The Moment Makers

When you are building with LEGO Technic, sometimes you need extra supporting pieces on beams to keep your model from falling apart when you handle it. This is especially important for LEGO robots used for competition. We thought up some ways over the past three years to help with this problem. We will share some of those in this blog post.

Crabs:

Two years ago, right before a regional competition, we needed to rebuild an attachment that had broken. One of us had the idea to use something we like to call the “crab.” We thought that with connector pins in the holes, that it kind of looked like a crab. For our team, the name stuck. You can use these to support two beams parallel to each other. The small crab attaches beams three LEGO holes away from each other. The medium crab attaches beams four LEGO holes away from each other. The large crab attaches beams five LEGO holes away from each other. The medium crab is a little different because the gray half shown above does not have a cross axle hole where it connects to the black half. This makes it slightly less structural.

Sideways Crabs:

Sideways crabs are almost the same as crabs, but the gray/red part is tilted upward at a 90 degree angle. These are very useful for connecting around corners. Again the medium crab does not have a cross axle hole where it connects to the black half. This makes the medium sideways crab less strong, but the small and large sideways crabs attach across a strong 90 degree angle.

Armchairs and Couches:

The armchair and the couch are similar to the sideways crabs because they can connect around corners. The difference is the spacing of three LEGO holes width-wise. This comes in handy especially when connecting across Technic rectangle pieces that only have holes every other space. The couch is also helpful because it can connect one hole further out than the armchair.

We hope you can put these elements to good use!