Guide Lego Pull-back racers

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A little while back, Pawel Kmiec, a renowned LEGO Technic builder better known by his online name of Sariel, was kind enough to send me a copy of his latest book "The Unofficial LEGO Technic Builder's Guide". I have to admit that given my at times 'difficult' relationship with LEGO Technic I approached the book with a degree of trepidation, and it wasn't just the Technic angle that I was wary of - many LEGO-related books that I've read over the years have been written with a much younger reader in mind, making them pretty uninspiring for the average

First up, I have to congratulate Sariel on an extremely impressive effort; his book weighs in at a substantial 334 pages, and it's very nicely presented - robustly bound, and containing lots of clear colour pictures and photographs. Furthermore, any pre-conceived notions I might have had about being spoken down to were very quickly dispelled - this is no lightweight piece of LEGO fluff, people, it's a veritable textbook of Technic and no mistake....

The book is broken into five parts. It kicks off with the basics - four potentially dull but in fact extremely useful chapters which define critical and often misunderstood concepts and terms such as torque, power, backlash and efficiency before going on to describe the common Technic elements and then contrast the geometry, pros and cons of studless vs. studded building techniques. Once the basics are covered the book moves on to deal with mechanics, albeit with a distinctive LEGO flavour - gears, levers, chains and pulleys, plus mechanical solutions such as differentials, and also LEGO's pneumatic system. Next the focus is on motors, including an inventory of LEGO motors past and present and a detailed review and discussion of LEGO's current Power Functions system. Then follows a section on advanced mechanics which outlines various types of steering, suspension (picture below - click to enlarge) and transmission systems, even including step by step instructions on how to build your own versions. The book wraps up with a discussion of some of the key design considerations for different types of Technic models including cars, trucks, tracked vehicles and aircraft, including but not limited to scaling and controlling your models remotely.

Source gimmelego.blogspot.com