RiGi

Care to elaborate on that last bit when there were at least fifteen other entries that also had side by side photos of both the original and remake, including @GerritvdG's 8835? And those side by side photos can work both for and against entries as they can highlight the differences between the models more clearly, as well as the similarities. You also talk about newcomers being discouraged from entering again - TC20 was my first contest and first MOC. I had such an enjoyable time building my model and had no expectations of doing well in the contest, and I was incredibly proud that so many people liked it. Having my entry singled out and insulted for no real reason actively discourages me from entering contests in future. As I understand it, having fun is meant to be the main objective of these contests, something which seems to have gotten lost in some of these posts.

By coincidence I also did an order on 21/1 and my non-bestseller parts arrived yesterday, so I would imagine yours should arrive shortly. Unlike the bestseller parts, I didn't have any communication from Lego that they had shipped, they just turned up unexpectedly!

Nice choice! I loved a bit of Thunderbirds back in the day and this looks good so far, so I'm excited to see how this progresses!

Weird! I couldn't even see it as showing up as out of stock when I checked earlier, but it's there now (but still out of stock)

Finally! Still no sign of the 3x19 frame on the UK PaB though... *eyeroll*

I remember I had 3 of the 2780 black pins spare after bag one and thinking it was a bit odd, but after checking the instructions I couldn't see any missing from anywhere so I think it's deliberate to have 3 spare (possibly because there's none spare in the next couple of bags). I had a couple spare after a later bag as well (bag four sounds about right).

Does anyone know if the new 20t gears run smoother than the old tan 20t bevel gears when meshed with a 16t gear in the configuration below? I always find this combination never runs as smoothly as other gear combinations, and from reading other threads on here it seems to be caused by the newer mould of the bevel gear (which is all I seem to have). I'm hoping the new 20t gear fixes this issue!

Awesome work, I absolutely love this model!

Thanks! Making semi-trailing arm suspension would definitely pose a challenge given my very basic mechanical knowledge and limited MOC-ing experience (Although it would be pretty awesome if I could manage to pull it off!) I can only find one example online of it being used in an MOC, and that's @nicjasno's Ford Sierra RS 500. Fortunately, his YouTube channel has the livestream recordings from when he made that MOC, so I might try and find some time to watch them to try and get a better understanding of how it works mechanically and how it translates into Lego...

Thanks! 5+r and a centre diff is the ideal scenario as that's what the real car has, so I'd like to keep that if possible, but it'll involve a bit of reworking of the gearbox at some point. Supercars definitely have their place (the 42056 911 GT3 RS was the thing lured me back from the wilderness of my dark ages...), but there's plenty of other interesting cars out there to MOC, so I'm glad to offer a bit of variety! In terms of an update, I've made a decent amount of progress (after far too many hours of tinkering ) and I think I've finally got a front axle that I'm pretty happy with! In order to fit the engine in I had to place the steering rack back as far as possible whilst trying to keep the bracing restricted to a pretty limited path: I then had a choice to make for the engine position, either place it partially over the steering rack which would have meant it sitting very close to the height of the bonnet, or place it in front of the steering rack but be able to mount it 2 studs lower. In the end I went for the second option as that way it'll give me more space to add some details on top of and around the engine later on: In an ideal world I would have preferred it to be one stud further back, but I'm scuppered by the half stud length of axle that sticks out from crank at that end. Finally, added some bracing and the suspension top mounts: (Orange axle connects to the engine, yellow axle connects to the diff, steering from the u-joint above) So it now has decent suspension geometry (positive caster, negative camber, kingpin inclination & ackermann), drive, steering and an engine! I suspect I'm going to have to route the steering to the steering wheel with two 90° bends via bevel gears rather than using u-joints, but that should actually make it easy to add a HoG steering knob on top of the dashboard so I think I can live with that. Next job - try and rework the gearbox to add a central diff and make reverse gear run smoother. I also briefly considered reworking the rear suspension to be more realistic, but after looking into semi-trailing arm suspension I realised that that's way beyond my knowledge level right now ) As always, any suggestions/critique are greatly appreciated! Thanks

Thanks for the reply. Given that I'm going for the rally version rather than the road going version now, I don't need to worry about fitting in rear seats. That means more room available in the rear of the car, so I'm tempted to rework the gearbox to include a central diff now in keeping with the real car. That's a good point. If I did rework the gearbox, I might change it from a 5+R to a straight 6-speed (or even just keep it as a 5-speed and lose reverse) which would help it run a bit smoother as the 3 8T gears used for the reverse gear do put up a bit of resistance currently.

Thanks! Thanks for the input! This is going to be a purely manual model, so hopefully there won't be as much stress on the components than there would be in an RC model. I was conscious of the bracing around the diff and the potential for it to sag a bit, so I deliberately used longer axles and doubled up on supporting liftarms at the ends of them to try and minimise this: I'm hoping that this will be sufficiently strong enough for a manual model, but I'll definitely keep in mind your idea of swapping the 16:16 gearing with a 12:20 gearing. I presume if I went down that road I would also need to apply the same gearing on the rear axle with it being 4WD? In a worst case scenario, there's probably enough room for the engine if I move the diff back up so that it's directly connected to the driven axles and use the newer 4L CV joints - but I don't have any, and I'm trying to avoid doing too many parts orders!

Progress Update: after much tinkering I think I've finally got the front axle geometry setup just right! Head on, everything looks to be as parallel as possible: I managed to get a smidgen of negative camber, which is hopefully enough to have an affect: I ended up reducing the caster angle to 1 stud as it was getting tricky to line the steering rack up in such a way that didn't create toe in/out. Now the steering angle is much closer to being parallel with the axle and the wheel alignment is much better (the steering rack is fixed in place right now so I could check the wheel alignment more easily): I decided to drop the diff down 2 studs to create more room to fit the fake engine in (the axle with the orange connectors will connect the engine to the gear box) One downside I've found to my wheel hub design is that if I use 4L axles to connect the wheels, they have a tendency to slip off the u-joints after a while. The best solution I've come up with so far is to use a 5.5L axle with stop and use a 3x3 disc as a sort of wheel cover to hide the excess axle length: Hopefully over the bank holiday weekend I can spend some time finalising the bracing, steering and fake engine! As always, if anyone more knowledgeable than me (i.e. almost everyone ) spots any areas for improvement then I'll gladly take on board any advice! Thanks

This may be a bit too similar to the TC20 studless contest, but how about a "scale-up a classic System set" type theme? You have the overall bounding box to stop models getting too big, you get a variety of models to keep (most) people happy and you get a fair comparison of models by including a comparison of the looks with the original System set as part of the scoring criteria. But unlike TC20, people can go nuts and add as many functions as they like within the confines of the bounding box!

Thanks! I'm only really used to the standard Lego double-wishbone suspension, so it's been pretty interesting learning about and building something more realistic! Thanks for the comments! The caster angle works out at ~12.5 degrees with a two stud offset or ~6 degrees with a one stud offset. I read in another thread on here that recommended ~10 degrees so I went with the two stud offset. Although I did also read that most real cars tend to use around 3-5 degrees, so a one stud offset may be more realistic. Yeah, the two yellow shocks are super stiff, but that was mostly for proof of concept of the dual-spring setup. I don't have any of the soft shocks right now, but I'm planning on getting the 42139 All Terrain Vehicle at some point, so that will provide me with plenty of soft shocks to play around with! The main reason for changing the U-joints to CV joints is because I noticed that the axles tends to start slipping out of the 12t gears in the diff after a while, so I want to use them so the axles have that extra wiggle-room. I'll still keep the U-joints at the hub end for the extra steering angle. Out of interest, as this is going to be a manual model and not motorised, would adding camber have much noticeable effect? Or is that something that would only be noticeable at the higher cornering speeds you would get with an RC model?