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I saw a video awhile back in which the person only sorted by color. He ended up with single color bins (like you) and his rationale was that while he usually knew what color he wanted to work with, having unsorted parts all in the same color allowed him to discover elements that he could use which he otherwise might not have thought about using. As someone who likes to sort by part rather than color, that gave me pause to reconsider, especially for my own unsorted mess (which is not quite to Apocaclarence” (should it be “Appocaclearance”?) levels but is somewhat substantial nonetheless.
I don’t know what your final storage looks like but for me each of those bins would be another week on average of sorting into individual parts. See you in another year! 😂
>> (should it be “Appocaclearance”?)
Ha, it’s interesting that you say that. Clarence’s name is an homage to Clarence Oveur, the pilot from the original Airplane! movie. Unfortunately, Oveur is a pedophile, so I really didn’t think that one through, but I chose it because my (2nd) favorite scene in the movie is “We’ve got clearance, Clarence.” “Roger, Roger. What’s our vector, Victor?” “Over, Oveur.”
>> Love the file name!
Thanks, I decided not to post old pile photos or a full history of Apocaclarence. The short version is that in 2008, I got an unprecedented haul for my birthday, and around that time I was also watching Jericho on DVD. So when I took all the sets apart and the pieces were in a giant pile, I looked down and said “Huh, it looks like the aftermath of the bombs dropping”, so I put Clarence on top of the pile, called him Clarence of the Apocalypse, and took a couple pics. He’s in the pic I posted of the 2023 pile, but he’s really hard to see, he’s standing on a tan 2×6 plate in the middle.
>> Looks quite pretty I think.
I agree, I consider it a monument to how good Lego is at making nice bright colors.
>> I don’t know what your final storage looks like but for me each of those bins would be another week on average of sorting into individual parts. See you in another year!
The problem is that currently the rest of my Lego collection is in a state of organization that I would describe as “in progress” (which also applies to the rest of my house). For some of it, the situation is excellent, and for some of it, it’s poor. There’s bags of parts from previous color sorts and MOCs that only got partially subsorted, or not at all. There’s all kinds of unconsolidated bags from BrickLink, LUGBulk, and the PaB wall. There’s parts from MOCs that still need to be rinsed of dust. There’s colors that had fit in the same container for ten years or more and finally outgrew that container, and so they’re randomly spread across multiple containers. Ah, the agony of the AFOL.
>> As someone who likes to sort by part rather than color, that gave me pause to reconsider
Frost and I talked about that a little bit when he n Jonah were here to help, he said he sorts by color because that’s the way he builds, and I said so do I. We’re both big fans of the classic space series from the 70s through the 90s that were done on very specific color schemes. I currently have four space projects and one castle project that are specific color schemes as well, the most obvious being the one I just put on display in March. I also plan to do Febrovery some year.
>> his rationale was that while he usually knew what color he wanted to work with, having unsorted parts all in the same color allowed him to discover elements that he could use which he otherwise might not have thought about using.
I’ve done that too, again, as recently as this past March. I have a pretty good handle on what Lego parts are available, and what’s in my collection, but there’s a lot, especially in colors like gray and black, and so it’s easy to forget about some of the less common ones. After I joined the LUG, I started organizing some of the parts by project, but that can run into complications if their parts needs start to overlap, or the scope of the project changes.
I’ve found that sorting by color speeds up the process, because as far as I can tell (I haven’t looked up any scientific studies), the eye picks out the colors much faster than the shapes. There’s some things that ultimately won’t be organized by color because the color rarely matters – the most obvious example is Technic axles, bushings, gears, and pins, which are all stored together. For Apocaclarence 2012, I pulled them out into their own piles as I did the color sort, but I came to the conclusion that this had just slowed me down. Even though the color won’t matter in the long run, it’s easier to sort them by color first, and then weed them out during the category sub-sort.
I am running a contest in this space.
Some of you may be aware that Lego made reddish brown (and also sometimes dark red) parts that were defective, became brittle, and would break during regular use. I’ve been told that Lego will replace the parts if you submit a request online.
Some of you may be aware that I came up with a technique for building large structures using brackets and plates (with minimal or no use of bricks). I did my initial test builds in 2015 and 2016, and I then successfully used the technique in my never-finished Exton 2022 build, Mysterious Planet versions 1.0 to 1.3 (2023), my test build for Ross Park Mall (2024), and Planet Ben versions 1 and 1.5 (2024). All those builds have been disassembled.
In 2015 and 2016 and beyond I bought a ton of plates in anticipation of those (and other) builds. At that time, the cheapest color on BL was invariably reddish brown. I didn’t know it was an issue until several years later, so it’s still unclear to me if prices were low at the time because supply exceeded demand (which is what usually creates low prices on BL), or if it’s because people were staying away because of the risk of breakage, or both. I bought all the parts new.
Every part that has been broken has been saved. I put them in bags, wrote down on 3×5 cards what they are, and except for the first batch, dated them. I can’t find the oldest bags, one would have the initial group from 2016 – probably five parts – and one would have plates that broke during the disassembly of Those Space Plants Aren’t Gonna Water Themselves v2.1 in September of 2021 – probably less than a dozen parts.
I’m pretty sure I have the rest on hand here which are from September 2022 until now, and since it will be awhile since any more brown plates get used again, it seemed like a good time to submit a request to Lego for replacements. So I created a spreadsheet and went through all the 3×5 cards and transferred the numbers so I know what to ask for. I haven’t submitted it to Lego yet.
The contest is: guess how many replacement parts I will be asking Lego for.
Your prize is the glory of winning and being able to trash talk everybody who guessed wrong. Closest guess wins; in case a of tie, higher guess wins. All the parts are reddish brown rectangular plates, of eighteen different types, which broke on 36 different days. They’d been in a variety of ziploc bags, so once they were entered in the spreadsheet, I consolidated them into a 3-gallon bag, until I realized they weren’t all gonna fit, so the overflow is in a 1-gallon bag.
The only other hint you get is that, until I hear otherwise, I am claiming the LUG record for this. Some of you may be aware that I have claimed several Guinness-style records within the LUG. They are:
1) Most Lego rooms visited at residences of other LUG members.
2) Tallest tower built and transported for public display.
3) Most brittle brown replacement parts submitted to Lego.
4) Most lava.One guess per person. Post your guesses on this thread. The deadline for guessing is midnight on November 30, 2024.
Incidentally, I still have plenty of reddish brown remaining from that time period, either cause they survived being used in the recent builds, or because they haven’t been used yet. Either way, a lot of them are very stiff, and so once I start building for Erie next September, I expect the breakage to continue.
>> I’m going to say 1500, but I feel like that’s either really conservative or really high.
Whoo hoo! So I have at least one guess, which means my contest won’t be a total bust. Obviously I can’t comment on the accuracy of your guess without putting you at a disadvantage.
So during the first intermission, I went to lego-dot-com to ask for replacement parts. The current system for missing or broken parts requires you to choose a specific set, and then pick parts off the list for that set. If there’s a way around that, I couldn’t find it. And the problem is, it won’t let you select a greater number of parts than comes in that set. So if you need twenty of part A, and the set you’re selecting from contains two of part A, you’d have to submit a request ten times to get there. This obviously wasn’t gonna work in this situation.
You can also email them, so I did that. It should surprise no one that my email was long and detailed. And I got a reply already. They asked for photos, as expected, but they also asked for proof of purchase for all sets that the parts came in, which I can not provide. I’d already said in my email that at this point I have no idea what parts came from what sets.
I’m about to clear off table space in the Lego room so that I can take photos. We’ll see how it goes.
The contest is: guess how many replacement parts I will be asking Lego for.
Eleventeen. Wait, no… Thirty-Twelve!
I’m gonna go with 997. I feel like you may have told me a ballpark number at some point (probably in an email somewhere I could refer to if I really tried, but that seems like too much work)
I have claimed several Guinness-style records within the LUG
Would that include “Most days between posts in Own Thread” at 516 days?
Edit: I’ll guess 516 parts just to be a smart ass. 😀
>> Eleventeen. Wait, no… Thirty-Twelve!
You forgot my personal favorite, eleventy-billion.
>> Would that include “Most days between posts in Own Thread” at 516 days?
Ha, I doubt it. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen anything on the threads from Jim R, Kevin M, or Rich M @tcsbgdady @mrmain18 @zaximillian. This is another instance though where I’m posting because I’m not building. Some of you may be aware that my time management grade for Chantilly was D, and my time management grade for Erie was D-minus-minus, so I didn’t exactly have time to post about what I was doing.
>> I’m gonna go with 997. I feel like you may have told me a ballpark number at some point (probably in an email somewhere I could refer to if I really tried, but that seems like too much work)
That’s one of many reasons why this isn’t a serious contest, I was aware that some people would have a slight advantage. Mostly I was thinking of the Build n Chill regulars, since I did a lot of disassembly there last January and December, with near-constant whining about the breakage of parts. I don’t know how many of them subscribe to this thread though @kyle2022 @loganc @mitchsbricks @schaup
Update: I’m embarrassed to admit that I found a >gasp< copy/paste error in my Excel sheet. Presumably all the other numbers are correct, but the cell that added up the grand total was wrong. So we have the correct number now, fortunately before the contest has ended.
Lego emailed me back. They wanted a list with part id’s for each part – you know, the ones that go with each part in the inventory list at the end of the set instructions. I see the wisdom of doing it this way, it means there’s no confusion as to exactly what parts I’m asking for. But it also meant I had to look up the numbers for eighteen different parts, and to my knowledge, there’s no master list. So I had to look up each part on BL, pick a set that contains that part, download the instructions .pdf for that set from lego-dot-com, and scroll to the end to find the part. I started picking larger sets with lots brown in hopes of getting multiple parts per instructions. The A-Frame House was definitely my friend.
I made a new, consolidated spreadsheet, took a screenshot, and sent it to them. While I was typing here, I got two replies, including one that says my parts should arrive in 7-12 days. So now we wait. They also typoed “doe” for “for” in the last email, very professional (thank you doe doing this).
Thanks for that shout out @bengood921. Not sure if the contest is still running, but I’m going with 1250ifty! Good luck to me and thanks for remembering the folks, good times on B&C!
It has occurred to me that the contest was supposed to have ended awhile ago. The parts did not actually ship until November 25, and they still have not arrived. They should show up before the end of the week. There is no tracking information given.
The actual number of parts submitted for replacement is: 1114
The winner of the contest is Frost. Pam’s guess was only 19 farther away than Frost’s.
If I can get the photos edited to a suitable size for this website, I’ll post them here.
In a curious quirk of the Lego website, the order page lists the total number of parts as 1112. So I thought there was an error, but I checked the individual quantities for each part, and Lego got them all correct, and they’re all there. And I checked that those numbers really add up to 1114, and they do. So who knows what’s going on there.
>> Yay, I win! What is my prize?
Let’s see, what did I post when I announced the contest? Ah, here it is:
“Your prize is the glory of winning and being able to trash talk everybody who guessed wrong.”
Let the trash talking begin! Also, you get to drive the trolley.
My parts still haven’t arrived, even though it’s coming up on a month since they supposedly shipped. I submitted the parts request the first week of November.
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