I've begun gradually giving my ~30-year-old childhood Legos to my son, and am impressed with how well they've held up. I haven't noticed any yellowing or fading.
I wonder if the new plant-based plastics will have the same longevity.
Brokering Bricks: The World of Lego Investing
21–30 of 38 posts
Re: Brokering Bricks: The World of Lego Investing
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you perchance happen to be a kid in the late 90's?
Yeah and I can afford way more Legos now, I still prefer the old school kind. Compare 42054 to 8480. They're both great sets for sure, but the shuttle pieces are more versatile in other builds.
"I still prefer the old school kind"
Of course you do, because it's an emotional experience. Just like how those tomatoes you ate at nanna's summer cottage in Italy tasted incredible, yet if you'd eat those exact same tomatoes in your drabby work canteen on a rainy tuesday morning, they'd be nothing special. My children don't particularly like my old legos, yet I somehow see them as "obviously" superior over the ones they have themselves. I'm sure they'll feel the same about those same sets 25 years from now when their children play with whatever is new then.
Re: Brokering Bricks: The World of Lego Investing
#23Sorry if I'm starting an off-topic discussion here, but I can't read the article due to Medium's reading quota.
https://i.imgur.com/uWY1kaw.png
I don't think I have spent that much time on their site, didn't try to. Maybe the fact that many of HackerNews' link go to medium and I started following HN actively recently?
Have people here just accepted to pay Medium 5$/month?
Re: Brokering Bricks: The World of Lego Investing
#24Sorry if I'm starting an off-topic discussion here, but I can't read the article due to Medium's reading quota. https://i.imgur.com/uWY1kaw.png I don't think I have spent that much time on their site, didn't try to. Maybe the fact that many of HackerNews' link go to medium and I started following HN actively recently? Have people here just accepted to pay Medium 5$/month?
Nah just open in incognito.
Also only some articles are premium(those with a star) that means that the people who write them actually make money from the subscription.
Re: Brokering Bricks: The World of Lego Investing
#25Sorry if I'm starting an off-topic discussion here, but I can't read the article due to Medium's reading quota. https://i.imgur.com/uWY1kaw.png I don't think I have spent that much time on their site, didn't try to. Maybe the fact that many of HackerNews' link go to medium and I started following HN actively recently? Have people here just accepted to pay Medium 5$/month?
Nah just open in incognito. Also only some articles are premium(those with a star) that means that the people who write them actually make money from the subscription.
Got it, thanks!
Re: Brokering Bricks: The World of Lego Investing
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or they can have a website where one can order a set and have a robot setup the kits from standard bricks. This should work for the majority of sets and would require a relatively small set of custom bricks.
I'm an industrial engineer and geek out about manufacturing stuff. Lego used to make custom pieces all the time. That, along with other missteps, nearly killed the company. Product variety means changeovers (switching molds in the plastic injection molding machines). More quality problems will occur. Low volume parts for one set may use a tiny fraction of the mold's useful life, making the unit cost much higher than…
The upside of custom pieces is that I was able to identify all my LEGO sets from a single pile of bricks. By grabbing the custom pieces and looking them up in online databases, I could see which sets they were used in. It was usually two or three sets and based on my memory I would pick the one I most likely owned. Going by the database I was able to grab all other bricks belonging to that set and build the item. I would mark the missing bricks online, tear everything down and put it in a ziplock bag labeled with the number of set. After a couple of days of going through the pile I was able to find all my LEGO sets and have them separated in labelled ziplock bags. I can now browse through my personal database of LEGO sets, pick one, find the ziplock bag and build it. It's also nicely preserved for future generations.
Re: Brokering Bricks: The World of Lego Investing
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still have my 90’s Technic car with multiple gears and a working stickshift. Nowadays, the sets tend to have some set-specific pieces. Back then, no individual piece was anything nonstandard.
Actually, they mostly stopped doing that a while ago. There's a new piece or two every year but it's 99.9% standard pieces with the occasional new colorization.
Dunno about this specific case, but I find that a lot of the people who say "Lego sucks now" mean "I glanced at the toy aisle at Wal-Mart and didn't see exactly what I was looking for." It's most notable with the people who insist they don't sell big buckets of generic bricks anymore, when they absolutely do. They might be on the bottom shelf under the Star Wars kits, and smaller displays at supermarkets and such might not have any, but they're still easily available if you look or go online.
Re: Brokering Bricks: The World of Lego Investing
#28As a kid I adored Lego. I think fondly of all the time I spent playing with my collection and all the creations I made. As I entered my early teen years my collection had grown considerably and it was taking up a lot of space, and I was spending less and less time with Lego. I knew a younger kid down the block who was in the peak of his Lego phase and I donated my entire collection -- around five or so 30 gallon tras…
Or they can have a website where one can order a set and have a robot setup the kits from standard bricks. This should work for the majority of sets and would require a relatively small set of custom bricks.
Bricklink.com is a lot like that. They have a large catalogue of set inventories and a database of sellers' stocks of bricks.
Here's a how-to video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IGytOTiZJg
Re: Brokering Bricks: The World of Lego Investing
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah and I can afford way more Legos now, I still prefer the old school kind. Compare 42054 to 8480. They're both great sets for sure, but the shuttle pieces are more versatile in other builds.
"I still prefer the old school kind" Of course you do, because it's an emotional experience. Just like how those tomatoes you ate at nanna's summer cottage in Italy tasted incredible, yet if you'd eat those exact same tomatoes in your drabby work canteen on a rainy tuesday morning, they'd be nothing special. My children don't particularly like my old legos, yet I somehow see them as "obviously" superior over the ones…
I dunno. I've gotten my kids a lot of LEGO and the new sets are really high-part-count but it's tons and tons of fiddly little short bricks, mostly, to build relatively small sets. All I can figure is they went overboard with CAD and/or started letting too many "pro" types who care more about the finish of the final result than the building experience run the show. I pull out old sets of mine with similar part counts and they're huge by comparison, and building them's more satisfying because you can almost always tell what you're building and why it's put together that way. Much nicer.
The good thing is they've started shipping brick tools in the bigger sets—they may have to given how many fiddly little bits they include now—and extras of some of the smallest or most breakable pieces, which is nice. But otherwise they're not half as fun to build as sets. And the parts are less useful in general building (for young kids, anyway, maybe useful for the "pro" sorts) because they're mostly tiny pieces. Kit-bashing with them kinda sucks (again, at "amateur" levels of skill, I know there are real brick artists out there who work magic), better to just get generic brick buckets or use parts from older sets.
And I'm talking about 6-12 year old targeted lines here, not any of the fancier sets aimed at older kids and adults. Elves and normal town sets and stuff like that.
[EDIT] examples:
6086, Black Knight's Castle, 569 pieces, 12 minifigs
41188, Breakout from the Goblin King's Fortress, 696 pieces, 4 minifigs
And the former is ~2.5x the size of the latter. I can tell you from experience that the latter is too tiny and intricate for even little-kid hands to play with it very well. It's a nightmare of itty bitty pieces to put together something that looks slick on box art but sucks IRL.
"Oh, but that castle's like ~$150-170 inflation-adjusted while the Goblin King's Fortress is only ~$70"
Well, that's not my point, but OK.
6075, Wolfpack Tower, 232 pieces, 4 minifigs
About the same size as the Goblin King fortress when assembled, only ~30% the part count, same number of minifigs, originally $30 so at or under the price of 41188 inflation-adjusted. Definitely does look worse on box art, granted, but holds up to play better, is far easier to put back together if it gets damaged without doing a tear-down and re-build from scratch, and has spaces sized right to support play. It's a better set to play with.
Re: Brokering Bricks: The World of Lego Investing
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I still prefer the old school kind" Of course you do, because it's an emotional experience. Just like how those tomatoes you ate at nanna's summer cottage in Italy tasted incredible, yet if you'd eat those exact same tomatoes in your drabby work canteen on a rainy tuesday morning, they'd be nothing special. My children don't particularly like my old legos, yet I somehow see them as "obviously" superior over the ones…
I dunno. I've gotten my kids a lot of LEGO and the new sets are really high-part-count but it's tons and tons of fiddly little short bricks, mostly, to build relatively small sets. All I can figure is they went overboard with CAD and/or started letting too many "pro" types who care more about the finish of the final result than the building experience run the show. I pull out old sets of mine with similar part counts…
shrug You're entitled to your opinion of course, but my point was that there is no objective measure for past sets being better, there's anecdotal evidence that (at least some) kids enjoy legos as much as I/we did 30 years ago, and there's plenty of scienfic evidence for 'rose colored glasses' wrt childhood memories, the subjective nature of 'enjoyment' and preferences being formed in childhood/adolescence.
I'm not going to argue set numbers and brick counts, I don't know anything about legos. All I can say is that I see children be just as creative with legos today as I and my friends ever were.