Let’s start 2019 off a month late with a small little airplane for the Eurobricks TC15 contest. I was excited about this contest, but as I started with some designs, none of them worked the way I wanted them too. This was the result of a lack of inspiration, and 7 different drafts, all quite different.
I was frustrated with everything design I was trying, and then I picked up a little stud shooter, and started playing around with some technic panels. After a little tinkering, I found I could do something like a WWII attack plane. I started with the engine cowling, and tied it to the wing that I had started.
Hunter MK.III Loadout
Next I added a cockpit section, and then added the joystick and control surfaces. Mechanically, it is a simple design, but airplanes run out of internal room quickly. The landing gear is a simple worm gear setup, that is tied together by a single axle.
Hunter MK.III Bottom
I then worked on the bodywork to make it all tie together. I added a little color, some markings and nose art, and the design was done. It is not my best work, and for a contest, I wanted to have something I was proud of. It looks OK, and it functions well, but I have to try my hand at another airplane soon.
The T-72 that a made a couple of years ago is still the most popular MOC I have made; at least in terms of internet analytics. This year, I committed to making another tank, so I figured keeping in line with old Soviet armor would be rather apropos.
The main gallery may be found on Brickshelf or at Flickr. Instructions may be found here.
The T-54/T-55 line of tanks have been produced in greater numbers than any other tank. The MOC represented here is a T-55A, representing types that were assembled starting in 1970. This series included an updated NBC and antiradiation system, an upgraded engine, and also added back in the 12.7mm anti-aircraft DShK on the loader’s hatch that was part of the original T-54 spec.
As with most of my MOCs, I starting scaling the tank before any building took place. I knew I wanted to use the newer, larger track links, and I knew I wanted to use the old mid-sized wheels. This set my scale, so I got to work. Starting with the chassis and the hull I worked first on the driveline and suspension. I used simple 2×4 liftarms to connect the road wheels to a suspension axle which activated a shock absorber inside the hull. Each road wheel has its own shock absorber. Fitting them all in took some creativity, but they are all mounted inside on the left and right sides of the hull. In the end, each wheel has about 3 studs of vertical travel.
In between each suspension bank are the remaining mechanics. After the suspension was set, I worked on the turret functions. Right from the beginning, I knew the tank would have a rotating turret and an elevating gun. It was clear having the elevation mechanics for the gun in the turret would be tight, so I decided instead to have the functions placed in the hull rather than in the turret. Using a vertically mounted mLA, connected directly to the breach of the gun, I was able to develop a method that would elevate the gun throughout the full turret rotation. The turret rotation was driven by a 8z gear connected to the turntable, and reduced by a worm gear. Both motors for the elevation and rotation are placed directly in front of the turret.
Behind the turret are two PF L motors mounted transversely side by side. They drive a 1:1 gearbox which connect directly to each rear drive sprocket. The IR receivers are placed above the gearbox. For those keeping score at home, the internals are (f to r) the battery box, the turret motors, the turret mechanics, the drive motors, and finally the IR receivers.
Working on the exterior of the MOC is what took the most time. The hull came together pretty quickly, with the exception of the details over each track. Most of the finishing time came with the turret exterior. Most Soviet tanks have the distinctive mushroom turret, which considering LEGO’s cube orientation presented some challenges. The turret of the T-55 also has a slight triangle orientation when viewed from the top. Like the T-72, I designed the turret with four side orientations (left, right, front, and rear), and one top orientation. Starting from the rear, I added a basic curved structure. The sides each had a couple levels of slopes, each tapering in toward the gun. The front was a little more complex. There are two “slope blocks” made of 4 curved slope bricks, and a supporting structure. One slope block is mounted on each side of the gun. The support structure is a mess of bricks with a stud on one side, headlight bricks, and plates. The top of the turret is plates on the front, and two sloped plate sections under each hatch. The two hatches are mounted to the turret support under the sloped plate sections. The AA machine gun is placed on the top, and various external mountings are placed in various ways around the turret.
After making a lot of non-powered MOCs, it was nice to get back into Power Functions. I was pleased that everything worked flawlessly. The drive had adequate traction and power. The suspension worked well, and provided good floatation and travel. The turret rotation was smooth and allowed for precise directions changes. The gun elevation worked great, though I had to limit turret rotations to under four before the clutch on the mLA would snap. After a number of smaller builds, and frustratingly long builds, I was nice to finish something that worked well, provided constant entertainment throughout the build, and turned out quite nice.
Two years ago I built the Spitfire MkIIa. It remains one of my more popular builds, and one of which I am still quite proud. It was not my first large plane, though when I completed it, I said it would be my last.
I learned a lot of great things from the Spitfire. Large scale building is exciting, and challenging in that you have to think about significant structural considerations, placement, and shaping before and while your build.
With this in mind, I wanted to develop what I have learned, but allow myself the ability to take a large scale aircraft to the next level. I wanted to improve the function of the control surfaces, design my own propellor, use four Power Function channels, and use the boatload of Dark Green parts that I had recently acquired. I considered a number of airplanes, including doing the FW-190 again, but I finally settled on the Typhoon. Time to get building.
After some planning, I had my scale. 1/13 was an appropriate size for me to replicate the plane and its functions, while still keeping the plane from getting too large. This scale would also allow for LEGO wheels for the landing gear, and a worker able propellor spinner design. As I learned from the Spitfire, placement of large components needed to be done early, and placed in the MOC to its exact final location. As the structure of the fuselage and wings would be stressed heavily, large components could not get in the way. Once I placed the engine block, the landing gear, the power functions, and the control surfaces, I was able to start putting together the robust structures that would support the final plane. One of the major challenges of this plane was the outset landing gear on the wings. Because they were located 42 studs apart, the wings needed to be strong. But due the the space taken for the control surfaces, and the massive 24 cylinder power pack, the wings still sag a little under load.
The control surfaces were activated with strings with studs on each end. I found this to be a better system than the axle controls for the Spitfire. It kept the controls more smooth, and reduced the amount of play in the controls. The elevator and ailerons were controlled with the joystick, and the rudder was controlled by two foot pedals in the cockpit. The remaining functions were controlled via Power Functions. An XL motor powered the massive 38 stud diameter propellor, as well at the 24 cylinder Napier Sabre engine. A M motor controlled the pitch of the propellor. Another M motor powered the landing gear, and still another adjusted the flaps. All four motor were mounted in the chin of the aircraft; I had to use that huge chin for something. The two IR receivers were mounted in under the windscreen, and the rechargeable battery was mounted behind the cockpit.
Finally, I had to make sure all the markings were accurate. Again, due the limits of dark green parts, it was not an easy task. I started with wings, and made sure to add invasion stripes, and work my way out to the tips. The roundels were a little different than the Spitfire, but were a little larger. The fuselage took a little work to make sure the panels could be easily removed, but I eventually got there. The fuselage roundel should have a yellow ring around the outside, but the strip is so small, I could not figure out a good way to do it.
The plane worked almost perfectly. The ailerons were a little sticky, but other wise everything else managed to work for an 8 hour shift at Brickworld. The plane was liked enough to be nominated for Best Air Ship. While it did not win, it was validation that the the model was a success.
It’s going to be a busy week in thirdwiggville. Before everything goes live, I thought it would be fun to let everyone know I have completed instructions for my T-72. I don’t know what took me so long. If you want to make a copy for yourself, you can for $5.
I am not a very ambitious person. Sure I made it through college and graduate school, and have managed to work well in job for a while now, but for me to do something challenging, takes a lot of convincing. It doesn’t happen often. This project was a little bigger than it should have been, and I got in over my head. This is not the first time this has happened (1, 2). The project was interesting enough for me to keep moving forward, even after six months. I present my 1:12 scale Spitfire Mk IIa. I hope you enjoy the work.
View the full gallery here, and the work in progress gallery here. Flickr set is here, and full instructions may be downloaded here.
First, the whole reason I did this project was because of the excellent Baby Twin Otter of Cpt. Postma completed two years ago. If you have not yet seen this creation, take a look at the above link. When I first saw this model, I went home a made his variable pitch propeller This was the first step to my Spitfire, though at the time I did not know it.
I chose to do the Mk IIa version Spitfire for a couple of reasons. First, the model had to have a three blade prop, because I wanted to use Cpt. Postma’s design. Spitfires stopped using a three blade prop somewhere in the middle of the MkV series. Second, I wanted to model a eight gun variant, rather than the cannon variant because I think it has a cleaner look, and I love the red and yellow leading edges on the eight gun variants. Finally, while it would have been great to do a early model Spitfire with the dark tan camouflage adding both the dark green and dark tan would have been too expensive, and even more ambitious. I found a number of pictures of a certain MkIIa with all the features I wanted. I chose a Spitfire flown by Lt. Tomas Vybiral, who was a Czech pilot with the French Air Force. The plane was Spitfire P8081 when he flew for the British in Squadron No. 312. It had simple markings for me to recreate, a camouflage pattern I would be able to do (read afford), and I found some good documents to help my modeling.
Next came the internal planning. The Spitfire would have working ailerons flaps, rudder, and elevators (with correlating pilot controls), prop, prop pitch, V-12 engine, and retracting landing gear, all within the 1:12 scale. Once I had the dimensions calculated, I started placing things in a simple “placeholder” model on my floor. I constructed the engine, the propeller spinner, pedal/joystick assembly and placed them in the placeholder. Then I made the placeholder 3D.
It took two months to get the rest of the internals all set. The required moving various parts of the 3D placeholder, and adding additional parts. The joystick is connected through various liftarms to the rear elevator, and by axles to the ailerons The pedals connected though a shaft to the rear rudder. You can see the gears on the rudder. The flaps have a simple lever in bottom left side of the cockpit.
The rest of the functions are controlled via Power Functions. The small 8878 battery box is placed behind the cockpit, as is the IR receiver. A PF M is housed under the V-12 and drives four mini linear actuators for the landing gear. It is strong and simple, and works well. It does not have the correct Spitfire landing gear geometry, but if someone can figure out a way to do it at this scale…well, I can’t figure it out. A second PF M is used to power the propeller It is placed directly behind the V-12. Finally, a third PF M is placed behind the V-12, and works through a system of gears to power two mini linear actuators to move the pitch of the prop. It’s messy inside, but it has everything I wanted.
After the internals, I had no idea how hard the rest of the Spitfire would be. LEGO, you need to make more parts in Dark Green. I know how selfish that sounds, but it would have been more helpful. Thank to some newer sets, like the 10226 Sopwith Camel, and the 21016 Sungnyemun, it made it much more possible, but still limited me in many places. I spent the next four months acquiring parts, and placing small plates over the rest of the plane. With some help on the roundels from Dieterr89, it eventually came together. The bodywork took a long time. Too long. And the lack of some parts in Dark Green forced me to make some concessions. The canopy frame should be all Dark Green, but it was not going to happen with what is available. The camouflage is not as clean as I would have liked, and there are some abrupt steps where some plate limitations made the transition for one part to another not smooth enough, such as on the rear fuselage. Also, try as I might, I could not get the leading edge of the wing to be perfect. The dihedral did not help either, nor did the yellow leading edge. Also, the gaps between the control surfaces and the fixed part of the wing and stabilizer was more than I would have liked. But this has happened before.
I am please with how it turned out, but there are some parts that I wish would be better. I never seem to remember this when I start a project in this scale, but free moving functions just do not operate well as you hope when you keep adding parts. The control surfaces work, but they could be smoother and lighter. The powered functions worked flawlessly. I was very please with the way the markings turned out. They are not as flush with the plane as painting would cause you to believe, but they make the Spitfire clearly identifiable.
My father would always tell me “never say never,” but it may be a long time before I do another large plane. But I guess I said that back in 2008.
For some of you, this may come as no surprise, but I like to build with more than only Technic. I find a lot of enjoyment building with Technic, but as a child I had more fun with the bricks. My resources (and bricklink.com) now allow me to build some of the things I never could at that time. To this day I still like making tanks, so I present to you a model of the Sd. Kfz. 173 Jagdpanther. This is still one of my favorite tanks: simple lines, great stance, decent performance, and for my purposes, able to be made in LEGO.
While I love building tanks, I don’t build them often. Posting a tank to the LEGO community online is asking for trouble. There are a lot of builders like me who like to build tanks, so it is hard to make a tank that doesn’t take some influence from someone else. While the design is mine, there are a lot of ideas from others that have influenced this design. Feel free to take a look as some of the ideas in this gallery. Thanks to the various builders.
I have some more Technic models in the queue, so until then, enjoy this break from normal.
The full gallery may be viewed here. Thanks for reading.
I have a love hate relationship with LEGO instructions. On one hand, I think they provide a great service to other builders. This has become clear with my 8081 4×4, which has been much more popular than I could have imagined, in part because I have published instructions. Builders like to know how other builders come up with ideas to solve problems. But on the other hand, instructions are a lot of work to produce. Especially if they require some rendering program. I guess I could charge people for access to my instructions, but that seems to take away from the access to ideas that I like to support in the LEGO community.
With that I present instructions for my FW-190a3. The FW-190 needs no introduction. It it still one of my more favorite airplanes, so I thought I would make a minifig version, and publish instructions for it. As with all of my instructions, links can be found on my Building Instruction page.
It has been a little quiet in Thirdwiggville for the last month. I have been working on a project that is taking a lot of time and resources, so my posts have slowed, even though my building has not. But just wait, it’s going to be awesome.
Last summer I wanted to do another Trial Truck that would utilized some features I have never used before. I wanted something complicated to see how it would work. I wanted a model that would use four wheels steering, independent suspension, and have a simple two speed gearbox while being low to the ground. After spending some time at the Chicago Autoshow, I saw a FTTS concept, so I thought this would be a great vehicle to model for this next truck.
This model would be built around an independent suspension. After seeing it used so effectively in a truck by ATRX, I wanted to give it a try. Each of the four wheels would use a simple double a-arm set-up with a wheel mount attached at the outside. The wheel mount would house the portal axle and connect the steering linkage. After a couple of different designs, I also decided the wheel mount would also connect the the shock absorbers. This was a little unorthodox, as most independent designs mount the shock absorbers directly from the frame to the a-arms. I did this for two reasons. First, the model would be heavy, and I could not get the support I needed when the shocks were connected to the a-arms. Second, and most importantly, I noticed too much suspension flex when the shocks were mounted to the a-arms. The force applied to the wheel would go up the wheel, to the wheel mount, through the pivot, halfway down the lower a-arm to the shock. LEGO is relatively stiff, but all these steps complied too much flex. I would not have it. I mounted the shocks on the wheel mount, and created a simple MacPherson strut set-up. This worked well, as it allowed for full steering movement, long suspension travel, and adequate support of the truck.
The front and rear suspension axles both had a PF-M motor driving the steering. Each were on independent PF channels connected to a single 8878 Battery Box to allow for individual steering, crab steering, and to solve steering drift commonly problematic with four wheels steering vehicles. Both axles were connected with dual drive shafts running the length of the truck. One drive shaft would then connect through a simple two speed gearbox to the PF-XL motor. The final gearing was 1:6.2 and 1:10 for the truck. This gave the truck sufficient top speed, with an effective crawler gear. The Battery Box used for the drive motor and the gear shift motor was placed directly behind the front suspension, and in front of the drive motor. This placement was perfect for stability. It helped give great traction to the front wheels, kept the center of mass low and to the center with a slight forward bias.
I then finalized the model with a simple removable body built on a Technic frame. While the hood was little high, and the rear body a little too short, it looked pretty close to the rear FTTS. Fans seems to like the look, as it is still one of my more popular model. See the full gallery here and the Work in Progress gallery here.
The model was a lot of fun to drive, and due to its squat design, it was very well planted. The truck did not want to role over. I think it could have used a little more suspension travel, and having four wheel steering was crucial to give it some maneuverability that was lost due to the suspension design. The gearbox was flawless. The truck did have some trouble skipping gears at the portal axle. It seemed to happen when a single wheel was over-stressed as the driveshaft could have used stronger bracing in each suspension unit. This placed a lot of strain on the particular wheel. So would I do the independent suspension again. Maybe, but it would need some strengthening and redesign. Maybe it’s time for another truck like this.
I start most of my projects because I see something brilliant by another builder, and then I decided to develop this idea, or give the idea little more substance. After discovering a great two row radial, I wanted to give the engine a body. It had also been a long time since I had done a large project.
I chose to make the FW-190 for a couple of reasons. First, it had a radial. OK, 14 cylinders in the plane, and mine would only have 12, but it was close enough. Second, it was one of my favorire plane of WWII. Third, the body work would not present too many challenges. I set to work. I had to get the scale right, and start placing some of the plane’s extremities, so I would have a good idea where to place all the parts that I would build.
Once everything was placed, I had to figure out how I was going to do all the control surfaces. This started with figuring out the joystick, and the rudders. The joystick was a simple design driving side to side movements out the front by an axle to gears for the ailerons. When the joystick was moved front to back, a link all the way to the rear elevator was activated. I mounted the foot pedals on a simple pivot connected by gears to the rear rudder. Flaps, with a simple activating lever, were also installed. The cockpit was pretty full.
With a project this size, it took a great deal of work to get the shaping of the plane to work right. I used half stud offsets to get the fuselage correct, and spent a lot of time on the wings. Because the cockpit had a lot of activating levers, a lot of work went into the area around here. Adding the opening canopy did not help things. I added brick built markings, worked on the coloring, and spent some time adding guns and other details. The model was done.
It’s been three years since I have built this plane, but I needed a little motivation to help me with another similar project. It was good for me to remember how much I enjoyed this project, even though it took a lot of time and energy. Stay tuned for the next big plane.
As a child I always wanted a model of the Russian T-72, so I decided to create a version of the tank out of LEGO bricks. As is often the case, the model started with wheels. This determined the scale, and from there, I was able to determine the rest of the tank dimensions. This gave me very little room for all the functions of the tank.
Instructions are available for $5 USD.
Model of the popular Russian T-72. View the full gallery here.
Suspension of the tank.
The tank includes independent suspension on all 12 of the drive wheels. 6 are suspended with 6.5 length shock absorbers, 4 are suspended with rubber connectors, and the final two are not suspended, but move freely with the track. The tracks are driven from the rear by two longitudinally mounted PF M motors. These are connected 1:1, through double bevel gears to the 24z sprockets. The battery box is place in the front of the tank, with the IR receivers placed over the drive motors. The final PF M is mounted vertically in the turntable, to rotate the turret. It could use another reduction, as the rotation is a little quick as you can see below.
I was pleased with the way this model turned out. While the functions work alright, the aesthetics of the tank represented the original well.
Thirdwigg.com 