bricks go weeeeeeeeeee

gota love motor bricks

Huh. I knew about the 4.5v battery stick, but I never knew there was another battery box. But I bought one of the sticks and a motor, and quickly determined that 4.5v sucks, and never looked back.

I wonder how to control it with a mobile?

You’re gonna need more bricks than that to make something big and sturdy enough to carry that battery…

Even when we had one of those battery boxes, didn't know it was also used for Technic. We had it for the lights, but guess we must have bought it separately at some point. Got my one Technic motor from 8055, with the stick battery box. It was slightly underpowered though for the 8865 B-model....

But what a great idea: A set with everything you need to power the sets you already have! Makes you wonder why they can't do that anymore nowadays.....

@WizardOfOss said:
"Even when we had one of those battery boxes, didn't know it was also used for Technic. We had it for the lights, but guess we must have bought it separately at some point. Got my one Technic motor from 8055, with the stick battery box. It was slightly underpowered though for the 8865 B-model....

But what a great idea: A set with everything you need to power the sets you already have! Makes you wonder why they can't do that anymore nowadays....."

You can buy individual motors, battery boxes, hubs, remote controls, etc individually. An issue with putting them all in a set to power another set you have is that they don't know which set you want to power . So they sell them individually instead and you can pick what you need rather than buying a single box with all the electronic parts in which woud likely be more than you need.

It sure is a technical motor. They are technically correct.

This reminds me of that one battery pack that could be used with most late 90s technic sets. Often only with an alternate model, but still.

> The motor has a nominal RPM of 4000 rev/min so it always has to be geared down

Yep I have this and the gearbox set 872, which should have been a single set.
I wore out the bearings in the motor, and I should really see if I can take the platic casing apart and replace the motor.

I recently got one of those motors. Whilst the electronics still work, the plastic axle broke off from the metal shaft in a very strange way...

The little groove intended to hold rubber belts created a big weak point there.

Not gonna lie, its Technically a Motor.

Love these old Technic motors and battery boxes, always meant to utilize them in a build to make some Minifig scale something automated (like a cargo lift or something with lights), but never got around to it. Maybe someday.

I had the original blue version of the Battery Box 11 years earlier with rather unreliable wiring which gave me my 1st experience of soldering. Roughly equal amounts of melted solder and plastic, but at least it worked!

@CCC said:
" @WizardOfOss said:
"Even when we had one of those battery boxes, didn't know it was also used for Technic. We had it for the lights, but guess we must have bought it separately at some point. Got my one Technic motor from 8055, with the stick battery box. It was slightly underpowered though for the 8865 B-model....

But what a great idea: A set with everything you need to power the sets you already have! Makes you wonder why they can't do that anymore nowadays....."

You can buy individual motors, battery boxes, hubs, remote controls, etc individually. An issue with putting them all in a set to power another set you have is that they don't know which set you want to power . So they sell them individually instead and you can pick what you need rather than buying a single box with all the electronic parts in which woud likely be more than you need."

You can't get that stuff in shops though, and does the average customer even know about PaB, let alone manage to find everything they need on there? And even for the bare minimum of a battery box and motor you're looking at €70, which is almost double the price of the last Power Functions set which contained a bit more than just that.

Not that it really matters as sets aren't designed for this anymore, so it likely takes a lot more effort and additional pieces to do so.

@LegoStevieG said:
"Take a look at https://images.brickset.com/library/view/?f=ideasbooks/8888 from page 79 onwards It's surprising what you could do with one motor in those days "

Yeah, that one was awesome! Using gear racks kinda like punch cards to "program" that crane or plotter, very cool! Back in the day I have tried to create simpler things like that, but problem always was a severe lack of those gear racks....

I have built the motorized dog shown on the pages before though, or at least the mechanism. Back then didn't care to much about how it looked, but only about how it functioned....

@WizardOfOss said:
" @CCC said:
" @WizardOfOss said:
"Even when we had one of those battery boxes, didn't know it was also used for Technic. We had it for the lights, but guess we must have bought it separately at some point. Got my one Technic motor from 8055, with the stick battery box. It was slightly underpowered though for the 8865 B-model....

But what a great idea: A set with everything you need to power the sets you already have! Makes you wonder why they can't do that anymore nowadays....."

You can buy individual motors, battery boxes, hubs, remote controls, etc individually. An issue with putting them all in a set to power another set you have is that they don't know which set you want to power . So they sell them individually instead and you can pick what you need rather than buying a single box with all the electronic parts in which woud likely be more than you need."

You can't get that stuff in shops though, and does the average customer even know about PaB, let alone manage to find everything they need on there? And even for the bare minimum of a battery box and motor you're looking at €70, which is almost double the price of the last Power Functions set which contained a bit more than just that.

Not that it really matters as sets aren't designed for this anymore, so it likely takes a lot more effort and additional pieces to do so."

I doubt the average customer would want to motorise their sets, unless they came with instructions on how to motorise them. And yes, individually they are expensive - presumably because they are low volume sales, just like a box with them in would also be a low sales set if it was just extra parts and not an actual set and I doubt regular retailers would want to sell them. Whereas if the parts make something, then sales volumes go up and so they are more realistically priced, and other retailers might want to sell them.

@CCC said:
"I doubt the average customer would want to motorise their sets, unless they came with instructions on how to motorise them. And yes, individually they are expensive - presumably because they are low volume sales, just like a box with them in would also be a low sales set if it was just extra parts and not an actual set and I doubt regular retailers would want to sell them. Whereas if the parts make something, then sales volumes go up and so they are more realistically priced, and other retailers might want to sell them."

Well, about the instructions......for decades Technic sets indeed did include instructions for how to motorise it, using the optional motor. But even if it wouldn't, would that stop kids from trying anyway? It sure didn't stop me from finding out that 4,5v motor wasn't quite up to the task of powering the 8865 main model :-)

I find it hard to believe nowadays kids suddenly aren't interested anymore in motorizing stuff. For decades motors were probably the coolest thing, and thus for decades, they sold sets for that. And even when that stopped, at least there were still quite a lot of reasonably priced PF sets. Which makes me wonder: are C+ components really that expensive because there's no demand, or is there no demand because they made it so expensive and hard to get?
(well, apart from the other major flaws of the C+ system.....)

Got the US version of this 960-1 along with 961-1 to go with my first Technic set 948-1 back in 1978.

That wired cord was a bit short trying to do a hand-held power control setup (no steering controls, just power on / off). Trying to mount the battery pack to the kart made things a bit too heavy for the v4.5 motor; so hand-held was the way to go.

Ended up later on using the motor to power lights and radar dishes in my attempts at a Millennium Falcon moc. That worked out better as the battery box could be incorporated into the infrastructure of the ship with the motor free to power things without a weight load.

Motor still functions great to this day as well as all the gears and parts, even the rubber band is still good!

@WizardOfOss said:
"But what a great idea: A set with everything you need to power the sets you already have! Makes you wonder why they can't do that anymore nowadays....."

You can, but it's a secret.

@Maxbricks14 said:
"Not very technical by Technic's standards."

There's gears for cool functions, sounds Technic to me.
Or did you mean that it's not a licensed vehicle, which Technic has become.

I never liked the idea of having something moving but attached to the battery box with a long wire, cue a vehicle big enough to accommodate the battery box too, set the think going and off it goes smashing into various bits of 70's furniture and skirting boards and moaning from parents...

@MCLegoboy said:
"I love the size of the battery box being so huge compared to the motor. 70s technology."

It held 3 “C” cells as compared to the smaller AA and even AAA cells found in most LEGO battery boxes today.

The weight of the battery was used to advantage in certain models, such as by adding ballast to locomotives to improve adhesion of their wheels.