Hey, what is up everybody, Jason here.
A couple of months ago, LEGO Ideas was running a contest celebrating sport,
and because it was the middle of winter here, I thought it would be cool to build a ski hill.
Of course, what I really wanted to build was a working lift to bring the minifigs from the
bottom of the hill to the top of the hill, and the skiing aspect kind of ended up being secondary,
but I did end up with a nice little model of a winter chalet to go along with the ski hill,
and today we are going to take a closer look at it.
Now, minifig scale isn't really a scale I build a lot of, and it's certainly been a
long time since I've designed a minifig scale building, so this was a little bit new to me.
But I had a lot of fun with it, especially adding some of the fun details,
like the clothes hanging to dry in front of the fire,
the ski rack,
and the little snow making machine, which I'm particularly proud of.
I also added some fun play features as well,
like this toboggan run from the roof onto the snow bank.
And the skiers can go down it too, but they're generally not very good at it.
They tend to be a little bit too bouncy to actually land very well. Oh that guy made it!
The ski hill also has a working start gate for the skiers.
You can just stand them at the top and then when you hit this lever it'll open the gate
and they can go down the run.
The design of the gate is pretty simple. The gate bar is mounted on a technic pin,
which is constrained between these two thin lift arms,
which are separated by a half bushing, so that the pin can freely rotate and move up and down.
Then I added an inverted curved slope and some plates
to constrain the gate when the pin is in the low position,
and when you push the pin up, it lifts the gate above the slope so that it can open.
And when you push the gate back closed it will fall back into its locked position.
Then I added this small lever to the side to make it really easy to push that pin up.
And, of course the ski hill has the bar lift which was
kind of my whole motivation behind building the model in the first place.
And, in addition to bringing the mini-figs up the hill,
it also pushes them off at the top so that they can start down their run.
And, I'll just detach the slope from the main model so we can
take a closer look at what's going on.
I actually designed it to be adjustable so I could optimize the performance of the skiers.
For the cable, I'm using these strings with grips on them,
which makes it really easy to connect the bars I'm using to push the minifigs up the hill,
and for the pulleys themselves, I'm just essentially wedging
a couple of rubber tires between these two technic discs.
Now, whenever you design a pulley driven system like this,
it's often a good idea to have some kind of flexible tensioning system.
In this case, I've mounted the lower pulley onto an arm anchored off to the side, which is
connected to another arm underneath, which is being pulled by a rubber band to add tension.
And that allows the pulley position to vary slightly while still having tension on the cable.
And this is particularly useful in this situation where the cable is much
thicker where the strings are connected, for example, and also where the bars are attached.
And you can see the position of the pulley varies when those parts of the cable go around it.
And to motorize it, I just have the upper pulley driven by this Power Functions motor underneath.
And that is about it for this one.
I hope you enjoyed the model and the video. I had a lot of fun building it.
I've been building a lot of sculptures recently,
so I kind of forgot how much fun it is to play with minifigs.
As always, thanks for watching, keep on building, and I'll see you in the next one.
Generally not very good at it.
Hmmm, this guy's terrible at it.