allanp

Oh yes, the flip up lid and the desirable parts displayed in their own special bits tray, yup, that'll get ya!

@Jurss I'm not sure it's all whining, we are trying to figure out why the set is so expensive without knowing enough about the set to do that, so basically were all just chatting! But let's not stop lest this place die if inactivity! But you are right in that it most likely won't change the price, only a significant drop on sales will do that. But Technic is a unique theme in many ways, what fans want from a 700 euro Technic set will be very different to what fans want from a 700 euro star wars set, and maybe there is some use to us saying what that is. They certainly don't have to obey our every wish but that doesn't mean they are not listening.

Well the old rumour was that it would have 1 kg of counterweight pieces. How much do the models say that will cost?!

Captain, I believe this ship is drifting!

I tend to find reviewers all have their own different biases, unbrickme wants a set with a gearbox for example. We all have our biases and opinions and I don't see why reviewers should be expected to be any different. But I really don't sense any bias in favour of Lego due to being given sets "for free". I say "for free" in quotations because going by my hourly rate at work, the time to film and edit a review for YouTube would cost Lego more than the set is worth, so it's not really for free, it's compensation for the time and effort spent making the review. Secondly, I haven't based a buying decision based on a reviewers own opinions of a set, but rather by seeing the sets functions in action, seeing how realistically the functions are recreated and the parts list. These are things that remain the same regardless of if the reviewer is "sucking up" to Lego or not. It is true that sucking up for freebies happens in other industries, especially movies, but Lego can't hide the final product from their audience like you can with a movie. So, as much as I might sometimes disagree with a reviewer, the fact is that I can disagree, and the idea that reviewers are giving false positive reviews for free Lego is nonsense, at least from the reviewers I have seen.

I wanted to display the UCS millennium falcon on my wall, so I added some beams to the inner structure that hang out the bottom and make a wall hook (also out of Lego) and just hung it there, it's been there for 3 years, definitely the cheapest solution but it's a pain to dust! I am very tempted to make a plexiglass cover or something. It's pretty easy to cut and smooth the edges to a professional looking finish with a plane and scrapers (the edge of a metal rule makes a nice scraper btw).

Well there might be a silicone shortage which is pumping up the prices of electronics but that doesn't make it more valuable to me as the customer, at least not when it comes to non-essential things (and especially speaking as a fan of the more mechanical Technic, not the more electronic and coding based mindstorms), but I have a hard time believing that price is accurate anyway. If it is correct, even with my tendency to come up with fanciful new parts, it's hard to think of new parts that could both be reasonably expected from Lego but at the same time worth that price. Actual hydraulics with hydraulic motor drives for the tracks, winches and slew ring would be worth that price, but I don't think we could expect that from Lego. We could probably expect a metal hook, but that's not worth that price. A combination of a new motor with the power of the buggy motor (and it comes with many of them), metal hook, and a physical controller with a number of fully proportional dual axis joysticks and many many buttons, then we are somewhere in the ball park of that price. But wouldn't it be better to release such a controller as a separate PU accessory anyway? It's too early to get too annoyed with the price though until we know more about the crane and know for sure that is the actual price. I do hope the price matches the product though, I haven't bought a flagship technic set since 42100! While they release 18+ sets and super expensive sets, my favourite sets have been neither of those but the sets just below the flagship, such as the airbus, material handler and pneumatic tow truck, and that not because they are smaller and cheaper, but because they have the heart of true Technic. I'd love for there to be a 400 Euro or 500 Euro Technic mega flagship with the same focus on mechanical representations of real life but have yet to see it from Lego.

Haha, nout wrong with a bit of banter

8288 is on pick a brick?! Or do you mean the boat weight?! I wonder if the new weight will be brick based or diecast metal like the old hook or the off center weight from control centre 1.

That picture with all 5 models makes me miss universal sets even more, excellent work.

The height decrease might not be a bad thing, and it also might be misleading in a way. Wasn't 42042 advertised as being a certain height but also came with an extra piece of boom to make it taller? This is pure speculation but there may have been some stability issues which lead to a safety issue with it falling over. We know Lego is obsessed with safety (4 screws in the technic hubs is ridiculous!). If there's any chance of a 5 foot tall model crane operated by a 10 year old falling over then they will probably rethink it. If however they include a few extra things then they can still release it as it was meant to be. If the included cables are long enough, if there are three winches included (upper boom/lower boom/hook), if enough counterweight is included aaaaaannnnddddd if extra boom sections are included, then they have circumvented any safety issues by saying look, here's the set and instructions and anyone with the desire to build it much taller than we say in the instructions is free to do so, but we didn't say they can do that so it's at there own discretion! Maybe that's why the advertised height has come down but the price hasn't? Maybe the redesign was to make it more modular and reconfigurable into different setups and heights for this reason? Also a very good point. This new crane should be able to lift way more and still look solid with no bending. It should fall over long before it breaks. And size isn't everything, well, maybe it is for a crane, but "big red" is one of my least favourite cranes despite being the biggest!

Maybe the mounting points for the cylinders will be different?

I'm not sure I follow. The description says 3 movements and claw and seat rotation. To me that reads as 1) up/down 2) forwards/backwards 3) rotation and then we have claw open/closed and seat. But descriptions have been inaccurate before. Descriptions from promobricks tend to be more reliable though, so I wonder what they will say of it.

That's very well done. With 5 functions that work well in a smallish model it definitely has that old school technic vibe. The placement of the controls is good too!

I did think that also (didn't want to mention it incase it lead to disappointment!) like if there's some new rotary pneumatic actuator (not continuous like a motor, but like 180 degrees or 270 degrees of rotation) it would make more sense of the description. It says three movements of the gripper, but on the real one, one of the three movements is the rotation of the claw. So if they have one there I guess why not add one for the seat also? So it would make more sense of the description but I don't want to get anyone's hopes up. I must not be disappointed if there is no new rotary actuator, only very very happy if there is one.

Well, I guess someone has to complain about it so here we go.... No working steering wheel? Oh my poor sensibilities! Smaller brick based cars can have a working steering wheel but not a Technic set? Triggered! I also wouldn't say that I prefer the clear cylinder blocks over the bluish grey ones. Heck I prefer the old light grey blocks with the dark grey cylinders! But the clear ones don't seem too bad in this smaller set. Still it does look very nice and I still like the dark blue colour. It also feels a bit like the colour coding is nicer, perhaps a few too many bright red pieces and I wonder if he's trolling us with the random lime green part lol! I also suspect that I'd feel differently had the set had more gears and wave selectors which would have been green, more red, orange and so on. But overall the colour coding does look much better than previous sets. Those new 7 long flip flop beams come in a useful colour and I'm very happy to see the still quite rare 3x19 frames. Normally I'd skip right past these 1:10 and 1:12 scale cars but I might actually get this one

We haven't seen it yet, but one translation of the description sounds very much like there's 5 pneumatic functions (maybe more than 5 cylinders?) as well as steering, 4wd and engine. Also bear in mind that part count is not a good indicator of price. Weight is a much better indicator. So if this set has bigger and heavier elements then the price also goes up. Possibly class tyres, possible 3 x 19 frames, possibly even a motor? We don't know yet.

Oooooh, that sounds very much like there's 5 pneumatic functions!

The John Deere is sounding even better with 4 pneumatics, 4wd and fake engine. I hope it is motorized using simple battery box but of course I'm gonna buy it either way! I like the idea of the bolide in a different colour. Releasing certain sets in multiple colour choices is great. It makes more parts available in more colours and I don't think it will be released in the place of a completely different set, it likely just an additional set. I did complain earlier about the number of cars for this year but if there's enough other sets of interest then I guess I shouldn't complain. The John Deere is sounding great and the Liebherr is the first flagship control+ set I find myself actually looking forward to as I think it'll be the first flagship control+ set to be fairly mechanically authentic. The new counterweight pieces sound interesting (the set is rumoured to contain 20, at 50 grams each, making 1 kg of counterweight, but that is a rumour of an earlier version). The also rumoured truss pieces will also be useful and make the build less tedious. And I tend to think there will be something special with the hook, like maybe a metal hook, or maybe a stack of new 3 x 0.5 pulleys? Something like that. Hopefully there's more than just these two to look forward to. The NASA rover could go either way. Could be dull, but could be great. And I think cars get a bad reputation from us because of the lack of mechanical novelty they seem to bring, and some seem to go backwards. But I don't think that's the fault of the subject matter. We can all think of ways to make cars novel again!

There may be other issues with releasing the originally rumoured 5 foot tall crane, I mean, it's not going to be operated by trained crane drivers, it'll be over loaded and fall over and land on a 2 year old and Lego gets sued etc. It's not like the completely static Eiffel tower. But it doesn't matter, while a larger sized model can allow for a "better" model, it doesn't mean it will be better. But also, if they kept the winch drums large, the counterweight heavy and base/turntable solid then we can easily add our own sections back in, to make it the originally intended height. Maybe they include extra sections of truss you use as a load to lift? As a Technic fan I'd love to see the tallest Lego model be a Technic model. You'd think it would be, rather than a brick built Eiffel tower, but like I say, the Eiffel tower doesn't move.

I have often wondered about how to do a pneumatic motor, or more specifically, an axial piston pump type compressor which could also possibly be used in reverse as a motor. It would be a sweet replacement for motors where in real life a hydraulic motor is used (for example excavator track drives, grabber rotation, etc), but just that on it own certainly wouldn't justify the development costs. But if it's main use was as a 6 bore (like a stack of 3 x 0.5 pulleys) axial piston pump, 6 pumps in about the size of a pf medium motor, that could also be back driven as a motor, well that would be totally sweeeeeeeeet!!!!!

I haven't bought a 1:10 car before due to lack of mechanical interest but I really do like the colour!!! The issues with proportions (which aren't all that bad to me) all seem to come from the wheel arches being too big and having to fit the car shape around them, so it will be interesting to see if the wheels fit in the smaller wheel arches, and if suspension/steering geometry can be upgraded to prevent rubbing while still having a good (meaning possibly unrealistically large) amount of suspension travel. I suspect the way to do it will be to shorten the top wishbone and angle it upwards (move it's mounting point out and down) so the top edge of the wheel moves inward and under the wheel arch as the suspension moves.

Good questions. I will generalise a lot here because I could write about every function of every set but I'll be here till next year! Simplified versions of real life: I would say car suspension, steering (if we consider things like power steering, steering geometries like Ackermann angles, and steering on heavy vehicles which usually have more complex linkages), engines (would be nice to see some timing belts, cams, etc), most helicopter rotors, axles (due to the omission of working brakes which most axles have), seats (mostly immovable), doors (no locks), tracked vehicles (either have no transmission or an electric motor for each track), some pneumatic functions (ie the grabber for the material handler, in real life there would be a cylinder for each blade of the claw. Also, real life hydraulic circuits have some added complications like pressure limiters, return flows and one way valves for example), most turntable based slew rings, big heavy crane hooks that have only one pulley (most big and heavy cranes have many pulleys) More complicated than real life; Multi speed gearboxes, steering (speaking of larger Technic cars and if we ignore power steering. Most cars have a single shaft between the steering wheel and pinion gear and maybe a U joint or two, no other gears or shafts), models that rely on the combination of multifunction gearboxes and LAs. Just exactly like real life (Nothing in Technic is exactly like real life but I take this to mean the closest that is reasonably practical) : Most pneumatic functions (Yes I know real life uses hydraulics but the basic principal of containing a fluid, be it air or oil, to do work is the same), the helicopter rotors of the Airbus rescue helicopter, suspended multilink live axle suspension, motorbike suspension and rear chain drive, telescopic drive shafts (Zetros), planetary reduction in the wheel (42099), some examples of steering (8860), slew rings that incorporate rolling elements (42082), some crane main structures (such as the cables and winches of 42042). And there's probably lots more in all categories that I missed.

So long as 3D printed examples are allowed, well of course I suggest my gearbox parts due to them being much more realistic, easier to build and understand how it works (as well as understanding how a real gearbox works), much lower friction than official gearboxes and can change gears under load making them suitable for RC models and also static display models (like in the video). The drive ring is also only 1 module long (as opposed to TLGs 3 module long drive rings) making for more compact and authentic gearboxes. If my FDM 3D printed parts can do this then I'm sure proper TLG injection moulded versions of my parts would be even better! And I'd also like to point to some of the excellent parts designed by Barman on brickshelf https://brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=376235 I recommend looking round the whole gallery but some of my favourites are.... because bearings! With a slight modification of the existing axles and only one other new part you can get any length and orientation of tow ball link you could ever need. There could also be several variants of the socket piece, like a friction (for suspention/steering) and frictionless (for helicopters for example) variant or a simple axle hole or pin hole variant as well. Some accurately proportioned truck wheels with deep positive offset like these.... And so many more new parts like: Low friction pneumatic sliding spool valve to make LPEs possible (Lego working steam strain or traction engine would be sweet!) Micro servo motor and a high speed motor Pneumatic one way valve Simple sensors for PU such as the touch sensor (just basic like in the barcode truck), pneumatic pressure sensor, rotation/speed sensor, etc. Combine the rotation/speed sensor with a micro servo and you can even make a working dash with working speed and rev counter. How sweet would that be in a static display model like in my gearbox video. Daisy chainable lights Working brake callipers And this could go on for a while but this post is getting long already!

I'm not sure I can agree with the general feeling over TLGs competitors, well, when it comes to Technic at least. Technic may or may not be in a good or bad place right now but there is usually a great set released from time to time, like the Airbus or the Arocs for example. I don't see anything anywhere close to as good as those sets from the competition. I don't wish for Technic to be threatened by the current low grade competition but maybe some better competition would be a good thing. But even so, Technic has a bunch of untapped potential and I would hope they can come closer to it's potential before being forced to by increasing competition. Fend off the competition before it grows by being better than they ever could be, not just better than they currently are.