Just for fun...

[6zfshdb]

It appears Leggo is getting into the scale model business rather than sticking to their roots.
With a few exceptions, most of the pieces in that bike model, or many others they offer, can be used to build anything else.
Nothing wrong with this per se, and many look quite clever, but to me anyway, they bear no resemblance to the original concept of the traditional Leggo building block pieces.

 

[DaveMatthews]

The mechanical engineering side of LEGO has become an experimenter's and tinkerer's and closet engineer's dream. Grew exponentially from the Technic line introduced in the 1970s.Thousands of well-engineered, high-precision mechanical parts by now.

I usually don't buy sets, just parts. If you have the imagination and a sense for how machines work, no end to the working gizmos you can dream up and actually build with LEGO these days. Not from sets, but from loose parts.

I like to make mechanical toys with real play value. Here's one of my more outside-the-box gizmos...

Nicely done mate!

 

[Jeremy McCreary]

It appears Leggo is getting into the scale model business rather than sticking to their roots.
With a few exceptions, most of the pieces in that bike model, or many others they offer, can be used to build anything else.
Nothing wrong with this per se, and many look quite clever, but to me anyway, they bear no resemblance to the original concept of the traditional Leggo building block pieces.

There's some truth to this — especially in the Star Wars line, where certain spaceship shapes required special parts with limited potential for other uses. Ditto for some of the other big franchise lines that choke store shelves.

But don't think that modern LEGO ends there. The original concept — that parts are for whatever you want, limited only by your imagination — remains alive and well. And the company's clearly still committed to it outside the sets it makes for mass consumption.

For example, of the bike set's 1015 pieces, 99% are general-purpose parts with many potential uses. Ditto for the orrery set I bought last year.

In the adult LEGO world, when you build your own stuff, NPU (nice parts usage) is one of the best compliments you can get. NPU means you found a cool use for a part that nobody saw coming — love it when that happens!

Some parts just have more NPU potential than others.

 

[Jeremy McCreary]

Just a taste of what you can do with mechanical LEGO these days. Wife said I couldn't have a Mars rover, so this is the next best thing...

The key to success here was to mimic the exact geometry of NASA's patented 6x6x4 rocker-bogie mobility system at ~1:12 scale. Couldn't steer the corner wheels like they do at this scale, but all 6 wheels have their own motors, and skid steering works well enough.

LEGO's made 2 unmotorized Mars rover sets with decent likenesses but limited play value. Nothing like this working rover, which is much more schematic visually but vastly more functional mobility-wise. Tons of play value in this build from parts to my own design.

For Martian topography, NASA requires a rover able to get past a step-like obstacle 1.5 wheel diameters in height. (Try that with your 4WD!) This model exceeds that spec.

 

[DaveMatthews]

Just a taste of what you can do with mechanical LEGO these days. Wife said I couldn't have a Mars rover, so this is the next best thing...

The key to success here was to mimic the exact geometry of NASA's patented 6x6x4 rocker-bogie mobility system at ~1:12 scale. Couldn't steer the corner wheels like they do at this scale, but all 6 wheels have their own motors, and skid steering works well enough.

LEGO's made 2 unmotorized Mars rover sets with decent likenesses but limited play value. Nothing like this working rover, which is much more schematic visually but vastly more functional mobility-wise. Tons of play value in this build from parts to my own design.

For Martian topography, NASA requires a rover able to get past a step-like obstacle 1.5 wheel diameters in height. (Try that with your 4WD!) This model exceeds that spec.

I seem to recall you posting this one once before! Awesome!

 

[PedalUma]

A couple of Christmas' ago I ordered 16 pounds of loose Legos with no instructions for a kid turning five, creative, and on the spectrum. It changed his life. You can find bulk Legos on eBay. Not having instructions makes for creative play.

 

[6zfshdb]

Getting back to humor:

 

[6zfshdb]

Then you have the Mythbusters 3000# ball made of 5 million Leggo blocks:

Skip to 15:10

 

[Jeremy McCreary]

Then you have the Mythbusters 3000# ball made of 5 million Leggo blocks:

View attachment 214616 View attachment 214617

Skip to 15:10

Any experienced LEGO builder could've told them that this brick ball had zero chance of making it to the target car in one piece.

Standard dimensions for studded LEGO parts.

"Clutch power" is LEGOese for the force it takes to separate two LEGO parts — classically, 2 bricks with studs (those knobs on top, like the ones on the brick on the left above).

One of the keys to LEGO's success is that they played the clutch power trade-off just right. In fact, that's partly how they arrived at their proprietary ABS plastic.

Too little clutch, and things fall apart during building or in normal use. Too much, and users (especially kids) get frustrated trying to take builds apart by hand — say, to use the parts for something else, or just to make revisions.

That's why you design studded LEGO structures that need to be strong (like the ball) in ways that keep the key joins in compression, not tension. And if that's not possible, then you brace the joins against tensional stresses in various ways.

No such bracing and lots of transient tensional stresses in that ball as it bounced along.

 

[PedalUma]

Tropical Storm Dolly expected to develop and become the next named storm in the Atlantic

Within the next few days, the development of a tropical cyclone within the Atlantic basin is looking likely. That means, that the next named storm in the Atlantic will bear the name “Dolly”.

www.wcax.com

Hurricanes are named six-years in advance. The next one is Dolly. I hope that she, now as a force of nature, wipes Mar-A-Logo off the map.

 

[PedalUma]

Guilty as charged. I told AI explicitly and thankfully exactly what I wanted. It did that on the first try, which is a first. It somehow knew or recalled my style and approach. The rainbow is perfect, both biblically with Noha and with LGBT freedoms and hopes for justice for all the down trodden and on the Statue of Liberty. Dolly bridged drag queens standing next to red hats. Now she is a force of nature.