For the last few months, I’ve been reselling some fantastic elements that supplement and enhance my Mindstorms project activities. These elements are made to work with any LEGO® Technic® compatible sets. What really makes them interesting is that they are made from aluminum instead of plastic. All the elements are designed in shapes not available through LEGO. I’ve been selling these parts through my Bricklink store. So far, it’s gone pretty well but I’m having a hard time finding potential buyers. The only real way to promote these on Bricklink is through the Bricklink Forum. I think about 5% of the people who use Bricklink actually visit the forum. Because these elements are custom, they are not tied to the extensive catalog of LEGO parts in Bricklink’s database. Consequently, they will never show up in a search on Bricklink. Other than linking from my occasional forum posts (I try not to be spammy), you have to know they exist and understand how to navigate the site to find them.
Because of this limitation and the little detail that Bricklink is intended for sales only of LEGO-related items, I’ve decided to setup my own store to further promote these great products. Right now, with just the liftarms, everything fits just fine within Bricklink’s guidelines. However, as the product line expands, the elements and kits we intend to produce will become less LEGO dependent and more of a crossover product. Our goal is to let you use your existing LEGO pieces, particularly Technic and Mindstorms and go far beyond what you could accomplish using LEGO alone. By extending their exceptionally flexible system, we will let you integrate more traditional RC and robotics components into your creations.
The product roadmap is fairly straight-forward but ambitious. LEGO liftarms are predominantly made in odd numbered sizes up to 15 holes (or studs-it’s essentially the same metric). Our straight liftarms range in length up to 25 studs and in even numbers down to 6 studs in length. Having the larger sizes lets you create larger structures without the need to bridge as often. By using a single, aluminum beam, you’ll have far stronger frames with fewer weak points. We’re also producing a number of angled and T-shaped beams to extend your building options.
Another unique feature is the offset holes. In a traditional liftarm, the holes are equally spaced the length of the beam. On a number of our designs, holes, or groups of holes are offset by 50% from the adjoining hole. This lets you create gearing trains with ratios not otherwise possible. On a traditional beam, you can mate the 8, 24 and 48 tooth gears fairly easily since their center holes align conveniently with the standard hole spacing. However, if you want to mate any of these gears with LEGO’s 16 tooth gear, the teeth won’t mesh without introducing a lot of complexity and building your gear train into a second dimension. Using our beams with the offset holes, you can make any combination of gears work. In the example below, a 16 tooth gear is sandwiched between an 24 and a 48 tooth gear allowing both outer gears to turn in the same direction.
Getting back to new product development, my manufacturer will soon release a steel gear and axle kit. There will be gears of 10, 30, and 50 teeth. There will be steel axles up to 38 studs long. This kit also has adapters to connect the steel axles directly to Lego 43 and 56mm rims allowing the usage of most LEGO Tires!
Additionally, ball bearing embedded liftarms will also be available separately to accommodate the higher torque. We will also offer adapters to use with Lego XL motors and higher torque motors like Futaba or HiTech. Of course, this will also facilitate integrating the RC industry’s remote controls and receivers. By providing this level of integration, remote control vehicles will be usable outdoors without the problems of limited range and infrared interference from the sun that LEGO IR controls have.
However, first you will see an aluminum “Screw-on” kit hit the shelves. This will logically precede the gear and axle kit so that customers can experiment with the solid screw-on connection between the aluminum liftarms already available in my store. This is something that steel gears and axles definitely need.
In case you haven’t noticed, I’m pretty excited about all of this! By marrying the flexibility of LEGO with the world of RC, I think we’ll have a system that gives unprecedented usability and offers a form of rapid prototyping for hardware that takes things far beyond the bounds of simple toys.
