This week is Engineers’ Week, and as part of that celebration, today we are going to dive into planetary gear trains! Ring and Planets in a pencil sharpener These gear trains have some unique features that may make interesting additions to your builds. Planetary Gear Trains (from now on PGTs) are used in lots of things: cars, helicopters, airplanes, wind turbines, electric drills, and manual pencil sharpeners to make a shortlist. A big advantages is that they have coaxial input/output shafts, can often take up less space than other transmissions, have less torque loss, and better distributes the load among the gears. In our LEGO PGTs, we likely won’t see much space-saving, but we should get the rest of those advantages. So let’s get nerdy and explore planetary gear trains in LEGO! The Basics [If math scares you, skip to the next section where we start talking about LEGO!] PGTs have...

Introduction One of the best attributes of LEGO trains is the fact that they move! The laws of physics tell us that in order to move, we need energy; in particular, electrical energy. However, before we get into the obvious use of electrical energy to move our trains, it should be mentioned that many of us likely started our LEGO train journey with “push-along” energy from our arms. I remember receiving my first LEGO train set at age three. It was not battery-powered, but self-powered! For most children, this is how we start our play experiences. We are not burdened with having to know how electrical circuits work, how things like motors and switches, etc. need to be connected, or the basics of operation. We simply put our trains on the track and pushed them along (also making sound effects of course!) Eventually, we recognize that having our trains move themselves...

Today we hear from guest contributor and military-history builder, João Eínon. He takes us through his own LEGO journey as well as a tour of a fan event in Portugal. Hi! My name is João Eínon, I'm 35 years old and I'm from Portugal. LEGO has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. One thing that I'm very proud of is the fact that I never really liked to build the sets in the boxes; instead, I always wanted to build my own things. Believe it or not, when I was very young, I used to make Churches and Cathedrals all the time! But then my aunt gave me an F-16 model Kit (when I was nine years old), and everything changed for me. I very rapidly noticed that I hated painting and building model kits... so instead I decided to use LEGO! Twice the...

The humble LEGO sausage element (33078) has been around since 1998. But is there still untapped yumminess there despite being so long-lived? Personally, it’s one of my favorite oddball parts with a wide variety of uses. Yet, I don’t think I ever actually used it as a sausage, hot dog, or other tubular meat stick of your choosing. I find it so much more interesting. At its heart, it’s really just a bar that’s curved. It has all the connection possibilities of a bar but with the added functionality of having a more organic curved shape. It’s almost perfectly versatile, with one exception that does get in the way that I’ll get to later. And it’s had an explosion of colors in the last five years in particular, with nine colors currently available on LEGO’s Pick a Brick service. So let’s dive into this odd little part that has had such a...

Today, we dive into the mechanical madness of my latest GBC module, "Soccer Shooter." We will explore all the different mechanisms and interesting building techniques hidden inside the module along with showing my design process from start to finish. So watch this video before we go behind the scenes of building a LEGO Great Ball Contraption module from start to finish. Inspiration I find a lot of inspiration in various LEGO pieces when creating GBC modules. Thus far, sports sets provide the most ideas, especially since they involve a lot of interaction with GBC balls, obviously. I've always had a desire to create a GBC module featuring soccer, because when I was little, these LEGO soccer polybags were given away at our local supermarket. I was always excited when my mom returned home from shopping for groceries in the hopes of getting one. After building my basketball module, I discovered that...