My kids being 4 and 6 means we’re full into Lego. I grew up with two brothers so we have like three hundred pounds of it. But lost most of the instructions.
It’s been amazing to go online and find any instruction and re-assemble these kits.
It also made me realize something: half the value of buying a kit these days is that you aren’t spending hours finding needles in a 300lb haystack.
> It also made me realize something: half the value of buying a kit these days is that you aren’t spending hours finding needles in a 300lb haystack.
What! That is the best part!
Wading through a mound of Lego has to be one of the most satisfying sounds I know, the clatter of a bajillion pieces of precision plastic, each with their different cavities and sonority, moving around each handful you scrape off to the side... Good times.
In the rare occasion I get a Lego set nowadays (no kids yet), the first thing I do is open every bag of pieces into a tray so I can do it on a smaller scale.
You will know no fury as when your kids intentionally mix up all the pieces for fun. We have hundreds of LEGO people, and my kids intentionally dismembered them into their individual pieces (including HANDS!). But how can you get angry at kids playing??? twitch
My daughter will be getting her own Lego and possibly a selection of mine. I organized mine for the first time in my life last year. Some of the sets I've had since the very late 80s and early 90s. Those aren't getting lost :P
She can play with them supervised, but she'll have her own. This is all assuming she's even interested, she's only 2 so who knows yet.
Mine is also two and really into Duplo, so Lego will be a natural progression, especially considering that the blocks are compatible, so I wholeheartedly recommend it.
Also some the ones she's playing with are currently over 30 years old and still going.
I think having sets that you like to keep together and you don't want to mix up is fine. Too many people saw the Lego Movie and took it to mean that keeping sets as sets is bad. Note that the person you responded to isn't stopping their kids even as they cause more destruction than the Lego Movie showed, they're simply complaining about it here because what _they_ had is gone.
Yes, let kids mix and match and play. But also acknowledge that we all play differently, and for some people having a model of something that they built is where the fun lies. People who like organization can still have fun, let's not shame them for their preferences.
Uhhh... the GP was written in a kinda funny way, so it just seemed fitting to plug a reference to the movie. If you want to keep sets together, power to you. My kids have a mixture of both (sets they want to keep as is and a mountain of pieces from other sets) and... that's just fine.
The word 'Grüschteling' is a German word used by German Lego fans. It is used to describe the distinctive sound made when you sift through a large bucket of Lego, trying to find the right piece.
One of my "core memories" wrt Lego is meticulously spending days sorting small parts into some of those Sterilite multi-drawer things and then knocking it over, spilling all my hard work onto the floor and undoing it.
I was probably 8 or 9. From that point on, fuck it, they all go in one big box. My brothers and I would compete to see who could find the most valuable pieces. Mostly treasure chest coins, little gems, and basically anything translucent qualified - transparent single stud pieces, cone pieces, and lightsaber beams were very high value, since one could not build a respectable Lego sci-fi arsenal without all of them.
I'm guessing that back in the day it all came in one bag?
When I built Titantic last year (first Lego I'd done in maybe 30 years) it was split out over dozens of small bags, and all the parts you'd need for one section would be in that one bag with no more than, say, 200 pieces in it. Often there's be a smaller bag inside for holding the 1x1 stuff.
So I built the whole thing with two tupperware containers..one decent size square "bowl" and s much smaller one for the tiny stuff.
Killed a month off and on putting that thing together. I was recovering from foot surgery so stuck in bed.
Luckily, the Titanic actually builds as 6 sections, with 3 pairs that join more or less permanently, while there are then a couple of pins and rods that hold the whole thing together (along with a rather clever tensioning gear... the main lines are there as strings, and do hang in a true catenary. )
So each of the 6 sections I basically built on a hardback book.
I tend to remember multiple bags, but I don't remember seeing the numbered bags where you only opened one at a time until I bought a few sets as an adult. That seems like a relatively modern thing.
Anyway like I said, we definitely always built the kit per the instructions first, it's just that the impulse to keep a TIE fighter a TIE fighter was never stronger than the impulse to build something new.
Ha! That was a common competition between me and my friend around that age too.
He is very fortunate to be part of a reasonably affluent family, so he had like 6 60-liter boxes full of assorted Lego.
We would spill a couple at a time (who am I kidding we spilled all of them) on the floor, when the flow of pieces stopped, the game was on! So many arguments about the nature of the simple shapes, like "oh no this isn't a blue lightsaber, it is a cylinder of pure diamond!"
I recently had the realization... I've carried this enjoyment onwards into how I store parts for hobbies. While I use compartmentalized containers for things, compartments are still a mix of parts. I can search for quite a while without getting frustrated, just knowing, "those servo mounting brackets are in one of these two containers in the garage..."
I don't buy or aspire to own new Lego as an adult, but I'm still basically doing the same thing I did as a kid: every time I decide to do a hardware project is me digging through my bins of assorted parts instead Lego parts.
Oh and of course, my desk is perpetually just as messy as the floor was as a kid, and I'm often fidgeting seeing how random things do/don't fit together.
(also, also... building the set? nah, building my own things without instructions, and similarly writing my own code...)
Agree! My partner disagrees though. She wants the LEGO organized by color or set. I find this blasphemous. It’s legit harder for me to find pieces when they’re sorted like this. My brain is tuned with specialized LEGO bin stirring techniques that reliably turn up what I need… but that doesn’t work at all when the piece has been squirreled away where it “belongs”!
> Wading through a mound of Lego has to be one of the most satisfying sounds I know
There are two sounds I associate with Lego. The one you describe and the other.
The words you can find and the tone you utter them with when you unexpectedly stand on a piece, or even better, when you kneel on a bit when trying to find the tv remote.
> It also made me realize something: half the value of buying a kit these days is that you aren’t spending hours finding needles in a 300lb haystack.
It's a bit of work but I found enjoyment in sorting my old childhood Lego. Don't do colors, do categories (bricks, slopes, plates, etc). Once done, I could complete my old childhood models even faster than the unsorted ones you buy new. It also lowers the threshold to break it down and build something else since it's so easy to find the parts. On the downside, it takes more space than a single bin.
>>*half the value of buying a kit these days is that you aren’t spending hours finding needles in a 300lb haystack.*
Are you NUTS?
Are you trying to shame my 1980s values with LEGO?
"I KNOW that FN piece is in here!!!! I JUST SAW IT!!!!"
You're robbing your kids of a life lesson. and better image recognition, memory, sorting processing thoughts, etc.
There are so many lessons embedded in working with LEGO that can only be learnt through the frustration of a F-ton of brix in a bin and your looking for that specific 1x2 -- or worse yet, 1x1 smooth piece.
I used to buy things in bulk from LEGO at the mall in San Jose and just have bins of smooth pieces and other were parts...
I get what you're saying, but in a large pile, finding the right piece is easily 10x harder now because the number of unique LEGO parts is much, much higher than when you and I were kids.
You need a rule that you cannot mix more than 2000 pieces from different kits. Basically 1/3 of those organizer boxes. A balance between search ability and organization, otherwise you get in these situations where it’s not feasible to rebuild a kit that you have, it’s like mixing different engine parts and expect to build that same engine
> you aren't spending hours finding needles in a 300lb haystack.
I guess that's for people who have a specific thing in mind that they wanted to build. I find a lot fun just picking out random pieces and then thinking about where to attach them afterwards.
I disagree. A whole bunch about Lego is the search. I was recently reintroduced by my son (5) and the fun of searching for what we want to try to complete a build - and occasionally redesigning due to what we find - is amazing.
Also helps him learn to adjust on the fly, which is a great thing to learn at a young age.
I have been building with my 6yo, and he has the traditional giant bin where all the sets of Creator pack of assorted bricks, plus the sets from Ninjago and Spider Man and Minecraft and various cars and so on all get disassembled after about 3 days for him to dig through.
More recently, I also got out my old boxes of Knex, which I'd put away a decade ago by sorting the parts by color into about a dozen quart-size ziploc bags (there are far fewer variants of Knex than of Lego, even ignoring the myriad custom tiles and stickers). He was THRILLED to have them all sorted, and for more than a month now - probably a dozen sessions of use - has put them back in the right bags. It's like pulling teeth to get him to keep his art supplies organized, those can just be piled in a heap, it can take two hours for him to do his laundry, typical playtime with friends is an explosion of toys from bins, but it is critical that the Knex go in the right bag even during use.
After seeing that, I got a compartmentalized organizer that used to hold fishing tackle, dumped all the tackle in the big tackle box, and washed it, and he has been keeping "the good Legos" in that. If you're curious, it turns out that the good Lego are the wheels, propellers, blocks with pins to connect to those wheels and propellers, the Technik couplers, the Ninjago transparent flames, especially the Ninjago spring-loaded bolt gun thing, and the Minecraft character heads Not the character bodies, not the Iron Man head, not even the ones that look like him and Mom and Dad, just Minecraft heads - everything else can go in the bin. I think he made a good selection, builds just seem to go together faster when those parts are available. In particular he used to need help on occasion to find the right wheels - everything seems to need wheels - and now he has them.
I’ll have to check it out again. Last time it looked like it wanted a subscription.
I would just like to pay once for an app that 100% offline scans for blocks. Let me pick an instruction book and begin pointing out pieces to me that belong in the set.
It’s been amazing to go online and find any instruction and re-assemble these kits.
It also made me realize something: half the value of buying a kit these days is that you aren’t spending hours finding needles in a 300lb haystack.