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Aircraft are difficult to taxonomize on LUGNET. This isn’t a military plane,
but military fans will recognize the “gooney bird” - the military’s version of
the DC-3 - so I included that. I decided to post it mainly under Technic
because of the working parts, though most of the plane isn’t really Technic.
I’m including Town because that’s the closest minifig theme, and while it is
roughly minifig scale the minifigs can’t fit inside due to all the mechanical
and structural parts. And I’m including my local and club groups. I wish we
had lugnet.build.aircraft, but there is no such thing.
Anyway... the rest of this post is based on my
blog article for this model:
When my father left the Navy and joined United Air Lines in the late 1950’s, he
flew this plane, the DC-3.
Like my Lunar Mobile Lounge, this has been at several BayLUG meetings, and now I
am finally posting about it here.
Also like that model, it is motorized. There are two motors, located in the
fuselage: one which powers the propellers and the other which makes the landing
gear go up and down. There is a battery box in the fuselage that powers the
propellers, and a wire coming out of the entry door leading to a battery box
that controls the landing gear. In both cases, a Technic axle passes through the
fuselage and the base of each wing. For the props, there are bevel gears in each
engine which drive the propshafts. For the landing gear, the axle is mounted
directly to the mechanism. A roof panel is removable to view the mechanism
inside. Here’s a video I made to illustrate how it works:
YouTube
QuickTime via
BrickShelf.
There are other parts that move as well: the ailerons, elevators, and rudder are
all freely hinged. Oh, and the wheels rotate :-) The wings and vertical tail can
be removed easily for storage and transportation.
The fuselage is designed using half-stud offsets to achieve the desired shape.
This means the walls are very fragile as they cannot be properly interconnected.
On the leading edge of each wing are “de-icing boots” which are made of rubber
in the real plane. These are modeled using a curved brick that I got at LEGOLAND
California in their “build it and buy it” area in 2003. I don’t know if they
were ever part of an official LEGO set, but I never saw them anywhere else. It’s
the same shape as the trans-light-blue spotlights in the Soccer sets. These
“boots” are attached at an angle using plate hinges and plates, and have
half-stud offsets to follow the desired wing angle.
Overall this was an interesting experiment in half-stud offsets and integrating
a Technic mechanism into a realistic looking model. I learned a lot making this
and hope you enjoy it.
Click the photo above to see more, or click to look
on Flickr
(slideshow)
or on Brickshelf. And
of course there’s the blog entry.
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