It’s finished!  Hurrah!!  Well, at least as finished as it can be.  I’ve sort of run out of bricks.  So it’s as finished as it can be given the limited resources with which I am lumbered.  I did have a brief look online to see what Lego was being listed on eBay, but quickly ran away from that idea – I know that once I start buying Lego I’ll never stop, and then I’ll be skint.  Of course, if people want to give/donate Lego to me, that’s another matter…

Anyway, back the point.  My car is complete.  It took a bit of doing, and a bit of redoing of what I’d already done, but the end result is pretty satisfactory.  If you remember from my previous post, the front suspension was already sagging under the weight of the car, so rather than trying to reduce the weight I opted to increase the strength of the suspension to compensate.  That meant doubling up the springs, using the ones I’d been using for the rear axle and transplanting them into the front subframe.  Of course, that was easier said than done, and I had to make a few modifications to make room for two springs.  But I got there in the end, and the result is a front suspension setup that is twice as strong as it was – still with plenty of movement, but it feels like it’s actually capable of supporting the car now!

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No post today about Lego.  One my wife’s old school friends is with us for the weekend, so the Lego has been diligently packed away and hidden in the garage again until it’s safe to resume my private geekiness.  Unless I suddenly lose all interest overnight, I expect the boxes will reappear on Monday evening, if not before…

What I’m actually blogging about now is the film we went to see this afternoon.  Now, being in the middle of the countryside, our nearest cinema isn’t exactly on our doorstep.  In fact, Cineworld in Yeovil is a good 40 minute drive away (albeit along beautiful country lanes).  The film in question was “Julie & Julia”, a film based on two true stories, one of a prestigious cook from the 50s and one of a modern day blogger who finds purpose in life through cooking.  Yes, this is a film review.  Read on if you’ve already seen the film, or if you have no intention of seeing the film but want to know what happens, or if you are planning on seeing the film but don’t mind knowing beforehand what happens.

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Slowness of work and lack of motivation to find it (no doubt caused by my cold) meant that mid-afternoon today I gave up staring at my computer and went and got productive with the Lego instead.  I say “productive”, some might argue that building a Lego car doesn’t quite count as there is no ultimate gain at the end of it, other than a little self-back-patting.  Nonetheless, my aching back and legs are testament to the hours I spent sat on the floor today.  That and the visible progress I’ve made (photos coming tomorrow now added).

With the basic chassis pretty much sorted I started work on the body, taking some inspiration from a Ford Mustang but generally doing what I could with the pieces I have to make something vaguely resembling a muscle car.  First came the front bumper, which incorporated some cool headlights.  Photos don’t do justice to just how cool they look, especially in the dark.  I’m going for a red body, with a white stripe down the middle.  Making convincing curves with Lego has always been a challenge, and the result is usually a somewhat angular version of the intended curves.  Basically, use your imagination and you’ll see a pretty car underneath.

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It’s day 4 of the build, and that can mean only one thing – starting off by taking it all apart again.  Yes, I decided that the front subframe just will not do.  So, in an effort to make the front end more realistic I decided to move the engine so that it was on top of the wheels rather than behind them.  That meant redesigning the suspension assembly again to make it wider so that the engine could sit inside.  It was a bit tedious, to be honest, but it was worth it once it was done as it looks so much better now, and hopefully it’ll be stronger too once I get the arms braced from the front side of the subframe.

The front subframe also now has a diagonal strut on each side, further strengthening it, which is no bad thing given that’s where a lot of the force is going to be taken, right over the wheels.  I’ve also widened the front subframe to give me more space between the steering shaft and the drive shaft, which has allowed for a far more compact yet satisfactory connection between engine and drive shaft.  It now runs smoothly and efficiently with only the most essential cogs in between (I want to retain a high cog ratio so that the engine spins fast even when the car is moving slowly).  Oh, and the front subframe has been significantly shortened, too.

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Perfectionist that I am, pretty much the entire car has been rebuilt this evening, apart from the engine.  Not satisfied with the imprecise and uncontrollable steering, I completely rebuilt the whole assembly from scratch using my own custom design.  The system I’d used yesterday was taken from an official Lego model, and used their official steering pieces, but the problem lay in their axle; because the ball joint was only one stud’s width away from the pivot point it meant that the mechanism accentuated any give in the gearing rather than compensating for it.  So I rebuilt it using ‘conventional’ Lego pieces to give me a ball joint 2 studs away from the pivot point.  It took some fiddling around to get it all lined up properly and get the suspension strut sitting nicely, and then some more fiddling to get it to attach to the front subframe, but we’re finally there – I have a front suspension/steering assembly that I’m happy with!

Next on my list of things to sort out was the rear axle, which just looked plain ugly.  It would do the job, and would probably be mostly hidden by the bodywork once that was figured out, but I just didn’t like the way it looked or the way it worked – it just wasn’t realistic in any way shape or form.  So that was stripped out too.

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Following the progress made on Saturday, and a good night’s sleep or two to think about it, I sat down and did some more building this evening.  Rather than trying to connect the front axle directly to the engine block and then connect that to the rest of the car, I realised it would be far stronger to build a solid front subframe and place the other components into it.  The engine is therefore now situated behind the front axle rather than almost on top of it, which if nothing else will make the profile a little more streamlined.  With that sorted out it’s actually starting to come together!

I’ve made a start on the rear of the car too, building the rear axle.  Rather than tackling the complexities of independent driven suspension at the rear I’ve gone for a live axle with movement in only one direction.  It makes it a lot simpler, though considerably less realistic – movement on one side of the car will affect the other side just as much, which isn’t ideal.  Still, at least it works.  There’s a differential in there too, and the drive shaft has been connected to the engine at the front of the car.  I wanted to have the engine spinning at a good speed when the car is moving, so I’ve geared it all up accordingly.  Unfortunately that does mean that there’s a fair amount of resistance, but I may be able to live with that.  It may be that I’ll be able to connect in an electric motor later on to drive the engine directly and have it drive the car at a manageable speed.

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Yes, I’ve got the Lego out again.  Unlike last time I have work to do during the day, so my building is restricted to free evenings, so progress is a little slower.  Still, nothing like a good challenge.  The project this time round is a vehicle of some sort, probably a sports car or similar.  The reason for the uncertainty is that the main goal is to experiment with a combination of suspension and an active drivetrain.  I experimented a while back with ways of getting a 4×4 drive system in place, but that proved too complicated given the bricks I have, so this time I’m going for the front wheels doing the steering and the rear wheels being connected to the engine, and with all four wheels having some form of suspension, albeit limited travel.

Today I started work on the front of the car, trying to get a setup capable of steering and suspension in a small space (I want to leave space for the engine in the front too).  In the end I stole an idea from another model, and used the front suspension and steering system almost straight out of the instruction booklet.  The next problem was working out how to connect that solidly to a subframe and not have it get in the way of the drivetrain.

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My friend Phill recently bought a new mobile phone.  Apparently it’s shiny.  Last Christmas I bought my wife a new mobile phone.  It too is shiny.  My own mobile phone, on the other hand, was shiny and new in 2005, and is now considerably less shiny than it used to be thanks to my keys rubbing a lot of the silver off the bottom of the casing.  No wonder, then, that I felt a few pangs of jealousy this week.

Unfortunately I just can’t justify buying myself a new phone, since my Motorola L6 does actually work fine.  So rather than get depressed about the situation I decided to have another go at revitalising my phone and getting the most out of it.  A little research got me Opera Mini 4.2, which is a sleek and feature-filled web browser for my phone.  Not only is it infinitely nicer to look at and use than the built-in one, it’s also miles faster thanks to a proxy compression that Opera provides – basically every web page my phone requests is sent via the Opear server, compressed until it’s tiny and then sent to my phone, which speeds up download times considerably.  The result is that my phone is now capable of checking e-mails and looking at web pages without a century passing between pages.

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