I had the Lego #8851 Pneumatic Excavator when I was a kid (and still have all the parts, natch), so when I noticed that Kmart here in Australia is currently selling the new and exciting #8294 linear-actuator Excavator for only $AU54 (US list price $US60!), I had to get one.
(OK, actually I got more than one. They also have the bigger #8295 Telescopic Handler for only $AU89 - list price $US90 in the States. The Handler only has one linear actuator in it, though; the Excavator has two. The sale's on until the 8th of October.)
Because the Excavator has only two actuators - the old pneumatic one had three - its bucket-hinge action is linked to the end segment of the arm. This makes it a bit less playable.
(The linear actuators are part of the new "Power Functions" motorised-model line, but are not themselves motorised unless you buy extra stuff. They're discussed in great detail on the excellent Technic Bricks.)
Apart from that, though, the new excavator is brilliant. I miss the more expensive old-style packaging you used to get with Lego; now each set is just a flimsy box full of bags. But I don't miss the old studded-beams Technic Lego itself at all. The new stuff makes it much easier to pack tons of mechanism into a small space, and if you just chug through the instructions without spending a lot of time puzzling over what in fact it is that you're building, it's a wonderful surprise when you stick it all together and suddenly find yourself looking at a freakin' gearbox.
The gearbox uses somespecialisedparts that've been around for years, but were new to me. In this case, they give you a shift lever with a neutral position in the middle, and either end of its throw linking a gear on the back of the Excavator to one of the two actuators.
(The actuators are powerful and accurate, but not what you'd call speedy. Frequent users may like to replace the gear on the back with a less pretty but more usable crank, or an electric motor - the instructions have a bit at the end that shows you how to add a Power Functions motor to the set. This, by the way, explains the funny little peg sticking up on one side of the tracked base; it restricts rotation of the top of the excavator for no purpose in the standard model, but if you add the motor, the turn-stop prevents you from twisting up the wire going from the battery pack in the base to the motor in the top part.)
The new excavator has those new chunky tracks I was talking about the other day. Unlike the somewhat fragile old-style gear-drive tracks, the new ones are deliberately made to not hook together terribly strongly. So if you twist the track a bit, one of the links will click apart. That may put a kink in your plan to use these tracks for heavy-duty off-road motoring, but it may also cause your new Lego Panzer V to throw tracks about as easily as the real one did.
The #8294 excavator also comes with several stickers you're supposed to put on the pieces; I of course did not even glance at them. And it's got this unusual giant tile piece, which is only used in the alternate model. Lego have cut costs here, as well; you don't get instructions for the second model in the box, but have to download them instead.
I'd normally complain about this, since downloadable extras can reasonably be expected to not be available ten years down the track. But there's pretty much zero chance that it'll happen in this case; the fan communitywillprovide, if Lego ever don't.
This is a Gakken Cross Copter, which can be yours, as it was mine, for 1886 yen plus delivery from HobbyLink Japan. (It's something like $US27 including the cheaper Surface Air Lift shipping, as I write this.)
The helicopter itself has two contra-rotating rotors, which are driven by one minuscule electric motor. The motor is tethered to a hand-powered generator, which you must crank with considerable enthusiasm to get the Copter airborne.
I was glumly contemplating a 600-take video session (with the cats, who find the Copter utterly fascinating, banished from the room...) to try to get some decent footage of the Copter in action. But fortunately, some people from Make Magazine got the chance to play with a prototype:
The prototype seems bulkier than the production Copter, and has a longer cable. But the principle's the same.
Because the power wire tugs on the bottom of the Copter, it tends to pull the bottom of the aircraft toward you, which causes it to fly away from you. This can rapidly get out of hand. Fortunately, you can just stop turning the handle and let the copter fall and dangle from the wires without damage. It seems to be pretty tough, too, considering its gossamer construction; the two interleaved rotors often end up mis-meshed after a crash, but if they haven't managed to get completely jammed, just twitching the generator handle back and forth a little will usually sort them out.
The generator's quite beautifully coupled to the tiny motor in the Copter. You only need a slight turn of the crank handle either way to get the rotors turning. It acts more like a drive shaft than an electrical linkage.
As with the immortal Vertibird (which actually did have a drive shaft from the power unit to the tethered helicopter), the Cross Copter's remote power source makes it lighter. The Copter by itself, not counting the tether wire, weighs only about 8.5 grams (that's 0.3 ounces). The whole 110cm (3.6 foot) length of the power wire adds only about one more gram.
The Copter's smaller than I expected, though. The diameter of each four-bladed rotor is a bit less than 12 centimetres (4.7 inches).
You also have to assemble the Cross Copter yourself, but this will only take a few minutes. As with so many Japanese hobby products, the packaging is beautiful - in this case a box with a short instructional magazine for a front panel. The instructions are all in Japanese, but the pictures are more than adequate to figure out how to click the few parts together. You need to squeeze rather hard to get the landing skids to click onto the bottom of the Copter frame, which could be beyond the hand strength of a small child, but the rest of the assembly should be no problem for any intelligent kid.
Getting the Copter to take off from a surface is dodgy at best, because of the wire-making-it-fly-away-from-you problem. If you've got someone to hold the chopper for you while you get it up to speed, though, you'll be fine.
(If you go for hand launching, you could also delete the two skids on the bottom, dropping a little more precious weight. It's not as if you're ever likely to use the skids for landing, after all. It's probably not completely physically impossible to get the Cross Copter to land, but I'm buggered if I know how you'd go about it.)
You can, these days, get a proper self-contained remote-controlled tiny helicopter for not much more than the price of the Cross Copter. The Interactive Toy ConceptsMicro Mosquito, for instance, is a highly insectile (it has eyes!) twin-coaxial-rotor beastie that weighs only about fifteen grams and seems to cost only around fifty bucks. And it seems to be quite controllable...
...which is more than can be said for its predecessors, the foam-bodied Picoo Z and its endless clones - some decent, some awful, all very cheap.
For proper airlift-a-sugar-lump-to-your-tea control, you need something like the incredible Pixelitos or the Proxflyer prototypes that led to the mass-market Micro Mosquito, but you can at least try to control even the worst Picoo clones. The Cross Copter pretty much just goes where it feels like going.
(The Cross Copter actually has a similar stability system to the Prox/Picoflyer; its rotors are rigid, but loosely connected to the drive shafts, so they can flop around to counter movement of the Copter's body.)
If you want a helicopter, you don't want a Cross Copter. But if you want a neat little not-too-expensive toy that's half science project, half party novelty, the Cross Copter's the only game in town.
Not a lot of people seem to be buying the Cross Copter from HobbyLink Japan, because as I write this the "People who bought this item also like" section on HLJ's Cross Copter page contains nothing but items from my own last HLJ order!
I hope, faithful readers, that you'll at least manage to add that little Sherman to the end of the page.
Tamiya make excellent radio-controlled tank kits; I havetwo. Their 16th-scale kits all cost several hundred dollars, though.
Here, in contrast...
...is one that should be well under $200, delivered.
It's the upcoming #48207 Sherman, a reduced-size version of the 16th-scale Sherman that Tamiya have been selling in different versions, on and off, for decades now.
This Sherman is 1:35th scale, an immensely popular scale for military models, so it ought to be about 16.7 centimetres (6.6 inches) long. And, like the 1/16th Kubelwagen Tamiya sold a few years ago, the 35th-scale Sherman comes with radio gear.
It's still a proper R/C kit that needs to be assembled and painted, so yes, there's more to buy. But you have to buy at least a radio set for a normal R/C kit; the 35th-scale Sherman has one in the box. And its major electronic and mechanical components seem to come pre-assembled. You shouldn't need anything but basic hand tools and glue to build it, actually, if you're happy with whatever colour the parts are when you snip them off the sprue.
The list price for the new Sherman is $US213 or something, but list prices for R/C kits are always ridiculous; you shouldn't find it actually costs more than about $US150 from a hobby shop. As I write this, HobbyLink Japan (with whom I do not, in case you were wondering, have an affiliate deal) have the new Sherman available for pre-order for only 13,110 yen (that's about $US124, $AU150 or 85 Euros, as I write this). That doesn't include delivery, but this isn't a big kit; it shouldn't cost more than another 5000 yen to ship anywhere in the world. So the total should come in well under $US200.
The pre-order price is a 5% discount on the 13,800-yen normal price. The kit's slated to be in stock in mid-October.
Tamiya have made several other 35th-scale R/C tanks, but in their typical treat-customers-mean-keep-'em-keen fashion, you're not going to find most of those kits in the shops any more. They released two other 35th-scale R/C tanks this year - a Panzer IV and a Panther G - and you may just still be able to find those for a reasonable price.
These current 35th-scale tanks are more expensive than the ones that were on sale a few years ago, but that's because they've got turret traverse and gun elevation. I think they have proper articulated tracks, too, not unrealistic and power-sapping rubber belts. If the above-pictured Sherman has rubber tracks, they're incredibly detailed, with proper sprocket drive.
You don't get sound effects or flashing "firable" guns, but you do get a lovely scale model with full Dalek motion control. What's not to like?
I've been a long time reader of your site, and seeing as you have a fascination for interesting cut-price electronic stuff, I thought this site might interest you:
I'm not affiliated with it in any way; I just think it's an awesome place to get things for silly low prices. Obviously build quality isn't great, but I've bought some interesting little gadgets of there for pittance. Also check out their diddly RC helicopter section - they're quite a bit cheaper than most other places!
I buy random incredibly-cheap stuff from Hong Kong eBay dealers all the time, so I just had to try out DealExtreme too. Like several other Hong Kong gadget dealers - USB Geek, for instance - shipping to anywhere in the world is included in DealExtreme's prices. So you don't have to do the usual overseas-shopping thing where you look for other stuff you can barely justify buying, to prevent shipping being 80% of the total order cost; if all you need is a ninety-eight-cent screwdriver, you won't be ripped off if that's all you buy.
I ordered a selection of entertaining objects from DealExtreme on the fifth of September, but the parcel didn't arrive until the 24th. That's because it took DealExtreme until the 16th before they actually sent it. And the package was stuffed too tight, so the pair of novelty tea infusers I'd ordered were both broken.
But DealExtreme's support people replied almost instantly to my request for a replacement, and I've no reason to suppose I won't receive it. Although it may, of course, take another nineteen days.
(The DealExtreme "Customer Service Express" contact form makes you include pictures. This is fair enough, but it makes you feel a bit stupid when it means you're taking 20 minutes out of your day to get a $2 item replaced...)
You can find most of DealExtreme's stuff on sale on eBay and elsewhere, but they stock some items that genuinely are hard to find elsewhere. Their Nintendo DS accessories, for instance, include not only dirt-cheap tri-wingscrewdrivers for the little screws that hold a DS together, but also several flash carts for running homebrew (or, of course, pirated) software on your DS.
Flash carts are notoriously hard to find on sites like eBay, but DealExtreme have a bunch of them. They probably even work, too, despite the fact that some of them are cheap clones of the R4 cart I use in my own DS. Apparently future R4 firmware may deliberately break the cloned carts, or even DSes using them.
Many of the other cards are R4 clones too, with a panoply of similar-yet-different names - ND1, M3, N5, K6 - and your guess is as good as mine as to which one's best. But at least you can buy the darn things, and get your DSOrganize, Pocket Physics, Colors!orwhatever on.
Many of the things Grand Illusions sells are very hard to find anywhere else, but this ring is not one of those things. I got mine for $AU8.99 delivered from this eBay seller. (Here they are on ebay.com, instead of ebay.com.au.)
They've got a lot of thumb-tips, too. With one of those and a good supply of chicken giblets, you could set yourself up with a nice little psychic surgery business!
The most common limiting factor for makers of powered Lego tanks always used to be tracks.
The simplest Lego tracks were the one-piece rubber "Technic Tread Crawler" tracks that came with the Universal Motor Set. The rubber tracks fit all of those plastic-box pre-Technic motors, and they work well enough, within their limits.
I, like umpteen other kids lucky enough to have two motors, just stuck 'em together side by side with one driving a track on the left and one driving a track on the right and, with two battery boxes, then had myself a skid-steer machine.
(Which would never go quite straight, because the battery voltage and motor performance on either side never quite matched. But it was close enough for government work.)
The little rubber tracks were very limited, though. If you wanted less-power-sapping tracks of arbitrary length, you had to use the Technic Link Tread pieces.
The Link Treads were basically just Technic Link Chains with a broad bar attached to the top. They were small enough to mesh with standard Technic gears, which made them rather delicate. Not to mention a bit fiddly for even small fingers to snap together.
The Technic Link Treads weren't actually the first Lego chain/link pieces. That honour goes to Technic Link Chain Old, which was much sturdier because it meshed with the old big spiky gears. The spiky gears were replaced by the finer-toothed ones around 1980, though, because the old ones didn't mesh terribly well with each other, and couldn't be made small enough for intricate mechanisms. (The biggestones might make a pretty nice scale waterwheel, though.)
The new tracks don't mesh with standard gears, so they need special driving wheels. But apart from that, they seem to be an excellent solution to the problem of making a tracked Lego vehicle that can traverse something more challenging than short-pile carpet.
Yep; that's a tank with treads made out of short, straight Technic "lift arm" pieces. Heck, you could probably make a clunkier version of these tracks out of good old studded beams.
This track design looks to be highly scalable, very strong, and easily repairable with cheap parts. And it doesn't need to crawl like this; you could probably drive these tracks quite fast, if you used a couple of the stronger motors.
As the all-knowing expert on model war machines (and the receiver of sponsorship from BackyardArtillery if I recall correctly?), I was wondering if you could recommend to me a catapult or trebuchet that is:
- Suitable for a beginner with fairly limited access to tools
- Suitable for someone who lives in a college at university (i.e. must be highly portable)
- Shippable by a method that will have it arrive by the 6th of October (the recipient's birthday)
- Not unreasonably expensive (I was thinking in the range of $80-$120, but if thats too little for something exciting, go higher)
Unfortunately, though, the RLT sites don't offer international shipping any more, on account of the usual credit-card fraud BS.
(Ed didn't specifically say that he's buying a gift for someone in Australia, but I presumed he was, from his .au e-mail address. If the recipient is in the USA, by all means just go straight to trebuchet.com or catapultkits.com and pick whatever you want. And if you follow my affiliate links, I'll get a cut!)
I don't know of any companies in Australia that sell trebuchet kits (if you do, tell us all in the comments!), but fortunately, there are some dealers who'll ship Down Under.
Educational Innovations at teachersource.com, for instance. I've bought from them and I think delivery was pretty snappy; ordinary international air mail should make the cut for you, provided the package doesn't get held for examination by Customs or something (which it shouldn't, but sometimes they just do it at random to packages that don't look suspicious).
Educational Innovations resell one of Ron Toms' kits; that'd probably suit you very nicely, but it's not cheap. Eighty US bucks for the kit, plus $US47.53 for delivery to Australia. Not peanuts, and a bit over your budget, but at least you ought to get it in plenty of time. And teachersource.com have lots of other cool stuff you might like.
You might also like to consider the kits ThinkGeek sell. You want the more expensive "Trebuchet Kit", not the cheaper "Catapult" one, which commits the cardinal sin of throwing from a cup on the end of the arm rather than from a sling.
(As I mentioned in the sidebar of the old trebuchet kit review, the cup-on-the-end "catapult" is the classic image of a medieval siege engine, but it's also mechanically stupid. All proper flingers actually used a sling, which allows the projectile to be hurled much faster than the end of the arm can move.)
ThinkGeek's international shipping fees are not low, either - more than the price of the kit, in this case, though the total is still well within your budget - but the regular DHL Express International delivery option is reliable and fast enough to make the cut for you. And the shipping's not too terrible if you add a few other lightweight items to the big thing you're buying; as with teachersource.com, you can easily build a small Emergency Present Pile out of ThinkGeek gear.
(See also HobbyLink Japan, who have tons of awesome stuff, much of which is not available anything like as cheaply, or at all, outside Japan. But don't see them now, because they don't have any siege engine kits.)
At this point, I started hunting on eBay, and found a couple of sellers with apparently identical treb kits for a reasonable price. Then I found the same thing on at catapultkits.com, which told me that this kit's from Pathfinders Design and Technology in Canada. Their trebuchet is a bit spindly, but that's because it's quite a nice scale model. And it's quite cheap. And Pathfinder even seem to offer international shipping - but when I entered dummy information to see how much the shipping actually cost (I just love how many sites make you do that...), I noticed that the "Country" box on the form is a text box, which doesn't seem to actually be taken into account when you click on through.
The Pathfinders site said shipping to Australia was a lousy nine bucks, for a grand total of $CA41.22. Which is great if it's true, but I'll bet you it's not.
If you're in Canada (or, surely, the USA...), though, Pathfinders look like an excellent source for cheap treb kits. They've got several other neat-looking products, too.
If ordering directly from Pathfinders doesn't work out, here and here are the eBay sellers I found that offerend the Pathfinders kit.
If it comes to that, it's actually not very difficult to make your own trebuchet, if you don't need something that can throw a bowling ball half a mile. Lego is very good for getting the hang of the concepts, and the basic simplicity of the idea - two A-frames, axle, throwing arm with sling at one end and weight at the other - means it's also not hard to knock one together from PVC pipe, or even authentic wood.
But a pile of plumbing and a book about siege engines is, I grant you, probably not the greatest of gifts.
(UPDATE: Murray Hill of 22AD Ancient & Medieval Artillery in New Zealand commented below. He isn't quite in the treb-kit business yet; at the moment he's just sending out free plans to school students, and making catapults himself for schools, now and then. But he just told me that he plans to "come up with a student friendly machine" quite soon. Check out his Web site, particularly the Shop section, for updates!)
The other day, I bought two little laser pointers on eBay, for a grand total of $US3.76 delivered.
I intended to use them as cat toys, since the only red pointer we've got here that doesn't run from those useless button batteries is a bit flaky.
I chose those particular pointers because they were the very cheapest AAA-powered lasers I could find. They were promoted as "Ultra Powerful Red Laser Pointer Pen Beam Light 5mW", but they almost certainly actually had an output of only one or two milliwatts, like almost every other cheap pointer.
This power level presents pretty much zero eye risk, according to the rather complex risk calculations I explained at great length in my review of a much more powerful pointer.
A genuine five-milliwatt laser certainly can damage your retina if you stare into it from close range, and it's theoretically possible for glance exposure to cause eye damage at ten to maybe twenty metres, given the beam characteristics of cheap lasers.
A cheap two-milliwatt laser can't possibly hurt your eyes if you're more than ten metres away - probably closer, actually - and the one-milliwatt output you'll get from the very cheapest lasers and from those ubiquitous button-cell keyring lasers when the batteries have more than a few minutes of use on them will probably not hurt you even if you do stare into them at zero range.
Not that you should do it just to see, but the hazard calculations start looking pretty stupid as you drop below 5mW.
Naturally, Australian Customs chose to protect the Australian people from these terrifying devices, by seizing them under subsection 203B(2) of the Customs Act.
(This only the second time this has happened to me. The other time was when Ron Toms tried to sendme an inexpensive Airsoft gun along with a box of other toys for review. The Customs guys left me the instruction manual, battery and charger, so I presume they really did incinerate the gun itself.)
Should I wish to contest the seizure, it would appear my first step would be to obtain Form B709B from the Firearms Registry of the New South Wales Police, which I could of course not actually do, after which I would be able to lodge a "B710 Application to the Minister for Permission to Import Weapons", which he would of course not grant.
At least I didn't have to go to bloody Clyde to pick up the package, as I've had to a couple of previous times when Customs were doubtful about something I'd bought.
(The second of those times, the item in question was a Gerber multitool. The nice Customs lady went into the back room to make sure it wasn't actually a switchblade or something. Her experience with tools in general may have been somewhat limited, since she came back bleeding. But she was very good-humoured about it, especially after I gave her one of the Band-Aids I keep in my wallet where less practical, or perhaps just more interesting, people keep a condom.)
This foolishness happened, of course, because a couple of geniuses shone green lasers at planes coming in to land here in New South Wales. And, immediately, our sagacious elected protectors made new laws which caused ordinary laser pointers - including low-powered red ones that have almost no ability to dazzle anyone more than a stone's throw away - to be classed as weapons.
Actually, in New South Wales and elsewhere, it would appear that all lasers above one milliwatt output are now Controlled and/or Prohibited Weapons, like military flame throwers and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. The maximum penalty for merely possessing a perfectly normal office laser pointer would, therefore, now appear to be fourteen years in prison.
I'd like to say that I'm sure that a judge would recognise that the assortment of silly ninja weapons and quite inoffensive items - like ordinary handcuffs, for instance, or even a home-made cardboard replica of a Sidewinder missile - that one or another drum-beating politician has added to the list of prohibited weapons, are not the same as an actual working RPG-7. And that of all the ridiculous things on the list, a $2, 2mW, laser pointer may be the most ridiculous.
But you shouldn't be up in front of a judge over just owning a 2mW laser pointer anyway. And, given the way things have been going lately, I don't know how much sanity is left in the system.
You'd think that even the docile betaapes who can be counted on to support frank fascism when presented with the simple stimuli so famously explained by Hermann Goering would, by now, have started to realise that just this once, for the very first time in human history, they are being lied to.
We still do not seem to have reached the point where any electable candidate for public office in Australia - or, of course, in the USA - will come within a hundred miles of saying that making little old ladies take their shoes off is not an essential measure to prevent conquest of the world by radical Islam.
Oh, and do note that while 2mW laser pointers are now super-illegal death rays here in New South Wales - instantly making felons of, what do you reckon, maybe a third of the population? - laser diodes with the same or more power which happen to be part of ultrasonic tape-measures, laser levels, Blu-Ray players, barcode scanners or any of approximately one billion other classes of device are all still perfectly legal, and expected to stay that way. Because we all know that terrorists do not own screwdrivers, or know how to find Instructables.com.
I remind you, at this juncture, that Wicked Lasers and their spin-off TechLasers continue to offer a 100% delivery guarantee for lasers the size of a billy-club that cost a thousand dollars and have at least a few hundred times the output power of the ones Customs seized from me.
Techlasers have a "100% Money Back Guarantee if for ANY reason your product cannot be delivered to your door, no questions asked", while Wicked Lasers will give you your money back plus a hundred dollars if a laser doesn't make it to you.
So I think it's safe to say that Australian Customs isn't perfectly watertight as regards even lasers with which you could beat a man to death.
But they sure confiscated the hell out of those cat toys of mine. Well done, lads!
The only even slightly rational justification for the new laws is that it's now possible for police to confiscate a laser from you if you cannot give a good reason for having it on your person. So the cops don't have to prove that this particular dork they just caught is the same one who was shining a laser at an air ambulance an hour ago, and can at least take his laser away even if they can't charge him with anything.
(Although the 1mW legal limit seems to mean they can charge you with a serious offence just for owning almost any laser pointer. Does anybody know whether this has actually been done yet?)
But even if you feel that this particular security-versus-freedom trade-off is a fair one, it doesn't justify stopping everybody else from even buying a plain old $2 cat-toy laser.
I, for the record, do not believe this to be a fair trade-off. There are similar laws here in New South Wales covering knives; if you cannot give a good reason for having even a tiny Swiss Army knife in your pocket if challenged by a policeman, he can confiscate it. But it is easy to justify having any normal sort of pocket-knife, and I do not strongly object to confiscation of a steak knife from some goon wandering around outside the cinemas on George Street in Sydney on a Saturday night, whether or not he's actually suspected of doing or intending to do something bad with it.
I don't think the knife laws have actually achieved a damn thing, but I also don't think they're a great assault upon our freedom, since all they really do is increase the number of ways a policeman can make your life miserable, if he chooses, from a million to a million and one.
The NSW laser ban, in contrast, is an excellent example of the new wave of arbitrary, fear-based laws to Protect the People from the Movie-Plot Tactics of the Scary Domestic Terrorists who Don't Actually Exist.
The practical results of the ban, despite the outrageous classification of harmless tiny lasers as being like flamethrowers, appear to be mundane and minor; nobody's being hauled off to be tortured in Syria over possession of Laser-Guided Scissors.
But I think the mundanity of the ban is what makes it a particularly good example of the Death by a Thousand (Laser-Guided Scissor!) Cuts that's being suffered by the civil liberties of citizens of Western nations.
One little thing after another's being taken away, none of them a big deal by themselves. Day by day, it further restricts the kind of life that's legally permissible, and makes us more and more accustomed to living in this slowly-tightening straitjacket. The idea is to make us all keep our heads down and do anything and everything we're told, lest we slightly annoy a policeman and then actually be charged with some of the new and ridiculous "crimes" which we cannot avoid committing.
