Lego Technic

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 Philip 30 Sep 2020

When I was a child Technic came in sets that built either lots (10+) of models or some more expensive kits that focussed on one design but still had instructions for 3 other. Seems now it's just very expensive single model kits with a second minor modification option.

Class tractor, £340, with option to change lifting arm to a plough. Or a mobile crane that can also be static. Looks pretty disappointing if the building part was the main fun. It's like the direction Lego has gone, so many specialist shapes it's harder to use kits to build things with imagination.

Moan over.

1
 artif 30 Sep 2020
In reply to Philip:

Have you tried the lego website for alternative plans

Removed User 30 Sep 2020
In reply to Philip:

I agree very much. There's a documentary about on the trails and tribulations of the company, and though it sucks, better than no Lego at all.

Look about though, plenty of used technic sets around and cheap enough to buy a few, dump randomly onto the floor, and make rat fink hybrid war animals from like it should be.

 mike123 30 Sep 2020
In reply to Philip: just after Christmas my youngest (8) was looking at various Lego technic you tube videos one of which led him to this :

http://www.isogawastudio.co.jp/legostudio/toranomaki/en/

we got got the three books off eBay for £10. We also got two other isogowa books that use all the motor stuff he got for Christmas.  The odd bits we don't have from the various sets he has he gets off eBay.  

Edit : unsurprisingly home school was often : some maths , some English .......rest of the morning DT 

edit 2: we got the actual books rather than the download , they really are excellent 

Post edited at 07:40
OP Philip 30 Sep 2020
In reply to mike123:

They look good. I'm just wondering how you get to a decent amount to work with. I remember in 1989 (9) going to Legoland in Denmark and getting technic (presumably bought there) for Christmas. I got a red and yellow set which gave me loads of pieces. I later got the pneumatic set.

 summo 30 Sep 2020
In reply to Philip:

I think they have massively changed their business model over the years to survive. Kids tend to aim for the ranges linked to movies etc.. plus the Lego friends or minecraft range. The big ticket one offs go to the many adult fanatics. 

 mike123 30 Sep 2020
In reply to Philip: old unfashionable sets off  eBay . We got a couple of sets  pre lockdown  for sensible money that were built once then canabalised .  All the power functions stuff is available from China some knock off some not, as power functions has now been superseded it's relatively cheap. Youngest likes to build stuff  and leave it made for ages , oldest builds stuff once and starts modding it immediately , middle one not interested at all. 

This and the second one has given them ( and me ! ) lots and lots of fun :

https://nostarch.com/powerfunctions1

Post edited at 08:28
In reply to mike123:

Also, the Sariel book is great.

Agree with the OP it has changed but once you've got a few sets and augment with brick link (beware; money pit) you can come up with some pretty decent builds of your own.

I made my daughter a cuckoo clock that displays a different mini-figure every hour. Only took me 4 years to perfect so on that basis, pretty good value for money (certainly better than that size 4 cam).

 Tom Valentine 30 Sep 2020
In reply to Philip:

Always an inferior product to Meccano ( though the person responsible for hoovering in the house might disagree).

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 wintertree 30 Sep 2020
In reply to Philip:

Sad, isn’t it.  The modern kits really undermine creativity compared to having a large set of basic parts.  My 8 year old life was complete when I got a pneumatics set to go with my motor.  I still remember our home designed cable car using a few pulleys, gears and a motor crossing the room up high on a piece of string.

I’ve been 3D printing Brio/Duplo adapters and flexi brio from “thingiverse” for Jr and am going to adapt one be sloped; we’re building elevated tracks and soon a ramp / bridge jump.

This is with an ultra cheap 3D printer (Ender 3).  Even the expensive home ones aren’t really good enough for printing Lego parts.

Post edited at 09:36

In reply to Philip:

I'm a bit before Techno era. But I rarely made up the designs on the instruction sheet. I might have built the thing once, but, thereafter, the bricks just went into the box and all the things I built were of my own devising. That was the attraction of Lego.

If I wanted to build models, I bought airfix kits...

OP Philip 30 Sep 2020
In reply to captain paranoia:.

> If I wanted to build models, I bought airfix kits...

That was what I thought when I saw the models this morning. They aren't great models (aesthetically) and not much more function.

Also thinking of switching focus to Mecano.

 Toerag 30 Sep 2020
In reply to Philip:

I've been slowly but surely going through my parents' loft finding my toys from my childhood to pass onto my kids but couldn't find any of the masses of Lego we had until a month ago when I came across an A4 envelope stuffed full of the fronts of Lego boxes that my Mum had cut out and kept. This drove me to keep looking and I eventually found a knee-high cardboard box about a cubit square. In it were 17 shoeboxes of Lego, each box labelled with the set numbers and descriptions and the sets mostly built inside along with the instructions. Must be 50-odd sets. Thanks Mum!  I was really pleased to find my pneumatics were still in good order from the early 90's, many of the toys I've found have perished rubber and soft plastic parts .  The most interesting things are the delivery truck which must be pre-1980, motor kits and trains. Most of it is Space lego with a smattering of what would be called 'city' today, and a handful of technic kits. One has a technic man in it which I'd forgotten existed.

Post edited at 12:25
 Toerag 30 Sep 2020
In reply to Philip:

>  Class tractor, £340, with option to change lifting arm to a plough. Or a mobile crane that can also be static. Looks pretty disappointing if the building part was the main fun. It's like the direction Lego has gone, so many specialist shapes it's harder to use kits to build things with imagination.

Our local shop has the Liebherr quarry excavator in stock, it's massive.  I wouldn't be too worried about the lack of alternative instructions, the 'adult' kits like that have so many parts in them you can build all sorts.  Have you seen the video of the Liebherr crane you can get plans for?  youtube.com/watch?v=7mQGgfgjcYU&

 Oceanrower 30 Sep 2020
In reply to Toerag:

> Have you seen the video of the Liebherr crane you can get plans for?  youtube.com/watch?v=7mQGgfgjcYU&

Bloody hell!!

Post edited at 12:45
 Dax H 30 Sep 2020
In reply to captain paranoia:

That was my brother and me, we got a laundry basket full of standard lego passed down from an uncle. Birthdays and Christmas was always space Lego and technical. Once we were grown up we passed 2 laundry baskets of Lego to his kids.

New kits were always built from the plans and played with a bit then broken down and added to the pile. That's where the real fun began just seeing what we could imagine and build. 

 Oli 30 Sep 2020

Have a look at https://rebrickable.com/ 

There are loads of instructions to make different models from existing kits.

In reply to Dax H:

Same, my brother and I would get kits for christmas/ birthdays then build once, dismantle and add it to the big pile of lego that generally lived on out bedroom floor.

We started clearing them into a bucket after one fateful night when I rolled out of the top bunk in my sleep and face planted into a pile of plastic bricks. This resulted in a 3am trip to the hospital, three stitches in my lower lip and a new found enthusiasm for keeping the bedroom floor tidy.

OP Philip 30 Sep 2020
In reply to Toerag:

> Our local shop has the Liebherr quarry excavator in stock, it's massive.  I wouldn't be too worried about the lack of alternative instructions, the 'adult' kits like that have so many parts in them you can build all sorts. 

They do, but at £300 - 400 for 1 kit it's a gamble if it will provide enough entertainment.

With his Lego I started with the Creator 3-1 and the mixed block sets. Then loads of city, so there is enough to build all sorts of things + vehicles. Just don't see the same amount of key parts (gears, motors, pneumatics) in the big sets that you could get in the past. The motor set was separate  - I had two they took C or D cells, and came with load of cogs. Lego is compatible for building the structure.

It's harder to build other things when may of the kits solve things like doors, roofs, etc with customer pieces. He has the Lego rocket kit, which has loads of small pieces but the main structure is some specific 2 piece cylinders.

I just feel the whole things has lost the creative engineer element and is now just another kit building toy.

 sbc23 30 Sep 2020
In reply to Philip:

Lego technic was always quite difficult/advanced to build anything significant from the parts included in a single set. There were never many spares to work with. You'd need to combine lots of sets together to start making anything properly creative.

Some of the new sets, like the red mobile crane (42082), are masterpieces of design. There must have been some CAD design or multiple build iterations to get the amount of mechanism into such a small space. The instructions have 1170 steps, each with multiple parts and sub-assemblies. 

https://www.lego.com/cdn/product-assets/product.bi.core.pdf/6245502.pdf

https://www.lego.com/cdn/product-assets/product.bi.core.pdf/6245458.pdf

I paid about £140 on amazon for the 4057 parts. 3.5p per part on average and some are really big, including the motor & battery bits. That's fantastic value. 

It took my lad (aged 9) 14 hours to build it. Having seen it, that was a significant achievement by itself. There is a downloadable option to build a different pile-driver model from the same parts. I haven't built up the energy to attempt to take the first model apart. I suspect that will take about 3 hours just to strip it down. He will need to follow the instructions on a laptop screen because I don't fancy printing out the 846 pages of colour manual.  

 Timmd 30 Sep 2020
In reply to Philip:

Having looked at the kits, it's my feeling that the mid 90's was when Lego Technic reached it's peak technology wise, to do with complexity and new things being incorporated. In later kits it doesn't seem like anything new was added after motorised pneumatics and worms gears and rack and pinions and differentials had been come up with, and the gear box in the red Test Car, and sprung suspension, which meant they had to find something new which was more specialised kits with bespoke parts in them, but not so much in terms of something new from a technical sense.

I like to think I'm not subjective in thinking this just because I played with Lego Technic during my teens during the 90's, I see more modern kits on ebay while scrolling through for the ones I built just for nostalgia's sake, and there doesn't seem to be anything extra added to them. 

Post edited at 14:57
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 Timmd 30 Sep 2020
In reply to sbc23:

Wow, that's an impressive kit. You're never too old for Lego Technic...I'm kinda tempted.

 Toerag 30 Sep 2020
In reply to featuresforfeet:

> and augment with brick link

I've just spent my lunchhour on there working out how much my big boxful of 80's Lego (77+ sets!) is worth - £800+ would appear to be a bottom-end estimate, with my Wife's Fabuland amusement park coming in at a whopping ~£130.  Small models/sets don't seem to have gained in value unless they're in 'boxed new condition', whereas the bigger things have - I suspect due to rarity.  I was disappointed to see my Lorry & forklift released in 1973 is only worth ~£30.

 Timmd 30 Sep 2020
In reply to Toerag:

A brother went into our parent's loft and decided his son would like to have my technical Lego, it could have been nice if he'd asked, but I don't suppose I'd play with it. It's just the pull of childhood nostalgia.

Post edited at 19:22
 Bobling 30 Sep 2020
In reply to Philip:

My kids have been steadily accumulating lego for a few years now and I've always been of the 'build it then add the parts to the enormous parts pile for random building' mindset.  This is now out of control, OK so the random parts pile is actually now an IKEA trofast system that takes up one wall of our lego room with parts subdivided into different draws (single bricks, double bricks, single plates, large plates, small wings, big wings, meeples, meeple equipment, and of course the mysterious 'weird bits'...you get the idea).  Several of the drawers are now fit to bursting and the sub-divisions are getting ridiculous.  So I have now embarked on a project to rebuild stuff as per the original instructions and to put it back in the original box.  We still have all the boxes in the loft and the instructions have been carefully preserved in poly-pockets in nice organised binders, about a dozen of them at least.

Cue delighted eldest child happily helping me rebuild - he just really likes building from the instructions!  Lord Business would be proud.  Him and his brother have spent hours playing with one of the big boat sets in the bath recently.

No real point to make other than sometimes free-form building isn't for everyone.

 HansStuttgart 01 Oct 2020
In reply to Timmd:

> Having looked at the kits, it's my feeling that the mid 90's was when Lego Technic reached it's peak technology wise

Lego Boost.

 Timmd 01 Oct 2020
In reply to HansStuttgart:

Aha, that looks interesting. I guess it was inevitable that only so many different mechanical things could be found to be made from plastic for children to build with - re my other post, before they needed to find a new area like Boost. 

A large mechanical engine model with valves and cams in it might be cool, but that's less 'cool toy' like than an Air Claw Rig like I got during the 90's, I don't think I'd have taken to something like an engine at the time.


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