The Case for Tablescraps

Well said, Rich.

I’m not sure how interesting a lot of people will find this post (it’s long), but I figure if Rich took the time to start the thread and type up his initial post, then he is interested in getting some stories back from us. (I’m also noticing that I’m using a very broad definition of the term, which some people might not agree with.) So here’s what I have to offer:

In the period of 2005 to 2006, when I officially transitioned from ‘somewhat slowly coming out of my dark age’ to ‘full AFOL’, pretty much everything I built was a tablescrap, even though I definitely was not familiar with the term then. Most of the builds were some kind of space vehicle. At the time, I was fascinated with how Lego had changed since I was a kid (I still am) and was clearly continuing to do so. I built a car using orange because I’d obtained orange for the first time. I built a car using green because it was novelty for me; when I was a kid, green meant plants or baseplates or police station window shutters and literally nothing else. I built a car for General Grievous using 9V train wheels cause the trains were new to me. One time I was bagging up sorted parts and I had a bunch of old gray slopes, and a bunch of new dark gray parts, and it was shortly after the big color change, and so I built a car because I wondered how it would look if I combined the two colors. (Answer: it looks bloody awful.) The list goes on and on. Most of those cars were terrible, but when I’ve brainstormed for Febrovery (yes I’m really going to do it some year), I’ve looked at pics of those old cars and thought that at least a few are worth revisiting. I also had fun building them.

My oldest nephew built almost constantly when he was a kid and I frequently built with him, and again, space cars. At some point I noticed that I had a tendency to do certain things in certain ways, whether it was color combinations or part combinations or whatever. To counteract this, and because there was no pressure for these cars to be any good, I implemented a practice where whenever I noticed myself conforming to one of those habits, I would then do the exact opposite of whatever my first impulse had been. It was definitely a good way to try different things. My nephew’s parts were completely unsorted for the duration, so a lot of those cars were even more ugly than the ones at my apartment, but we had fun building them too.

In December of 2009 I showed him the Moonbase standard, with the idea that we’d build our respective moonbases separately, and then I’d bring mine over to his house and we’d connect them. I basically tabelscrapped mine the night before at my parents’ house using a random collection of parts I’d brought along for the purpose. We got great results, and I told him we should do it again. In January 2010, I was working on the new base, mostly out of parts from sets I’d gotten for Christmas that had already been disassembled and sorted by color into piles on the dining room floor, and I built a car to go with it. And then I built another car. And another car. I definitely got carried away, I ended up tablescrapping more than 60 vehicles of various types and sizes. And unfortunately I never finished the base, we never did moonbase again, and I never got pics of all the stuff I built. Some of those vehicles came out pretty cool, and some of them were a good lesson in color schemes that should definitely be avoided.

Since then, my opportunities for tablescraps has dropped dramatically. For one thing, I am always very aware that tablescrap time is time taken away from working on bigger projects, for which I have big plans and few results to date. Not only does the tablescrap take time to be built, but it also will take even more time to take apart, sort, and put away. And while tablescraps can definitely be fun, I have no doubt that I’ve also used them in the past as a way to procrastinate doing more important things that needed to be done. Fortunately though, there’s still been some from time to time.

For me, the most important one was the first Lackey. I joined Steel City LUG in August 2013, and was hard at work preparing for my first ever public display as part of our November 2013 Greenberg setup. Although my parts were all sorted by color, at that time they were mostly not sub-sorted beyond that, and I discovered that it was woefully inadequate for the type of building I was undertaking, and so I had to power through some serious hours of sorting. When I did the dark bley, I came across the ‘elephant eyes’ (BL 3005pb001 & 002), and I thought, what am I ever going to with this part? I was tempted to put them in with the rest of the 1x1s, I could find a way to use them so that I could just turn the printing so that it couldn’t be seen, and I remember thinking ‘If I don’t think of something else for them right now, I’m never going to’. And the legs were there and I just grabbed some parts and built them. I had four sets of eyes, I built all four Lackeys on the spot and made them all different.

I had no plans for them, other than maybe I could use them as aliens in a space build. I didn’t add to them until later on when I discovered I had a lot of other printed eyes (BL 3005pe1 and 3005pb011) in a variety of colors, and I got into building Lackeys in different colors and making them all different. I took them to my sister’s house and me and two of my nephews played with them, but I had no real plans for them. Eventually I figured out they worked way better with the Mixel eyes and other printed tiles, and bought tiles specifically for the purpose, but I still had no real plans for them. They didn’t go on public display until June 2015, when I brought them to the Trolley Museum as a last-minute way to fill in a gap in our display. I didn’t come up with the idea of using dark tan to build a structure to display them until August 2016, and I didn’t build a truly successful prototype of such a structure until June 2018. Their numbers are still increasing, and eventually I will build something permanent for them.

In March 2019 I went to my first Build Day at Walter’s. Pulling parts from one of Walter’s bins that store the parts using his unique sorting system, I tablescrapped a bunch of space vehicles, just like in the old days. In November, when we went back, I tablescrapped a whole building with a few extras. I wasn’t super impressed with what I came up with, but apparently the resulting photo wasn’t too bad, because eventually I posted it to Flickr and a bunch of people faved it. I’m looking forward to when I can go back, cause I’m convinced that I can totally top the last build. So we’ll see.

This one time, I had a few green parts lying around, and I started playing around with them to see what I could come up with, and before I knew it, I had this eight-foot tall Christmas tree built in my basement and I couldn’t figure out how to get it out. It’s still down there.

This last one might not seem like it meets the definition of tablescrap: the background buildings I built for Phase 5 at the SWRandall toy store, on the Nexo-Knight theme, in February of 2018. Even though it was for a public display and I worked hard (including some rebuilds) to make it look as good as possible, it still feels tablescrappy to me because it checks a bunch of boxes: it was unplanned, I built it quickly, I experimented with ideas that were new to me, I didn’t worry about being efficient with parts because I knew I was gonna take it apart afterwards, and once I got going I didn’t wanna stop and kept building more vehicles and robots and bonus stuff afterwards. And it’s significant because it’s impacted plans going forward – I was really happy with the results, I loved the color scheme, I liked the general idea of a space castle (even though the Nexo-Knights themselves don’t do much for me and I don’t plan to use them), and I liked how it combined with our more traditional landscape. At the time, I already had six huge major projects in the works with little to show for them (see above: big plans, few results), and so I was loathe to add a seventh, especially since it would compete with other projects for resources. But eventually it became part of the lineup, and I’ve been buying dark blue and trans-neon orange on BL since then. A smaller version of the project may end up being my build for Oregon next March.

Bonus story not really about me: Long before he was a television celebrity, BrickMaster Jamie was sent by Lego to my very first convention, BrickFairVA 2010, to give a presentation and do a Q&A. I still remember a lot of what he talked about, and one of the things he mentioned was the fire escape for the Green Grocer set. He said he built (tablescrapped) it without any idea of what to do with it, and I don’t remember exactly how long he said it sat on his desk before it got incorporated into the set, but I seem to remember it was a couple of years.

That’s all I got, except a bonus pic I’ll do in a separate post. I don’t know if anybody read the whole way to the end, although I figure at the very least, Rich did, so that’s good enough for me.

Rich Millich wrote:

Maybe we wind up building a brick built mouse. Or a snail. Or a llama.

But seriously, great thoughts, Rich! (and Ben.)

Benjamin C Good wrote:

This one time, I had a few green parts lying around, and I started playing around with them to see what I could come up with, and before I knew it, I had this eight-foot tall Christmas tree built in my basement and I couldn’t figure out how to get it out. It’s still down there.

@greg, here’s the reference you’re looking for:

this