Category: About Lego

Lego: Remote Controlled Tower Crane

Part One

Model (MOC) by Tim Scheiter from Rebrickable.com

Bosley & Co’s Point of View …

So, with the river levels rising … the cabins need to be raised, the cattle paddock raised or the cattle relocated, and stores to be got in by boat or helicopter. Bosley decided they would acquire a tower crane and that it would be a permanent fixture in the village.

Jackie’s crane mounted on Jed’s truck, transferred onto a remaindered railway dolly, turned into be a good helper-crane. Great at helping to transport tower crane parts from the barges, and great at raising them to where the construction was happening.

The Build From My Point of View …

Getting the parts probably was not the hardest part but certainly seems so with postage becoming the real spoke in the wheel, after five parcels from five different far-flung places. This is the thing about living in Australia. Vast internal distances and even larger external distances which all equal to pricey postage.

And I still don’t have all the parts I need and though it’s only a short list at the moment, its length will increase as I start to modify the original design.

Modifying Before I’ve even build it? …

Yes, unfortunately. As always, space is constrained. Second, a few videos of real-life lone tower cranes swaying and breaking up in high winds, convinced me that even the stability of a Technic crane might need bolstering by being connected to its builds.

Beginning to make that happen, I found that I was using parts that will probably be needed elsewhere. The first really big problem I hit was a lack of two vital elements. Struts and panels. Just unable to get enough of either of them. I have only 5 of the panels, and 8 of the struts.


While I would’ve really enjoyed to build the whole thing without any hiccups, that was not to be. At this stage I thought I might be able to fix the tower on a base-plate with ordinary Lego pieces, support it that way.


That idea turned into fixing the four-sided base of the tower to a Lego base-plate with the help of Technic bricks. Which worked very well on two opposite sides. These bricks lift the structure about 1 millimeter above the studs but because multiple pins on each side connect the two, there’s a strong and stable joint. Leaving me with the right number of strut-pieces for the jib/boom.

So what happened? While there are eleven studs between the first pair of two opposite sides—and there need to be—there are eleven-and-a-half studs between the second pair of opposite sides. I rebuilt the whole thing several times, tightened everything that could be tightened, but got the same result every time. By then quite frustrated.

After a while remembered the ancient roads base-plate in my collection. This is the result. I’ve done away with the need for the second pair of opposite sides to be fastened to the base-plate. They are wedged pretty tight. In the photo below you can just about see the problem, the white brick does not line up with the studs.

That left a final concern. Without the struts-and-panels stabilization system the tower structure was so rickety that I was afraid that with more weight on it from another section of tower, a boom and trolley, the machinery in the middle, and the power and battery system on the other end, the tower would just twist and collapse. I inserted two panels made of 7 x 7-beams midway the stage.

These are probably overkill, since I will be fastening this stage to two fire escape blocks, part of the new village build. I put them in for peace of mind.


The Jig is Done …

Meaning the rejigging is done for now. I’ve renamed all the necessary files and re-uploaded them.

Bosley’s Builders are good to go for their next adventure … though progress in that direction is hung up in one of those situations that you apply that old nursery rhyme to. You know the one I mean … “for want of a nail a kingdom was lost”?

The image is of half the shallows. It just need a bunch of smooth little light blue tiles to cover the sandy looking studs to give you the idea that the low lying islands are getting flooded. As always with Lego, you need to use your imagination. One of the reasons I like it so much.

I’m waiting for those little parts to come by post. … little 1×2 tiles in light blue so I can enable Boz to visit with Robbie Rafter as steers his raft by, and for Bosley to get the news … the Post office promised to deliver on Friday but the parcel is not here yet, and it’s now Monday. Hundreds of possibilities why they didn’t make it so, okay, I am (im)patiently waiting.

Bosley’s Builders, 2

Lunch at the site, pizza again …

OMG, do you see what I see? Just noticed the smiley faces on the studs of the base plate … they’re not Lego, of course. But we knew that, right? It’s the Hardware Store Build and that base-plate is on notice.

This installment is now live here, on Story-ing Bricks … couldn’t change a few things, like the file name, and there being no author name, as if the installment appeared out of the ether … these items are part of the set-in-concrete nature of MSWord. Hopefully those will be fixed from now on.

Didn’t change the upside down order of posts. They should be easier to find with the blog-post re-titling. That’s a WordPress thing.

So I’m wondering whether if I organize a ‘cloud’ that’ll help with find-ability. Can but try, as the saying goes.

Rejigging Pages …

Having a bit of trouble rejigging the Page above called Brick Stories … if you click on that you’ll come to a page that says … Oops, can’t find it. I put it back in draft mode to figure out what happened to Bosley’s Builders, parts 1 and 2.

There’s a new page called Story-ing Bricks … which is where I will re-post the whole of Bosley’s Builders, beginning at the beginning, with today just the first installment.

I can’t believe the trouble I’m still having due to getting rid of Microsoft Word, the word processor that seems to think it owns the whole word processing world, and that was at least six months ago.

At the moment Bosley’s Builders seems to start at parts 3 or 4, depending on who is trying to access part 1. I thought to fix that and at the same time invert the order … you know start with Part 1 and go on from there, instead of starting with the latest and working back.

There has to be a better way to set that up.

But, not so fast, says Word. You need to pay us first if you want to shift this Word document from A to B. It turned out that Parts 1 and 2 were still in Word. There is a labor-intensive way to circumvent that, so that’s what I’m doing, one installment at the time.

Read Bosley’s Builders, Part 1, if you haven’t or haven’t for a while here on my new page Story-ing Bricks

If you are wondering why on earth “Story-ing Bricks?“

I googled the various possibilities and came up with this as a not yet hugely populated title. Can you imagine there is even a Lego store called Brick Island? And it is in Brisbane? (Brick Island was my first choice.)

Lego, Raft

Underside of hull …

This is the hull of Robbie Rafter’s new vessel. He will be meeting Boz … Boz in the rowboat in the shallow water, Robbie on the raft in the deep water … to discuss the forthcoming conditions.

This is the first time I’ve come to grips with Studs Not On Top (SNOT) bricks and angled plates in one of My Own Creations (moc). The problem here was the two hulls needing to be used upside down and connected to the deck plates which of course are set studs up.

Took me two and a half hours to produce the above and it is a fairly solid construction now. Although there are a couple of places where I may have used so-called illegal techniques, I was able to stabilize the area enough that elements aren’t falling off with handling.

The different colors on the underside speak of the same old same old. While I now have two IKEA Alexes and multiple little trays to store my whole parts collection in … I still don’t have enough of parts and colors to be able to construct even one color coordinated build. But never mind, the characters themselves are good at explaining away these little irregularities.

Top of as-yet-unbuilt-on hull … the dark grey platform will house the engine room, bridge, galley and the bunk room. The flaps at the ends are the gates/drive-on and off ramps. Similar to how a ferry works. The middle deck is for the cargo.

The walkway two studs wide on the near side, will allow Robby to save fuel and his propeller by ‘walking’ the boat through shallows … setting his pole in the mud and forcing the boat to move by walking in the opposite direction to where he’ll want to go.

Lego: On the Wall

After a lot of thinking and a couple of trials, decided that pieces of base plate would work better than a whole base plate. A pair of kitchen scissors did the trick.

Pieces had to be three by seven studs to fit the velcro fastener.

These four 16 x 16 plates connected by various other plates make up the base for the first part of the scene I’m intending to display outside my unit door.

Of the three bits of green base plate at the top, only the outside two have the wall mounts. The middle one is me testing its joining capabilities. Two wall mounts together will hold 4.5 kilograms the packet tells me. Plenty for the purpose.

What I discovered a minute after I glued the velcro fasteners to the wall … the two fasteners—one gripping the other and the thickness of a bit of base plate—are nearer to two plates thick than one.

Meaning I’ll probably need to add a two by one plate to the back of all the joiner plates, for the scene to hang straight against the wall. That’s my next thing to do.

He’s got the boat stuck on a sandbank, right?