The Three Mile-an-Hour Car!

[Phoxtane]

This is a Lego car I built that can travel a whopping three miles an hour - no modified bricks of any sort, just stock Lego:

[My cell phone has come in very handy for these kind of pictures!]

As you can, it has four wheel drive, but no steering. Thus, it moves in fairly straight lines. There\'s no RC control either; it\'s a flip-the-switch-and-go vehicle.

To figure out how fast it goes, I measured out a track that was ten feet long. At the end of this track was a pile of laundry to catch it with. I then used a stopwatch to measure the amount of time it took to travel the length of the track.

Here\'s the weird part: Out of three trials, it clocked in at 2.23 seconds every time.

Using the formula for rate, I divided ten feet by 2.23, which gave me 4.484304932735426, or 4.48 feet per second. Running that through Wolfram Alpha tells me that this vehicle travels at 3.055 miles an hour!

Other stuff, spoilered for your convenience:

1.366 m/s, or 4.916 km/h.

I used Sariel\'s Gear Ratio Calculator [http://gears.sariel.pl/] to get this information.

The first gear train is a 40t to 24t set, giving us a ratio of 1.667:1. The second gear train is a 20t to 12t set, giving us the same ratio. The final ratio is 2.779:1. The vehicle is powered by one Power Functions XL Motor, which when connected to a fresh set of AAs, produces...

...405.7 RPM, with a theoretical output torque of 5.22 Ncm. Not bad, in my opinion.

[Ascensiam]

I live where this is made, nice to know someone is making good use of it.

[Key of door]

Just add boosters, and kerbals.

That\'s how they get the rockets to the launch pad, they originality had warpdrives, docking, wormhole openers , and coffee makers.

[OtherDalfite]

I live where this is made, nice to know someone is making good use of it.

You live in a Lego factory? That\'s cool!

Kidding

Nice job Phoxtane

[Douglasdtlltd]

How are those Droid Wheels?

[Phoxtane]

How are those Droid Wheels?

I\'ve got plans for those, believe it or not!

I want to get footage of my automatic gearbox [spoiler alert ], and a couple videos of this car first.

[LukeTim]

You wanna get a PIC and some infra-red emitters and sensors and make that shit autonomous.

[Phoxtane]

You wanna get a PIC and some infra-red emitters and sensors and make that shit autonomous.

I\'ve got a NXT and an IR Link Sensor. What more do I need?

However, there\'s no steering on this model. That\'s one of my goals - build a fast vehicle that I can drive around.

[Drakomis]

Awesome!

[Phoxtane]

Right, change of plans: Take the steering system from this car:

...and convert it to 4WD.