Itty Bitty Rants

Infrequent posts about stuff.

LEGO Build: Technic Road Bike

So I was inspired to build a fairly neat looking bike this morning while playing with LEGOs with my girlfriend’s kids. There was a set of interesting balloon tires (43.2 x 28 Balloon Small according to the LDRAW parts list) near the top of the bin and they obviously needed to be put onto a motorcycle of some sort.

The original intention had been to make the bike primarily out of Bionicle parts, but the scale just wasn’t working out. I might be able to pull it off with the much larger wheels I have in my Technic parts at home, but not with these. The build went relatively quickly, even with a couple of tricky angles and I decided to finally take a crack at one of the LEGO CAD systems to record the design for posterity. Or just in case one of the kids asked me to rebuild it again someday after they took it apart. Looking around it seemed that LeoCAD and MLCAD where the most recommended packages to sit on LDRAW, so I tried both of them out. Of the two I can say that for me LeoCAD is by far the superior package. Where I was was futzing with MLCAD for 45min just trying to locate the parts that I wanted and manage to get them put together, within 10min in LeoCAD I had found the first few parts I needed and had started to assemble the model. It’s hard to say for certain since I had so much trouble getting around in MLCAD, but it seems like it might have slightly more advanced features, but the interface is such that I doubt I’ll ever know that for certain.

If you’re interested in seeing the parts list you can get the LeoCAD file here.