Creating Building Instruction Documents For A LEGO Remote Controlled Car (PART 1)

I've been working on a project to allow students to create a simple remote controlled (RC) wheeled car that would have some ability to drive and steer. The age of the students varies from 8-12 years and not all of them are that familiar with Lego.  So I needed to keep the model simple and functional.  I also have a limited amount of time with the group of students so I would need to provide a part built model to which they could add the main components, like motors, battery pack, infra-red receiver etc.   The main purpose of the event is not to build the RC cars but to drive them round and bash them up (Robot Wars style)

Although the basic car is fairly simple I would still need to provide some instructions for assembling the part built components.  I modeled the car in Roland Melkert's LDCAD (http://www.melkert.net/LDCad/download).  Whilst I could build the model in Lego Digitial Designer (LDD) I have no control over the resulting instructions that get created and there is no option to generate partial instructions.  Stud.io, I discovered, lacks many of the power function motors that I wanted to use in my model, so that was a non-starter.  LDCAD is quirky but it is a highly competent Lego modeler and if you are prepared to put the time in,  it can create some lovely models some of which, I've not been able to create in any other package (that's not to say that other packages can't do the things LDCAD can, it's just I haven't figured out how!).

There are a number of tutorials on the LDCAD website which provide a good introduction to how LDCAD works and I found I needed to work through the tutorials in order to really understand how the various elements of LDCAD functioned.  Having completed the tutorials, building my RC car was relatively straight forwards.  What I needed to do now was to create the building instructions...