Main Entrance Rebuild - Part FOUR

 

This update will be short.  This small section that is being changed was always the area I worried about the most.  

So what is the issue?  What is not shown here is the tower that sits on top of this.  A first order look at how the tower is structurally supported looks like this.  The weight of the tower is distributed to the first trans light blue 1 x 2 x 5 brick through the tan 1 x 16 technic brick.  Careful examination of this brick shows that there is some bending here.  What should be happening is that that the technic brick should extend to the two pillars on either side.  The same arrangement happens again were the weight is now transferred to the dark gray 1 x 16 brick.  It does transfer some of the weight  to the pillars on either side, but it is a very poor connection.  The trans light blue 1 x 2 x 5 bricks do help in weight support, but again the transfer of weight to them is poor.

These two pictures show the new bottom weight transfer design.  This is composed of three layers of technic bricks.  The first two layers are a layer of two 1 x 16 technic bricks connected with pins to one 1 x16 technic brick and two 1 x 8 technic bricks.  Then another 1 x 16 technic brick is connected on the back face.  On the front face is a 1 x 16 brick.  Then in order for this to cover the top of the door, three layers of brick are added.  

What this does is provide an excellent structure to transfer the weight to the pillars.  Once this in place, there is almost maximum support for the upper structures.  You will notice that I used a lot of tiles here.  This is so the next structure is easily removable, standard module building techniques.

Here the upper structure is attached.  What we notice is that instead of just one 1 x 16 technic brick spanning the 1 x 2 x 5 trans light blue bricks, there is two layers of technic bricks.  Two 1 x 16 connected with pins to one 1 x 16 and two 1 x 8 technic bricks.  This is the standard technique for strengthening technic bricks that will span a distance of 16 studs or greater.  The black 1 x 8 bricks can be hidden, but I will replace them with tan ones shortly.  I have been collecting tan 1 x 16 and 1 x 8 techninc bricks for a while.  They are not very common and can be expensive.  I just came up two short.

And now we are back to the first picture in this post.  You can see that the tower weight will now transfer to the side pillars much easier.  The two trans light blue 1 x 2 x 5 bricks are kept to help this effort and for cosmetic purposes.