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LEGO Building Instructions

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Re: LEGO Building Instructions

#21

Post by germinalphrase »

photonerd wrote: post #8

Probably an age thing, but I’ve never understood the point of Lego instructions. Or the sets. The whole point of Lego was creative free form building. Remove that & it’s dull as hell. It just becomes model building with poor quality models as the result. I’m happy other people find it fun, but to me it misses the entire point in favor of weak licensed “kits”.

Free building is great, but my experience is that my young son also wants to build his sense of competence - following the steps correctly, fixing mistakes, and making something exactly like the picture. Sure, he plays with it for a minute and then tears it apart to make something original - but, like you said, that’s the beauty of Lego.

Re: LEGO Building Instructions

#22

Post by Waterluvian »

celticninja wrote: post #13
Waterluvian wrote: post #4

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.

Get the brickit app, saves some time

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.

Fingers crossed.

Re: LEGO Building Instructions

#23

Post by marak830 »

celticninja wrote: post #13
Waterluvian wrote: post #4

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.

Get the brickit app, saves some time

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.

Re: LEGO Building Instructions

#24

Post by Waterluvian »

jjkaczor wrote: post #15
kroltan wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The sound of swishing through a mound/box/bin of LEGO has to be the most relaxing thing for me ever...

I looooove that sound. But with young kids there’s no point trying to sort. And without sorting, every piece takes a while to find.

Re: LEGO Building Instructions

#25

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

kroltan wrote: post #10
Waterluvian wrote: post #4

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…

There's someone who's really into knolling (https://knolling.org/what-is-knolling) and hates this comment.

Re: LEGO Building Instructions

#26

Post by kazinator »

JNRowe wrote: post #2

I sincerely applaud everything ending up on IA. However, if you're searching for specific instructions brickinstructions is excellent as it is far more navigable. For a random example see Starguider¹. I wonder if someone has already scraped that site for IA, beyond simply praying to the Wayback Machine. ¹ https://lego.brickinstructions.com/m/lego_instructions/set/6...

When brickinstructions goes belly up, or just messes up its URLs for shits and giggles, you will need to go through archive.org to find out what used to be at that URL.

Re: LEGO Building Instructions

#27

Post by sxp »

For modern sets, you can also get a PDF from the official site: https://www.lego.com/en-us/service/buildinginstructions/7622...

One of these days, I want to learn enough computer vision to write an LEGO instruction booklet to LCAD convertor that could be fed old instructions and generate a 3D model of the set. An archive of the instructions is nice, but a virtual archive of sets would be nicer.

Re: LEGO Building Instructions

#28

Post by tectec »

mrweasel wrote: post #7

Now if someone would just make an app that can figure out which set my bricks belong to. I have at least two sets that I can't find the instructions for, because I have no idea what they're called or which number they have. The bricks are fairly unique, they can't be in more than 10 sets.

Brinklink has list for each brick of the set it belongs too. I was able to use that to discover a set I didn't know my older brothers had.

Re: LEGO Building Instructions

#29

Post by bluetomcat »

dsr_ wrote: post #17
photonerd wrote: post #8

Probably an age thing, but I’ve never understood the point of Lego instructions. Or the sets. The whole point of Lego was creative free form building. Remove that & it’s dull as hell. It just becomes model building with poor quality models as the result. I’m happy other people find it fun, but to me it misses the entire point in favor of weak licensed “kits”.

My own take: Some people want to play with playsets. Some people want to display models. Some people want to create art. Some people want to construct machines. Some people want to assert allegiance. Some people want to collect. All of these aims are valid. The diversity of ways to buy LEGO supports them all, while maintaining a high-quality, largely compatible, reasonably consistent medium.

In recent years, there is a general drift towards "collectible display models". This means that the piece count in most sets is inflated by a majority of small "finishing" pieces. The models are finicky to build with lots of unusual building techniques (attaching bricks on sidewalls, for example) and are not easy to repurpose into something else in a reasonable amount of time.

In the 1990s, it was a "construction toy" first, playset second, display model last. A kid could take any set and rebuild it into something else in an hour or so. Now, they would need more time only to sort the tiny 1x1 pieces before starting to build anything.

Re: LEGO Building Instructions

#30

Post by kevmarsden »

jjkaczor wrote: post #15
kroltan wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The sound of swishing through a mound/box/bin of LEGO has to be the most relaxing thing for me ever...

I'm totally the opposite. That sound is grating to me. But I'm sensitive to other sounds too, so it's not just LEGO.
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