hey everybody's norm from tested here at this year's bricks by the bay now I'm
joined by Zack you have a set up here in the military zone and it's wrong a lot
of tension because you have a mechanized tank tell me about this Abrams tank this
Abrams tank is a variant of the Abrams chassis it's a m10 74 J a B jab joint
assault bridge and it's a replacement for the avlb bridge launching system
that the US Army is currently fielding right now and I think it's just in
production it's not very well known in like the military community or at least
I don't see too many military Lego builds of it but I'm pretty sure if you
research it on Wikipedia you can find it there 10 M 1074 jab join assault bridge
so you're not just going for of course the aesthetic accuracy of the tank it
sounds like you definitely know a lot about this specific model you're going
for the functional accuracy it deploys an actual bridge yeah yeah the
functional functionality is the more important part for me I actually have
like this smaller version of my jab that was an Abrams tank with the bridge
launching system I've had that for a while right but it wasn't really at
military accurate because originally the avlb was going to be replaced by the
wolverine platform which is a german based bridge launching system but the
United States ended up going with a Abrams chassis with a scissor bridge
type launching system so the scissor bridge launch system it folds up I saw
and it's almost like over two times the length of the actual tank itself yeah
and then there's a lot of precise control needed to get it to deploy over
this chasm yeah yeah it does take a lot of precise control you got to get your
gear ratios just right so you can slow down the motors and then what also helps
is the controller that I'm using for it which is espera it gives you fine-tune
controlling for it and this is a controller that then connects to the
existing Lego power system leggo power function motors leggo power
functions battery and I actually have an example that I could be showing this
would be what an Esprit would look like and this one here you get an extension
cable you plug it in here and then you got four inputs outputs on my tank it's
running 2's bricks and then then connects to an apple your phone which as
I saw you were controlling it you were then very precisely moving the bridge
the lift the main line and this one here is a beta testing version Esprit has
provided me this one just to really get some beta testers testing out the bugs
and then hopefully this comes out pretty soon
but they're not giving out any real dates just yet like scratch face dragon
drop yeah to be exact I think this one here is a Google based block coding
system broccoli got it got it very cool what were the technical challenges that
you made the one of the first ones maybe was a shorter bridge what are the
challenges of getting this reliable that one there is uh it's definitely a bit of
a challenge even today I ran about 30 times broke about two times is it in the
the studs that are disconnecting or the misalignment the combination of each
first it was some of the Technic pins that I installed there fell out and then
sometimes the fishing line would break but it only happened once with the
fishing line right now the fishing line that I got on it that's just a QA ting
the the lifting of the main bridge really is 50 pounds rated for 50 pounds
and I'm thinking after today I might go up to 100 pounds it's really really
impressive what's next for you you're building more tanks more military-style
Lego is that is that your passion yeah my passion is really a lot of military
base tanks that's I've been doing that for years and I have loved 1:24 scale
tanks and I've been moving into 1/16 like this one originally I had this one
set up as an Abrams tank I published that a couple months ago and then when I
brought this one out I wanted a bridge that could support the weight of this
one and so I had the upscale it's one of those things that when you
see it working is I didn't think Lego can do that how the tolerances and that
fine control and it works almost perfectly every time yeah yeah I mean
it's a lot of technical challenges and I kind of have seen like everywhere it
could fall apart and it's like okay I know how to fix this quickly and rapidly
sorry I can be presenting it to the public today it's a real bit engineering
congratulations thank you nice to meet you