It was back in 2003, with the mythic JCB JS220 Excavator from Jennifer Clark, that she shown us how to fully implement the routing of two independently driven axles, through the center of one Technic turntable [1, 2]. It took us another 6 years, till we came to see the same principle applied into the crane of an official LEGO Technic set (8258, Crane Truck), by Uwe.
Since then, some have tried to take it one step further and find one way to route three axle functions through one turntable...
Someone raised the discussion, earlier this year on EBs and then finally a viable solution came up.
Member blueShinyApple managed to convince everyone, on his concept [3] and soon fmmjqtft made a nice animation using MLCad, LDView and Blender to demonstrate it.
Here it is the corresponding LDraw file from fmmjqtft, if you need it.
However, the solution is quite big, complex and should have a considerable friction to be used at a commercial model. Don't think this time we're going to see it at an official LEGO Technic set, anytime soon...

3 comments:
Perfect, I'm close to cry now ;-)
Took me quite a while to figure out how it worked, but it is really rather clever. Though I seriously doubt we'll see this one in an official set anytime soon.
It's a very ingenious solution! Congratulations to blueShinyApple!
However, I find it quite hard to integrate in a model (not even official). When applying movement to the 36t gear, the 5L beam needs to turn, which requires a lot of free space between the 36t engagement and the other 2 functions, making it very tricky to reach all functions.
And if this is true for the base, it will be even harder to design something moving on top, which is usually not very big in diameter.
Post a Comment