The Moment Makers

In LEGO Inspiration today, we will show you what we found interesting in LEGO Ninjago set number 70724 NinjaCopter.

This is one of the discontinued LEGO Ninjago sets that’s from the old TV show called LEGO Ninjago: Masters of Spinjitzu. We have found many neat and inspiring things about this set including Technic pieces and gearing.

Turning Blasters, Wheel, and Back!

This set has transverse gears inside it which makes things move when you turn one of them! For example, if you twist the back tail with jet boosters to the side, the blasters and the large golden propeller wheel in the middle will move too! You can continue twisting the back tail to move the blasters into all directions!

Blasters forward, propeller up and down…

Blasters upward, propeller side to side…

Blasters backward, propeller up and down…

This set has gear piece 32072. It is a gear with no teeth! It has four knobs at 90 degree angles. There are three of these gears in the set. How can it move 4 objects with only 3 gears!? There is one gear towards the wheel with propeller, one gear towards the back of the Ninjacopter and one gear towards both of the blasters through the same axle. This function can make it so you can aim with both the large blasters together while you are playing!

This is a picture we made in LEGO Digital Designer that has a better view of the picture above.

LEGO blasters

There are two types of blasters that are in this set that we are going to talk about. The first one is piece 4520320 in this set it has a clear light blue stud on top. This piece has a stud on the top, and it has a non-friction connector lower down, and at the bottom there is a connected pole.

It is a piece that is usually put in a Technic hole and loosely held in place by the non-friction connector section of the piece.

The pole in the back is used to “fire” the missile by pushing this section of the piece out with your finger to make it fly into the air.

Next I will talk about the spring-loaded blaster with its rubber-tipped bullet (pieces 6064131 and 4210935).

The shooting mechanism is pretty powerful because of a spring being compressed when you insert the rubber-tipped bullet. The bullet locks in place when it is pushed all the way in to the blaster with a clicking sound. When you push the gold arch piece attached to the trigger, it will release this lock on the bullet. The spring helps to shoot the bullet out quickly. In the picture below, you can see the gold arch piece is connected to axle piece that is part of the shooting mechanism. We thought that this blaster was pretty neat because you could probably come up with a way to control it with your EV3 because of the Technic trigger.

The symbol below warns us to be careful with the blasters. The spring-loaded blaster and other LEGO guns can have a lot of pressure when shooting, and LEGO doesn’t want anyone getting hurt.

Nindroid mini-plane

There is also a mini-plane in this set for the Nindroids too!

We thought it was cool that part of the plane comes off to reveal an air glider that a Nindroid can fly on separately.

We also liked the propellers on the sides of the vehicle that are connected to non-friction connectors to make them spin. (There is a picture of them above in the first two pictures of the Nindroid mini-plane.)

We hope you enjoyed hearing more about the Ninjacopter set. We were excited to get a version of the set second-hand this Christmas, since it is no longer available directly from LEGO. We hope that you might be able to use some of what you might have learned about the gearing, the non-friction connectors, or the projectile blasters in your own Technic or EV3 building! We also want to wish you a happy New Year!