outside are very different, even though they represent the same model (a Star Destroyer). And there is certainly no 'best' design. They're so different, they're both great in their own right. Like choosing between a Ferrari or a Lamborghini

I like to use the LDraw import in Mecabricks and then using the Mecabricks render-farm. The downside though, is that not all LDraw parts are available in Mecabricks (yet) and that LDcad flexible parts can't be imported either.

Please post LDD files of Lego sets in this topic: I'll remove this post when it's posted over there. Thank you

I believe mpdcenter has an option to flatten an mpd model into a single model.

You can open both models in LDcad, then go to the submodel you want to copy and select all parts (CTRL+A) and copy them (CTRL+C). Then go the model to which you want to copy the submodel and create a new submodel and paste all the parts (CTRL+V)

Exporting to Blender is free and if you know your way around Blender, you can do everything you can pay for, for free and that's perfectly fine. Many users however, don't have the knowledge nor the computer horsepower to do that and that's who the feature is mainly (I think) for. You can pay for the knowledge, time-saving and the rendering hardware, not the render itself. I mean, that's the case with almost everything that costs money. For example, I can also build my own furniture. But then I have to spend time learning about how to build proper furniture, not to mention that my first set would probably look real ugly. I could also go to a store, buy some pre-made furniture and be done (and happy) with it. If you don't wanna pay for that, or just enjoy the experience of building it yourself, no problem whatsoever either.

The same connection was discussed here too. I think it's a semi-'illegal' connection that found its way into an official model.

There's texmap for textures right?

I want to add a disadvantage (for me personally): the file format of stud.io is 'closed'. Yes, in reality it's an LDraw file with some added stuff, but I just don't like the idea/attitude of taking an open-source file-format, adding a bit to it and then hiding it behind passwords. If it was a completely custom format; sure do whatever you like, but this is just a bit childish (in my personal opinion). Other than that, it is a nice piece of software.

LDraw.org released the 2nd parts update of this year. With 540 new parts! A preview of all the new pars can be seen here. The update can be downloaded here. And more information about the parts update can be found here. Enjoy!

What I usually do when I need to make a parts list from a digital file (either LDD or LDraw) is uploading it into a custom list at Rebrickable. In my experience they have the best mapping data between LDD/LDraw/Bricklink and can easily convert between different formats.