Stereo

It could just as well be a white elastic, round the blue piece then through both axle holes. Not really needing to be wire.

https://rebrickable.com/parts/63869/technic-axle-and-pin-connector-perpendicular-triple/ it's these with towball-pins in them.

I imagine it's more of the flywheel motorcycles, same as 60333 Bathtub Stunt Bike, where it's mostly a custom fairing piece. Could be moved to 4 wheel flywheel chassis though.

I appreciate the reply! They're numbered Algoma Central (AC104 etc.) but owned by CN from what I understand. Yeah, the brake discs are an interesting oddity. The dark gray underside is more compromise to get the stripes to work. I would say the approximate 'right' amounts are 4 plates of LBG on the cars, 1 plate LBG on the locomotive, but between the baseplate and profile bricks, the cars get 5, so the locomotive makes up the same stack as 2 LBG, 2 DBG, and 1 empty space instead of the bottom half of a train base, so the rear truck needs a black pin on tile to be inobtrusive. It would be LBG, DBG, black, except I unexpectedly ran out of 1x8 or longer black plates. If I do lower the cars, the upper layer of DBG will hopefully be easy to remove. The door window has hollow studs on top that are used to revert the 1/2 stud offset, I'll see if I have any more dark red jumpers to try lowering it. Though I'm a little worried about touching those windows, they were in sets in the brittle red/brown era and one of them's already shattered when being shipped to me.

I dunno if I even agree with the basic point that they've stopped using it, there's lots of system on recent Technic sets. For example I've highlighted the tiles/slopes used on the Jesko released this summer. Maybe a quarter of the bodywork. Though I suppose I agree that it's pretty much all attached with 1/2 pins, so it's not really structural.

In the broadest sense, this is modified from the set 60051 Passenger Train. I wanted something more locally relevant, and the Agawa Canyon Tour Train has a fairly stylish livery. So this is 6 by 30 stud cars all around. Due to the train baseplates, bogie plates etc. available, I've chosen to build one locomotive and two passenger cars. Typically the real train runs with 3 locomotives and around 15-20 passenger cars. It runs a point to point route in Northern Ontario, including the namesake Agawa Canyon, and the remote destination is not much more than a washroom and some historical items from the railroad, so it runs locomotives at both ends and returns without turning around. Most of the train is formerly Colorado Ski Train equipment, including the EMD F40PH locomotives and the passenger cars that match its paint scheme. The front and rear of F40PH have a combination of angles that are a challenge to imitate in Lego, especially at 6 wide, so I've mostly stuck to what needed to happen to get the correct configuration of running lights. The front has some tiles placed at funny angles, and the rear is built partly upside-down. The windshield is snugly inserted without being connected to any studs, to get it at an angle. The real train's red is brighter and pinker, but not to the point of being Magenta, and that colour has less parts available, so I've built it in Dark Red. The roof of the real locomotives is technically satin black, but in most photos it reflects the sky so strongly that I felt like Sand Blue was a reasonable substitute. As you might have guessed from the IR dome, it's running Power Functions, and the rear half of the roof lifts off for access; the rearward ventilation fan can also be clicked to turn on the power brick, though there's no way to see whether it's on. An interesting feature of the passenger cars is that they're designed to make stops at locations with no platform, so stairs lead right down to track level from each door. Each car is named after a location in the area, which is what the red plate in the middle of the side represents. One aspect I'm not really happy with is how tall the locomotive looks in direct side view. The whole train's essentially a half-brick higher than it "should" be for how tall it is, because all the wheels are the same size and it's a little too large for the passenger cars in this scale. I do have plans to take a crack at that; I'll post an update once I've tried them out and can comment on any problems and results. I designed it in Studio, and found a couple issues when building it in bricks, so I should be able to post some low-effort instructions once I've synchronized. It seems to be 95% fine with R40 track (sometimes it decouples through switches, I think because the trucks have the magnets mounted so far away), but I've photographed it on an R104 corner. Here's a photo of the real train to give you an idea. Descent to Montreal River by Billy Wilson, on Flickr

Depending which clues you weight more, https://rebrickable.com/sets/6736-1/beach-lookout/?inventory=1#comments Beach Lookout or https://rebrickable.com/sets/6563-1/gator-landing/?inventory=1#comments Gator Landing seems like options. I think Gator Landing is the only set with the black suit + red 1x1x5 bricks.

Could be 202 at the Porsche/Ferrari GT3 scale, or 207 with similar motorization to 42176... If it matches Dom's Charger then I'd expect it to be more like the 1200 piece $120 range.

I found a local printer for them, I'm still calling them "#3" and "#4" but actually it turned out the truck wheels are slightly different in dimension from the ones meant to go on axles, so more specifically it's 1 and 2 plates lower diameter than the regular kind, rather than in the standard aftermarket wheel dimensions. In short summary, both sizes work fine in the trucks, though the smaller ones leave less than one plate clearance below the train. I'll post about it in a topic once I have the train built, as it's mostly an aside to that.

42204 (810 pcs. | $59.99) 42205 (732 pcs. | $59.99) 10 dollar increase on the formerly $50 cars? I suppose it was inevitable, they've been the same for a while.

You'll need both remotes of course (older sets use infrared, new ones use Bluetooth) but they can be on the same tracks, in the same room etc. with no problem. Any sets that use magnetic couplers can exchange cars between them, they're compatible. If you want to run double-headed/multiple unit trains then the new system is more suitable; they can have custom firmware loaded to communicate between each other and target the same speeds.

I don't think twice about paying for instructions if it's something I want to build. I suppose it helps that I'm rarely building more than one MOC in a month. Maybe if it was based on a $20 set I'd be less likely but people don't seem to charge for the small mocs anyway.

I don't know for sure if they're 2L or 3L pins, I think 3L makes more sense symmetrically. These are the parts my copy of Stud.io doesn't know about in Bright Flame Orange though. The 3L axle with stop is probably most interesting, it's never been recoloured? The black rubber parts handle most of the actual flex, I suppose the pins would give a bit but this structure's already a tiny bit off exact (the 7L beams are slightly too long) so it might take up the looseness.

I was gonna say something about how they managed to cut the part count on a 12 piece set, but I'm not actually sure why it has the 1x2 plate with bar up, so fair enough. Is it a hat stand?

I think the bottom half of the train base is what it can eliminate, yeah. Just eyeballing where the wheels are, it'd probably be ok to have it under a lower train base on larger curves but not R40. I suppose I can 3d print 8 each of #4 and #3 and see where that gets me. That's a longer term project though, as I've found out Shapeways is out of business, so I'll need to find a new source for accurate prints. Luckily the only really key dimension is the 2mm hole for the metal axle and I can drill them to size if needed, anything else being correct just makes it roll more smoothly.

Part updates are separate from version, you'll get the parts automatically when they're available. It checks when you start the program.

Nothing modern, but this tire is narrower at about the same diameter. https://rebrickable.com/parts/32078/tyre-70-x-28-futuristic/

They work for me, but only after a few refreshes.

The rule about voting 1 point for your own entry is making my game theory senses tingle. If the winner has a large enough margin it won't matter. But it potentially sets up a prisoner's dilemma. If everyone cooperates and submits a vote, they're all equal. But if someone "defects" and doesn't vote, it gives them up to an 18 point advantage over people who did vote. For example, if everyone approximately agrees what order to rank the entries, 1st and 2nd place will give each other 19 points and themself 1 point, and it's fine, both get 20 points. But if 2nd declines to vote, they get 19 and 1st gets 1 point and so 2nd is more likely to win. I suppose a couple options are to just make it mandatory to vote in order to win. Or require participants to rank their own entry #1, which feels weird but incentivizes people to vote, and again if every participant submits a vote they're still all equal. Or instead of doing points total, use the average score of votes, not counting the vote for their own entry. Which, going back to the 1st/2nd place thing, if 1st has (1,19,19,19,...) and 2nd has (19,1,18,18,...) they get 19 and ~18 after removing the 1 votes. If 2nd doesn't vote, they have (1,19,19,...) and (19,18,18,...) and the averages are still 19 and ~18 after removing the 1 self-vote. Anyway, I did vote, this is just the kind of stuff I think about for fun.

A quick survey of my loose 1x2 bricks points at it being a pretty specific era, maybe 2005-2010, of having the hole on that part in particular. None of the 'old colour' (light grey, brown) have it, some reddish brown and medium blue ones with an older underside printing style do have it, and then the ones with the most current underside (extra (C) LEGO, newer font) don't have the hole. 1x2 plates seem to have the hole only on the 'newest' of those three, but longer plates have had them for a long time - quickly found examples of 1x4 and 1x6 plates from the '90s that have the holes, and current ones still have the holes. I've noticed this before and I'm pretty sure some of my '90s sets came with mixes of 1x6 that do and don't have holes. I think maybe I determined it based on having some set with a majority of my red 1x6 plates in my collection at the time, but the hole/no hole being too close to 50-50 to supply everything.

It's glued or whatever to the backdrop anyway, so they might have also glued the 2 of them with no gap.

I've looked around the third-party stores a bit, but it's always possible to get more specific on what you want, until nothing is right. Does anyone produce smaller wheels intended to work with the metal axles (in the 2878 holders)? I'm trying my hand at a 6 wide passenger train (digital-only so far) and coming up with an aesthetic issue where the locomotive's floor is a good bit higher than the passenger cars, seems like 33" wheels on the cars and 40" on the locomotive, so the livery (same height horizontal stripe on everything) doesn't want to sit in the right place, as it's basically the floor of the locomotive and the lower edge of the windows of the cars. Being able to lower the floor of the cars by a plate would help; the part substitution I have in mind is to go from #5 (small) to #3 diameter wheels, which would avoid needing custom holders. #3 is 1 plate smaller radius than #5, so the new flange is the same size as the original rolling surface. The side decorations I have mocked up here wouldn't work, but the coupler and truck in general do. A more complete solution would be #4 wheels in a holder that puts them 0.5 plate closer to the floor of the car, giving it this same height but with wheels that fill the space better, but making custom wheel holders seems like a much bigger job. In the meantime I'm probably just going to treat it as one of the quirks of 6-wide (like cars being half as long), it's just when I zoom out and look at the overall colour blocking of the livery that I'm not super happy with how much black 'underside' the locomotive has, and when I compare to reference photos, the one out-of-scale problem is that the entire train is 1-1.5 plates higher than it should be.

I like the studs for roof rivets, at least that's what I assume they are.

Specially designed to transport Chevy Vegas, they had it set up so fluids would only drain from the top rear corners so it could be loaded nose-down. https://www.motortrend.com/features/chevrolet-vega-vert-a-pac/

Haha, I always avoid them if I can, a few old sets (8860 and 8865 Test Car for sure) use them to mesh with the oldest differential style and I swap those to 12T bevels when I build them, interestingly they mostly work with each other. I've actually snapped a 12T in half in the distant past, so I don't trust the even thinner gears for any load. I've made instructions available on Rebrickable, with some minor parts differences from what I actually built, since I used parts I already have. https://rebrickable.com/mocs/MOC-194382/Stereog/tc27-heavy-duty-forklift/#details