2GodBDGlory

The scale of that is really cool! Those are some seriously serious bearings! Would a series of standard 2L worm gears not work for the thread cutting feed? Or maybe the 32L axle that would limit you to just wouldn't be long enough. I was planning on using 2L worm gears for that on my lathe project, but before figuring out whether I could make it work or not, I realized that I don't actually have enough worm gears left over either way, so I think I'll have to leave thread cutting out of my model, unfortunately. (Actually, as I type this, I'm realizing there's another option. Instead of having a full-length worm gear, I could have a full-length rack with a standard worm gear that translates along it. It wouldn't be realistic, but it might be workable) I can't wait to see what comes of this!

PU LEDs have a pinhole in the splitter block? Somehow that slipped past me until now!

I'd say probably more on the truck/body-on-frame SUV side myself. They seem a lot more practical to be the only vehicle someone owns, they're more durable, they're easier to fix, and they're better in Canadian winters, though their fuel economy is likely a bit worse. Though I guess practicality is probably not part of your question! I'd still say 4x4s, though That's what I love with my '95 Geo Tracker (Suzuki Sidekick/Vitara)! Only a 1989 (the launch year) level of technology to go wrong, simple mechanicals, and plenty of space to work (Only an I-4 under the hood when foreign markets had room for a small V6, and then just the general non-cramped characteristics of longitudinal-engine, body-on-frame designs!

This new electronics system is interesting! I really, really can't see Lego using these motors in Technic sets, though, just due to their extremely studded body shells. Could studless motors with the same functionality come to Technic? That seems more possible, but I still don't think it too likely. Internal batteries for every motor would be seriously expensive for a non-educational set, and it seems like the whole ecosystem is too education/programming based to be an at all workable system for Technic sets. Still, it's interesting to see that Lego is developing new electronics! It would definitely seem that PU is ending its run, so it'll be interesting to see what replaces it.

That's pretty cool to integrate a speed governor like that! Bricksafe is also a great website for hosting Lego images

Or you could use parts 27940 or 22961 with support/blocking on the other side:

This should be cool to see!

Yeah, there's not any little arm to catch on the inside, as on the previous driving rings. Yeah, that's true. The solution from Rebrickable does look fairly workable, at least!

Hmm, that got me thinking of this design from @Gray Gear: His design is optimized for a 6-speed, but it's got a clever sliding part to automatically prevent the gearbox from having multiple gears engaged at once. Could that work in your case?

Thanks! One thing I wonder about is whether or not it would work to just set it up so that sliding those selector forks would require sliding an axle through an axlehole, just to add some friction. It shouldn't be hard to implement, but I guess the question is just whether that much friction would limit the fast shifting you're looking for. You could easily swap for the old style of 2L driving ring with its friction axle joiner (you'd also have to go to old 16T gears then), or new 3L rings, though. What advantage were you hoping to get from these new ones?

I'm pretty sure the Ducati did that because of the larger scale the engine was built to. Usually there's the three-stud spacing between the engine block pinholes and the driveshaft, but they wanted to make the engine look bigger on the Ducati, so they did a five-stud spacing. The issue then is that the normal 3L connecting rod part wouldn't be long enough, and I'm not sure there was any way to build one out of existing pieces. Obviously a new 5L connecting rod part would have been the better solution, but I can understand why they went the way they did. Though I suppose one other advantage to this design is that there's no longer any simulated cooling fins. Now we can finally build model water-cooled engines, I guess!

Impressive progress!

Looks like the sharing settings on that aren't set up properly; it's not giving me permission to view it. Here's a couple images of something that could be worth looking into: It's just using a fixed shock absorber to make it snap in and out of position. It seems to work fairly well, but I'm not sure about your specific application. If you're getting high RPM out of your vacuum engines, I wouldn't want to see this driveshaft spinning quickly, since you'd probably get wear between the driving ring and the shock absorber. It's a thought, at least!

It is a little sad to lose the option of putting grille tiles or something on top of the engine, or just something that looks like a valve cover, but there'll be plenty of the old style floating around for the foreseeable future, so it shouldn't be an issue to get a hold of them for those niche situations

Wow, very nice! The level of internal detail is very impressive, and the total look of the car manages to be both plausible and very dramatic!

I've got a bunch of pneumatics from Mould King, and in some ways they're really nice (Low friction, and metal shafts on even the smallest cylinders), but there are some other issues. For one, the cylinders seem to stick in one position when the model is sitting, and need a fair bit of pressure or manual movement to get them moving at the start of a play session. For another, the tips tend to pull out of the metal shafts, but that can be fixed with some super glue. I'm quite pleased with their value-for money overall, though!

It does look a bit nicer without studs, but I am disappointed that they didn't optimize the design much further while they had the chance. It's still got the bulky profile on the bottom that allows it to be placed on top of a plate, but that's a seriously irrelevant connection.

Very nice indeed! Such smooth paneling. That is a fun usage of the 16L axle! I'm currently living in an apartment right across the road from a GMC dealer, so when I was watching the video on YouTube last night, all I had to do was look up to see a real-world GMC Hummer EV! (Though this one was the SUV version) out the window!

Yeah, those towball parts are in the F1 cars, I believe. Those will be extremely useful! Though more so the female one. That yellow part seems like something that could be quite useful! Half stud offsets in some situations are strangely hard. I get the feeling that the other four parts are all meant to interface together. The gear with pin might go on top of the bottom right piece, and then mesh with the other gear. To me, it looks most like a heavy-duty joint for large mechs, but I guess we'll see! Was that the one used in the F1 cars?

Looks impressive! There's a lot of functions in the original set, so shrinking it must have been a challenge. It really does look like the original!

Well, I'm back, with the 2024 edition of this book! I didn't really change much other than adding the 2024 sets, but boy were there a lot of sets this year! I wrote about 28 different sets, which is double the 14 I was doing when I started doing yearly updates around 2018. I am honestly considering ending the project here, though. I don't have the same free time I did as a teenager, and it feels like I'm trying to squish an ever-increasing number of hobbies into an ever-decreasing amount of time. Unfortunately, working on this book is no longer top of my priorities, so I just mean this to be notice that there's a real chance I'll never end up writing a 2025 update. Still, that's just hypothetical at this point, and we've got a brand-new 2024 edition, so enjoy! https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hB42i69V3VjkVZs4FikqIRWEA3zmdASY/view

Generally no. Some people go all-out with modification, and many will use specialist third-party parts if they fill a gap Lego can't really fill, and others use only official Lego. It's uncommon to use modified parts for basic structure. You're free to do as you wish, though!

Thanks! Probably some kind of Styrofoam type thing would work (I think I've seen it on other Lego machining projects), but I don't really have any in a suitable shape, and I don't especially want to buy any. Sorry about that! There's definitely room for two lathes with different approaches, though

I was a little hesitant to join this contest, given that I'm deep into another project at the moment, but Eurobricks contests are too good to pass up! The plan is to build a model of a lathe for machining metal, something like this: It's not something I've built anything like before, and there seems to be a lot of room for interesting gearing. The rough plan is to include: 6+ gears to choose from for spindle drive Universal chuck Sliding, adjustable tailstock Manual (crank), motorized (rack gear), and motorized thread-cutting (worm gear drive) carriage movement Manual crosslide Manual top slide It would be definitely cool to make it actually capable of machining something, but I don't think I have anything of softness so extreme that I could machine it with a Lego cutting element. It might be worth trying to mount a razor blade in a 3D printed part, but that's obviously outside the Lego-only stipulations for the contest rules, so that wouldn't be a part of my entry. I really have very little experience with lathes, being limited to playing with them for a few days in high school Machine Shop, and then watching a guy for maybe half an hour last summer, so hopefully I can pick up a good enough understanding of them to make a quality model. Anyways, this is the progress I've made so far, which is pretty much limited to just the chuck. It's a 4-jaw universal chuck, for gripping objects of various shapes, and like a real-world one, each jaw is manually adjusted using a screw. This requires some care to ensure that the material you're machining is properly lined up, but allows for gripping non-round shapes easily. I chose it, mainly because it seemed like the simplest one to accurately translate into Lego at a reasonable scale: The sliding jaws of the chuck are actuated using sliding worm gears, controlled by the yellow half-bushes on the outside of the ring. These worm gears engage with locked 8T gears on the main frame. To prevent the worm gear from being crooked, as they would be if both 8T gears were at right angles, one gear in each pair is locked in place via its axle, while the other one is technically free to rotate, except that a beam on its other side takes some of the space between its teeth, locking it in a position where a gap is meshing with the worm gear, rather than a tooth. I look forward to continuing this model!

That is wacky, hilarious, and awesome! I'm curious to see what ideas you have for developing it further