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Well you’ve made a good start and if you get stuck making revisions, just let us know. 🙂 This group is always good for suggestions.
Thanks Greg – yes, I’ve gotten a lot of help from LUG people who have way more experience with building.
Thanks Tim, it will be a cutaway view of the containment building, so people can see the plant components inside. The outside containment is basically free-floating so maybe I will be able to lift it off to reveal the entire inside build. But if I decide that’s too risky, the main components will still be visible.
Today I finished the AP1000 reactor building. I’m looking forward to displaying for the first time at the Ross Park Mall! The roof will just be resting on top so that it can be lifted off easily and people can see the inside better.
@carlsonf that looks pretty awesome! It is no small feat making round shapes out of square pieces. A minifig scale Geiger counter would be a nice addition. 🙂
Have you seen the CMF called the Hazmat guy? I think @joshhall used a bunch of them in the Dig into Reading display. They might come in handy some day. 🙂
@carlsonf that looks great!! One suggestion I would have for when you display it would be to bring one or two of the LDD cut-away views for the Reactor Building and annotate what some of the components are. That would help non-nuclear people (like me!) understand what they’re looking at!!
I bought a Hazmat Guy and I had to change his head to a smiley face because he looks too frantic. He came with what looks more like a pressure washer. I’ll have to put that Geiger counter on my list of things to get… Thanks!
I’ll have to put that Geiger counter on my list of things to get
It’s 1000 times better in the hands of Beaker. His face is priceless in this scenario. 😀
I’ve concluded my cooling tower absolutely will not stick together in real life. Either I use super glue or waste hundreds of dollars. Any thoughts? Will I be shunned? It’s all my fault for being naive in Studio, which clearly states there are “122 clutch power issues (106 warnings and 16 cautions) and 22 stability issues.” Of course I never looked at the “Stability” tab until now….
If I will be allowed to stay in the LUG after using glue, can anyone recommend the best glue?
It’s awful. It might be possible in a no-gravity situation to put this together, but on Earth it will not stick. At one point I thought I could build a paper wall to hold up the sides, but it didn’t fit (I would have to cut it out later). Then I thought of a balloon, which I still think is a great idea (I just have to pop it later). But it doesn’t matter – the yellow fences are not stable enough, the long sides are only connected to the structure at their tops and bottoms (and not to each other) and there is absolutely no way that the little top cylinder will attach – and hold – to the long sides.
Without glue.
Nancy, the cooling tower design looks precarious. Did you spend hundreds on the cooling tower itself? I guess that you want to use the parts you have, otherwise I would suggest making a tower like this one I saw at Brickfest 2005 in Alexandria, VA. Maybe masking tape will hold it together if you assemble it on site.
Then I started playing around with building some internal supports but again, the angled connections between that top cylinder and the slanted sides are just too frail. The whole cylinder itself is very frail as well. It’s a series of hinge clips sitting on jumpers, so each hinge is supported by only one jumper stud on each side.
@greg yes you are right, hundreds. So depressing. I had originally thought about that design you posted, but when I found the AP1000 I dropped everything.
I forgot to add the picture of the Studio Stability warning. In my opinion based on handling this thing, the Studio warning does not even highlight half of the poor connections. So bummed!
This can be fixed and you can use the pieces you already have – I think I have an easy solution that’s already started in my basement. It’s a brick-built cone that the sides can rest on.
Unfortunately I am quaranting in my room for the next day or so, but after that I can meet with you to solve the problem. 🙂
@carlsonf – if you like this idea, I could start working on the solution once you provide the necessary dimensions
@greg, such a nice offer and what a fun-looking cone. Am I reading the room correctly that glue is NOT an option?!! I’m trying to figure out how a cone would look as part of this. Maybe if I could build enough supports on the bottom and the cone could sit on top of the supports, maybe it would work. I still don’t think the top cylinder connections would be stable enough. Let’s touch base on this topic after the Home Show setup. Hope you are OK!
I would create a cylindrical base that is about the height of those yellow stanchions (5 bricks) to fit inside. I would then add a cone of appropriate height and diameter to hold the sloping sides. The top of the cone would not be a point, it would be a wide flat area to support the top cylinder.
I am not convinced that glue will work, I think there is probably a more elegant LEGO solution than the one I am proposing, but without looking closely at what pieces you have and how they are intended to go together, I would not know how to make those connections. I would only use glue as a last resort, because if glue doesn’t work you might ruin the parts you’re working with. (ending preposition reference: Miriam Webster 2024)
Thank you @greg for your thoughtful answer AND your attention to proper grammar. I will welcome your thoughts when you get to take a look at it.
Ok, so the cooling tower is not something that you are trying to complete for the Home and Garden show?
Btw, do you know what scale it is? Was it intended to be minifig scale? Did the original designer even have an intended scale in mind?
@carlsonf, I had a similar problem when I built the dome for my Hogwarts Castle Tower. I had 8 sloping plate-built panels coming from an 8″ diameter brick-built circular tower that had to come together and support the round top turret.
To resolve it, I ended up hinging the bottoms of each sloping panel using c-clips and plates with bars. At the top, I attached 4 of the sloping panels at the cardinal points again using c-clips and plates with bars, and let the other 4 panels “float”, or just rest against the top turret. The 4 points of attachment at the top were enough to support the turret and ended up being pretty sturdy.
For yours, I’d suggest building a ring at the top using plate hinges and 1x plate that could be attached to some of the sloping panels using c-clips and plates with bars, and then figure out a way to attach and support the top cylinder section of the tower to that ring.
If you’re having stability issues with the yellow supports at the base of the tower, then I’d consider again using plate hinges and 1x plate to make a ring at the bottom of those yellow supports to supplement the technic connections you already have. Once both the top and bottom of those supports are hooked together, the whole bottom support ring should be pretty stable.
I’ll be at set-up for Home & Garden on Tuesday. If you bringing the tower in with you, I can bring some parts with me to at least try to prove out whether this will work or not before you have to go and buy anything more (or worse yet, start gluing anything!).
@greg, I did want to have it done for the Home Show but it’s not worth the aggravation and rush to try and solve it before Tuesday. I think that it is not minifig scale – I think minifigs are proportionally too tall. The tower would be about 19 inches high but a real cooling tower is around 660 feet.
@rcgrier3406, thank you for your good ideas as well. I will bring it along at Home Show setup and maybe during the course of the event, my expert advisors can help me find a solution.
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