I don't know how to use hinges and I need help!

[Eazy_V]

I've been fiddling around with hinges and I'm having issues getting more than 1 hinge to work properly ( Hinge Mining Arm for my Rover ). I have no clue how to control them once I set them up properly. If anyone has some guide or video or whatever, I tried to search online but most of them were not that helpful since they didn't dive into the controls of the hinge itself.

[Dan2D3D]

Hi, the important is to make it on heavy car or heavy ship, well bigger than the arm so the main grid can better support it = will not move on its own < That is a problem that comes up when using rotor or piston or hinge on a ship.

> Do the Hinge limit setup when nothing added on its head, cause you may break your creation if no limits on a bad move, it will help doing the setup before creating the arm on the head.

Also, hinges are waeker than rotors, meaning rotors can move heavy shtuff while hinges will have a hard time.

The best is to do the Engineer testing on a Station and on a ship, one hinge at a time, so make one hinge work properly before adding more > slowly but surely to gain experience!

[Eazy_V]

Originally posted by Dan2D3D:

Hi, the important is to make it on heavy car or heavy ship, well bigger than the arm so the main grid can better support it = will not move on its own < That is a problem that comes up when using rotor or piston or hinge on a ship.

> Do the Hinge limit setup when nothing added on its head, cause you may break your creation if no limits on a bad move, it will help doing the setup before creating the arm on the head.

Also, hinges are waeker than rotors, meaning rotors can move heavy shtuff while hinges will have a hard time.

The best is to do the Engineer testing on a Station and on a ship, one hinge at a time, so make one hinge work properly before adding more > slowly but surely to gain experience!

Thank you for the reply :)! I will make sure to test it out on large grid first. I wanted to make a Mining rover with a Hinge foldable arm but I failed miserably making the 2nd and 3rd Hinge work.

[Dan2D3D]

+

Once the basic setup is done >> You may add the hinges in cockpit toolbar with specific actions, just enter the cockpit and hit the G key to drag and drop the hinges.

Later on >> You may use Timer block(s) to fold back the arm auto.
(close/retract the arm) edited

[Spaceman Spiff]

I used a double set of hinges to make a variable height connector that was kind of fun to operate. A simple button panel would reverse both hinges at once, and the connector would stay oriented parallel to the ground. All you had to do was move your rover near the connector and press the button to reverse both hinges; the hinge would raise or lower until you pressed a second button to lock its position to be aligned with the rover's connector.

However, unless something's changed in the most recent updates, hinges are very, very weak compared to rotors. I tried to build a mining vehicle using them and the hinges would fail (rotate downward) when the drills started to load up because I dump waste stone directly out of the drills, and stone can accumulate in the drills weighing them down.