Tag Archives: articulated

Mind Bending

Leave a reply

This is an MAN Lion articulated bus, created in Technic by Fosapifi of Eurobricks, and in place of the usual nonsense we write on these pages, this post is mostly an almost unfathomably long list. Because Fosapifi’s model is as complicated – and has as much hidden from view – as Trump’s tax returns.

Firstly the bus is remotely driven, with four Power Functions XL Motors driving the third axle. A Servo steers the front axle, and there are eight sets of LEDs illuminating the lights.

Two separate pneumatic systems, each self-compressed by individual Power Functions L Motors, power the doors and air-suspension, allowing the bus to ‘kneel’ at the kerb for passenger embark/disembarkation. A total of twenty-two pneumatic cylinders (plus ten shock absorbers) are built into the suspension, controlled via Servo, whilst another Servo and six further cylinders operates the doors, the second and third of which can be deactivated via a switch in the cab.

Finally, a Micro-Motor unfolds the wheelchair ramp, with all the above controlled remotely via four SBricks and a BuWizz Bluetooth battery, with all of it hidden away to allow for a complete bus interior.

No we don’t know how it’s possible either, but you can join us having our minds bent at the Eurobricks forum via the link above, where a video and a link to building instructions can also be found.

Get Bent

Leave a reply

Ah the bendy bus. Commonly used at airports when those raised tubey tunnel things are too far away, and – until recently – found clogging up the streets of TLCB’s home capital.

However whilst the bendy bus works a treat on the wide open concrete of an airport (unless you’re the unfortunate sole stuck standing on the articulation point as it meanders back to Terminal 4), they absolutely do not work on the streets of a two-thousand year old city.

Many American cities though, are rather like airports, what with their wide open concrete, multitude of fast food outlets, and overly-zealous armed security. This makes the bendy bus a much more appropriate method of public transportation there than in London*.

Fortunately this bendy bus, a New Flyer Xcelsior XD60, is transporting commuters in the right place, as evidenced by the excellent ‘Newark Penn Station’ destination boards. And the American flag on the side.

Constructed by JLui15’s Studio, this brilliant brick-built bendy-bus not only looks spectacularly accurate inside and out, there’s a full remote control drivetrain hidden within it too.

Custom replica decals enhance the realism, as does the working articulation in the middle, and there’s loads more to see of JLui15’s incredible creation at their ‘Motorized New Flyer XD60 Articulated Bus’ album on Flickr. Click the link above to ride to Newark Station, New Jersey.

*On the flip side of course, the average American bus passenger would probably get wedged in the winding stairs of a Routemaster double-decker, so the inappropriateness goes both ways.

Technic 42114 6×6 Volvo Articulated Hauler | Review

8 Replies

It’s review time here at The Lego Car Blog, as we add another LEGO set to the by now pretty huge Review Library! This set review comes from one of our readers, who dons the Reviewing Anorak (which may or may not be a real thing) and takes on the enormous remote controlled LEGO Technic 42114 6×6 Volvo Articulated Hauler. Wojtek Hildebrandt is the reader in question, and so good is his review that TLCB Team are frankly a little worried for their jobs. That’s not true of course, as they don’t get paid… Anyway, over to Wojtek!

…

LEGO has a long-standing tradition of recreating dominantly yellow construction equipment in Technic sets. This is rather a grateful theme for construction blocks after all – simple shapes and function over form. Recently these have mostly been Volvo licensed vehicles; wheel loaders, excavators, and haulers with different degrees of motorisation – from full (as in 42030 loader) via optional (to power 42053 excavator pneumatics) to none (for endless knob spinning fun with 42081 concept loader). The time has come for a fully remote-controlled articulated hauler – a Volvo A60H with the Control+ app.

Beauty is in the eye of the behauler.
First, let’s have a look from the outside. This is a looker, at least for a construction machine. We can see it already on the box cover, where the hauler is put in some blurred quarry environment. It fits well, but then the same image is sometimes used without the background, which makes the chassis twist look weird, like doing some unlikely stunt.

Speaking of weird: LEGO’s previous attempt to minify a Volvo hauler – the B model for 42030 – had it all wrong (even with the number of wheels), but if you’re generous enough, you can say it was a tribute to vintage, skeletal Technic sets. If so, then 42114 is more from a bloodline of Model Team or recent adult Creator sets, even if it uses mostly Technic parts. Of course, the pins and holes are there and some proportions and colors are off, but both overall shape and some neat details are very true.

Let’s start from the business end; the dump body – we’ll call it the body from now on – has a complex shape with clever usage of tapered panels (which are flat on both sides, unlike straight panels) and very few empty spaces. I guess you couldn’t haul sand in it, but it should be perfect for some beans or potatoes. Or lemons to match the colour. The driver’s cab is correctly centred and surrounded by a proper, orange safety railing as well as accurate big mirrors. There is a slightly surprising mudguard serving as a dashboard, my favorite seat made of a single curved panel 3x5x3 (which seems to fit the same purpose regardless of model scale), and a warning beacon on the roof that twists slightly to turn the Control+ hub on or off.

Further to the front, we have one of the best-looking parts – a nicely sculpted bonnet. The impression is improved by a few stickers, but even without them all the angles and curves feel just right, even if they’re not entirely true to the original, e.g. with headlights. One curved panel covers the limits of the other and everything works together nicely. It’s wobbly during construction but becomes solid enough eventually. The front bumper on the other hand is no match for a durable look of the original, but to me, it doesn’t harm the overall impression too much.

Green energy
Now we get to the hardware. Both real-life and miniature versions of the Volvo hauler are powered by six cylinders. In full scale, they are six, famously green inline cylinders of an internal combustion engine. For the set, they are 6 AA/R6 batteries. Which one is “greener” energy depends probably on whether your batteries are rechargeable and if so – how you recharge them. Continue reading →

Bending Bricks

Leave a reply

The Elves are happy today. Firstly this huge remote control truck is orange, so it’s already off to a winning start, and secondly it can fit a gaggle of them in the back to ride around the office, and only a few got run over.

This unique machine comes from Waler of Brickshelf, who designed and built it for his engineering diploma thesis. Waler’s design allows his truck to articulate in the middle in two dimensions, both left/right and up/down. To accomplish this Waler’s truck includes a cleverly-constructed pivoting differential, kind of like a helicopter’s swash plate, that can deliver power whichever way the the two halves of the truck are pointing.

The truck is steered by two linear actuators that swing the chassis around a central pivot point which – as it can also pivot vertically – allows for insane articulation. All-wheel-drive, a remotely operable gearbox, all-wheel-suspension, and custom 3D-printed differentials complete the drivetrain, upon which a simple removable body is mounted.

There’s a whole lot more to see, including the clever central pivot design, custom diffs, and on-location photos showing the truck off-road, at Waler’s Brickshelf gallery. Click the link above to make the jump.

42062 Container Yard Review

Leave a reply

Scrolling through the Brick Badger website can be a dangerous business, especially if you haven’t bought any new bricks for a while. It was a dull Sunday afternoon at TLCB Towers. The Elves had decided to find out which colour of 32009 Technic beam could do the most damage when beaten against a colleague’s head (medium lilac apparently). We were wandering the interweb and spotted the 42062 Container Yard was nearly 40% off on the famous riverine retailer.

The set contains 631 pieces, including a selection of beams in LEGO’s standard blue and orange colours, plus eight, grey 64782 flat panels. Not owning the 42056 Porsche 911, a source of orange Technic pieces is always welcome and the grey panels looked like they’d come in handy for making neat bases for MOCs.  There’s also one of the new worm gears and a good number of 18654 (15, plus spares). LEGO insists on calling these 1×1 beams, despite the pieces obvious inability to perform this engineering function. The most obvious new pieces in the set are the 18942 and 18940 Gear Rack & Housing. It will be interesting to see what use MOCers come up with for these parts. The set continues Technic’s trend of axles coming in a variety of colours: red, yellow and brown in this case.

Building the models is the usual, enjoyable adventure with Lego. There is a very nicely produced instruction book for both the main build and the B-model. The different colours are well differentiated and the days of dark grey and black getting confused are long gone. The parts come in numbered bags; building the tractor unit, the trailer and finally the telehandler. It took us a couple of hours of building and tea-drinking to complete the build. Builders at the youngest end of the suggested age range might find this quite a marathon of building and concentrating. Perhaps an advantage of this set is that you can build the lorry (and pause to play with it), build the trailer (and pause to play with it) and finish off with the telehandler. We certainly did!

As you would hope from a set with two different models, there are a good variety of mechanisms for young (and old!) engineers to build and play with in this set. Each vehicle has a different steering mechanism, plus the four-bar linkage that raises the arm on the telehandler, which also uses that new worm gear. Purists might be annoyed that the A model doesn’t use the gear rack to extend the telehandler’s arm. However, the B model does and the A model uses an interesting camming mechanism similar to the locking mechanism found in early repeater rifles. The container grabbing claw is another very neatly implemented version of a locking knuckle. For a set with a relatively small number of pieces there’s a lot here to inspire amateur engineers to experiment and build their own machines.

Sadly, the one thing that this otherwise excellent and exciting looking set doesn’t do so well on is its playability.  Compromises have had to been made to keep the set within a certain price range, which is understandable. Continue reading →

Transformers…

Leave a reply

Yellow Lorry 02

…are actually pieces of electrical equipment. Regular readers of TLCB will know of the Elves’ obsession with the Transformers franchise. Finding the best Lego cars on the internet provides Smarties and meal tokens but happiness involves explosions, robots, more explosions and Megan Fox. You can imagine their excitement at finding Jakeof_’s latest build. The smoothly modelled DAF XF95 tractor, towing a Nooteboom Pendel-X trailer with a large transformer as its load is typical of Jakeof_’s style. You can also imagine their disappointment once they realised what sort of transformer it actually was. Still, we’re happy with our find and recommend that you visit Jakeof_’s Photostream to see the details.

Yellow Lorry

Well Articulated

1 Reply
Gabor Horvath's RC Mercedes Citaro Articulated BusGabor Horvath's RC Mercedes Citaro Articulated Bus

Gabor Horvath’s RC Mercedes Citaro Articulated Bus

Gabor Horvath, the master of small scale RC trucks and buses, is the builder of this fantastic remote-controlled Mercedes Citaro articulated bus. The vehicle is only 6 studs wide yet contains 2 PF M motors, 1 PF IR receiver, 1 battery box and all the gears necessary to provide public transport in a LEGO city. Some more views and a video:

Continue reading →