mookers
puri puri
- Location
- Frankston, Melbourne, VIC
- First Name
- Derek
- Drive
- CL9 Accord Euro Lux, GE Jazz VTi, Evil Supervillain Chair, Homemade Portable Square Drumkit
Life size Lego car
- Thread starter mookers
- Start date
probably compressed air into a few hundred lego pneumatic pistons.. looks like its got 4 stacks of ~20 cylinder clusters (each cluster probably has multiple lego air pistons in it judging by the number of tubes coming out of them) arranged in a rotary arrangement (google plane rotary engine)...
may have a microcontroller and pneumatic valves as engine management, as each piston passes TDC you open a valve from pressure source, when it gets to BDC you swap to venting to air.. repeat for each of 20 cylinders as the crank turns.. probably has some sort of rotary encoder on the crankshaft to tell the controller where the crankshaft is so it knows which pistons should be pressurised and which ones should be vented..
the vent/pressurise cycle could possibly have been mechanically actuated if they were trying to use just lego as much as possible (imagine something like a spinning arm on the crankshaft that pushed each valve as it went around), I never had pneumatics in my lego box so I dont know what options they had.
well thats what it looks like to me anyway..
may have a microcontroller and pneumatic valves as engine management, as each piston passes TDC you open a valve from pressure source, when it gets to BDC you swap to venting to air.. repeat for each of 20 cylinders as the crank turns.. probably has some sort of rotary encoder on the crankshaft to tell the controller where the crankshaft is so it knows which pistons should be pressurised and which ones should be vented..
the vent/pressurise cycle could possibly have been mechanically actuated if they were trying to use just lego as much as possible (imagine something like a spinning arm on the crankshaft that pushed each valve as it went around), I never had pneumatics in my lego box so I dont know what options they had.
well thats what it looks like to me anyway..
tidy legnum
Idling at the Lights
I had stacks of lego as a kid, and experimented heaps. The pneumatics were fine for the job they were designed for but push them and the valves would leak and the hoses would expand. (just like having only silicone piping off your turbo). 'Spose they could have modded them. the idea that it runs "just on air" is bs as perpetual motion is just a pipe dream.
with a few hundred cylinders just a kg (or less) from each would probably be more than enough to drive the car, especially if they are double acting and could power on the exhaust stroke too.. Leaks wouldn't matter as long as they could supply more air than was leaking. didn't look like it was going very fast so it may even have been geared down too..
now I wonder how much of it actually is just lego blocks, or if its simply a lego facade with reinforcing under....
now I wonder how much of it actually is just lego blocks, or if its simply a lego facade with reinforcing under....