Lego Nerd

Thank you, everyone, for your comments and compliments! @Jurss, It does have front seats; I removed them to show the engine, which wound up being built very low into the car. I would say that if I could rebuild the car, I would try to make the engine and seats more realistic, however. Yes the half-width liftarms are used very heavily throughout the MOC, and half-stud offsets help the bodywork look better and provide much of the structure of the front suspension. I appreciate your feedback! I'll do my best to show the suspension; it's a little hard because of the small size and compact nature of the vehicle. Here's the front suspension: As my pushrods, I used the 5x1 Steering Arm connected to the lower A-arm. Steering was a simple crank setup. In this view, you can see the suspension compressed on one side. Here is the side view (seats and significant bodywork removed). Just to the right of the vertical rod (steering), you can see the end of the 45 degree section. I used the 2x4 Liftarm to hold the springs lengthwise in the car, but rotated at that 45 degree angle to match the rockers and pushrods. So the way it works is: the lower A-arm pushes up on the pushrod, which rotates the rocker arm. The rocker arm then pushes back on the spring. Here's the rear suspension with some bodywork removed. The wheel is mounted on one half of the CV joint, which is the first articulation (at the hub) needed for the suspension to happen. The black 12t gear rotates the tan one, providing the next articulation for the suspension. The links for the rear suspension rotate parallel to this axle, but the stress-bearing members are above and below the axle so that the rotation is free at all times. Going back, the next black 12t spins a tan 12t, and here we find the differential. The differential rotates a 20t tan gear just visible on the right side of the differential. This gear actually connects to the engine's crankshaft directly. @T Lego Thanks! I hope the pictures help! Do the pictures help? Would there be a better angle that you'd like to see? @syclone Thank you very much! I'm pretty happy with the way the front turned out, and I like the Brera as well.

Thank you very much! It is my first MOC submission, and it's been a blast finishing my first (shareable) model. Thanks for your comments; I wish the arches could have been better, but the suspension travel of the front wheels meant that they had to be high in order not to scrape when fully compressed. I was thinking of Crowkillers as well; his cars were an inspiration for me! The extending spoiler like that is pretty rare, but I got this idea from the Porsche Panamera GTS, whose spoiler rises up as well as extends sideways. In the Porsche, I imagine they used this solution to suit the car's styling. In mine, the spoiler kind of helped me nail down the car's styling ;-)

Hello everyone, I would like to present an experimental supercar which I have finally finished. A little bit of history: it started because I noticed that the various LEGO-designed cars with pushrod suspension start sagging overtime as the ball joints and other pieces become warped. Also, they tend to exert forces in undesirable ways; the pushrods on 8461 (Williams F1 racer) especially on the front tend to push the rocker arms up and down as opposed to transferring the force directly to a rocking motion. So in this supercar, I made the front suspension with pushrods use a 45-degree angle for the rocker arms so that the force would be more properly applied. The springs and rockers are visible towards the front of the car in this photo: A separate goal this project succeeded in accomplishing is making independent rear suspension with a differential and no floating axle in a very narrow chassis. The differential placed behind the wheels made for a very narrow chassis! Other features this car has are: Gullwing doors Opening rear hood and extentable spoiler And a miniature V8 engine Thanks for looking!

Yes. Works for me on Fedora 25 using Firefox.

@Doug72 gave a great answer, but I think there are a couple other possibilities unlocked if you don't connect the two halves of the turntable. Have a look at this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicyclic_gearing The first picture shows the standard setup. Now imagine the inside of the turntable as the outside (pink) ring. Then place the 8z gears (blue) on a carrier (green). Also, place an 8z gear as the center sun gear. Now if done right, there should be three possibilities of things to hold steady. Doug showed four of the possibilities, but now think of holding the sun gear in place and rotating the carrier. A single rotation of the carrier will spin the ring gear (inside of the turntable) once plus an additional 8 teeth for a total ratio of 1:1.33. When I did this I attached the carrier to one half of the turntable, so I spun that. Of course, it is difficult to hold the sun gear in place while rotating the rest around, but it can be done. Clear as mud?

If you want to increase speed somewhat, hold the innermost gear steady and rotate what holds the middle idler gears. See: http://gears.sariel.pl/ If you look at the picture of the planetary gears that he has, note that keeping the center (red) 16z gear stationary while rotating the 5L beam with the two idler gears on it will cause the yellow outer gear to rotate faster than the 5L beam.

Some vehicles use them in place of a portal axle; the builder uses a turntable and 8z gears inside to reduce the speed of the driven wheel and increase the torque after the driveline. Real vehicles use planetary gear sets quite a bit. For example, most automatic transmissions operate using several planetary gear sets; the various rings can be clamped by the transmission to make the different ratios. In fact, the Ford Model-T used a planetary gearbox operated by pedals. Also, many older cars (e.g. an MGB) had a manual transmission and a planetary overdrive operated by a switch. In that case, it lowered engine rpms -- so added speed. Subtractors also could be said to rely on planetary gearsets, and those are useful for tanks and other things with caterpillar tracks. Those allow tracked vehicles to be controlled using a motor for driving and a motor for steering (see some of Sariel's excellent tanks and this: http://sariel.pl/2009/01/subtractor/). Lastly, if the right part of the planetary gear set is held in place (the center with idler gears), it can be used to rotate two things in opposite directions, as in this set: http://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?S=8960-1#T=S&O={} The drill has two counter-rotating parts done using a planetary gear set. Does that answer anything?

Have you tried twisting the 4L rod? Also, sometimes using lots of the half-width 2L beams stacked on the remainder of the 4L as a grip can be enough to overcome the friction, and each individual beam can be removed one by one.

1: 10 12: 6 34: 4 20: 3 31: 2 21: 1

I second this. It's impressive, and has plenty of clever uses of pieces.

That's kind of an interesting question. According to this article, the castor in the front is to return the wheels back to center. I'm not really sure whether the back axle would need that, because the back axle would ordinarily only steer a few degrees. If it's easier, I would mostly copy the front suspension setup to use at the back. It might help the turning radius if your steering arms were shorter.

Does taking 8448 apart down to the chassis, and building a new body on it count? If so, I've done that far more than I've rebuilt any other set. But it's fun to do because even somebody without much skill can create a fairly good body out of the few panels and lots of flex axles included. The engine can easily be moved to either the front or the back, and the instructions for the functions are all given. And when all that is done, it's fun to play with.

The total height of the rears should be 30% of 345mm x2 + 20" (Probably what you meant to type). Try using this: https://tiresize.com/calculator/

Glad you like it It would be great if I could build both, but I'd have to somehow collect a lot of expensive/rare red pieces. IMO, it looks better in white than in red, based on picture comparisons, but that's just a personal taste.

I tried the Unimog tires on 8880 wheels, and they do fit together. The wheels are a bit narrower than the ordinary wheels used for the Unimog tires, so the sidewalls are a bit tilted in towards the wheel (about 1.5 mm on each side). The slippage of the tire on the rim isn't any greater than what normal Lego wheels and tires have.

I like how you solved the HOG issue with the roof. Both the convertible and the hardtop have clever placements of the steering knob. Great job!

Thanks guys! And Zblj, it would be my pleasure if you borrowed the setup.

I've driven a garden tractor, a quad, a dirt trike, and a dirt bike. But for most of those, I don't have the set. For the quad, though, I wound up getting the pull-back motor quad, but not because I'd ridden the real thing. (Actually, now that I think about it, I almost want to get some of these because I've used the real thing. You aren't secretly an agent for Lego, right ?

Great! I'm impressed by how the boat doesn't capsize easily.

I think I see what's going on, so the explanation made sense. I think I just might borrow your gearbox and try to adapt it to the Porsche. At any rate, I am amazed by what you've been able to do Are you going to do a gapless body? It might be cooler in a way if you left gaps to see the mechanisms through. The way I see it, the Porsche will be a very popular set, because regardless of whether it works or not, it looks good, and it's a replica of a famous car. So it could be more expensive once it's discontinued, much like the 599 Fiorano. I think that in Jeroen's case, he could justify buying the Porsche in order to use its parts for the AM DB11. The preliminary picture of the body looks great, and orange isn't a color we get much, but whatever you do, I'll be watching this build.

Great review, Jim! I was amazed at the amount of work you put into it Thanks for answering my question. I may try something at some point. It looks like there should be room for 4WD. So does it roll in first gear?

Here are some, in daylight: There are more pictures, and in better resolution, at my BrickSafe. Thanks! And what makes them better in my opinion is that I was using Lego lights, too. Good question, but not easy to answer; I was collecting parts for more than one car, and I used pins and axles from my collection. But my guestimate is that it was about 200 USD for the rest of the parts. And I bought 42039 for its flex axles, wheels, and white pieces. So all told it probably cost about 230USD. Basically, what I saw was that it requires some 17 #3 connectors, and 10 of the connector 44, so red would be expensive. Also, when I made it, black panels were more expensive than red, and the Heavy Lift Helicopter hadn't been released with some Black 19 flex axles, so black would have been expensive as well. If you have any more questions or feedback, feel free to add them below.

A while back, there was this topic, about doing some of Crowkillers cars in white. That, and the fact that white was cheaper than either red or black, gave me the idea to build the Porsche in white. There were a couple modifications I had to make, but those were fairly straight forward. Of course, the 44 connector isn't available in white, so I made a black accent line that goes over the roof, and made the mirrors black. Now for the pictures: More pictures are at my BrickSafe (see sig).

April Fool's joke. It's been this way since last April. Hopefully the mods will fix this soon.

Actually, it's been like this since April 1. The title didn't get edited back yet, but the first post, which on the 1st said "HoS" was edited on April 2 back to "HoF". The HoF itself was changed to HoS on the 1st, too, and was reverted to HoF in short order.