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LEGO Building Instructions

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Re: LEGO Building Instructions

#31

Post by gertlex »

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…

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...)

Re: LEGO Building Instructions

#32

Post by lacksconfidence »

bluetomcat wrote: post #29
dsr_ wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Personally I find the display models awesome. I'm not a big lego fan but the apollo rocket was nifty so I built it and put it on display.

Re: LEGO Building Instructions

#33

Post by PhasmaFelis »

bluetomcat wrote: post #29
dsr_ wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

See, I love all those detail bits. I love to make tiny, intricate models that say a lot in a small space. I love grabbing a couple of random gribbly bits, sticking them together, deciding they look like the beginning of something, then sticking on more bits to make it more like the thing.

The "voxel sculpture" style where you just stack (mostly) rectangular bricks into a shape is perfectly valid, but it's less interesting to me personally.

Modern Lego supports both. Both are valid. They still sell big brick buckets, and no one's stopping you from buying one of those and doing your thing.

Re: LEGO Building Instructions

#34

Post by mcphage »

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”.

> The whole point of Lego was creative free form building. Remove that & it’s dull as hell.

The point is that Lego can be played with in a bunch of ways. It's parts that you can do whatever with, and it has instructions for one or more models that you can make. Some people like the sheer possibilities of making things up, and some people find that daunting. Lego supports both, and anything in between.

Following the instructions does teach you techniques that you can use on designing your own builds. It's a way to learn from experts.

Re: LEGO Building Instructions

#35

Post by gaazoh »

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.

You can try to find the parts that stand out on bricklink[0], which will point you to the sets they were used in. It's pretty quick, once you figure out what the part can be called or what category it fits in.

If you can't figure it out, you can ask for help on the "bricks" StackExchange site[1].

[0] https://www.bricklink.com [1] https://bricks.stackexchange.com/

Re: LEGO Building Instructions

#36

Post by suddenclarity »

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.

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.

Re: LEGO Building Instructions

#37

Post by epiccoleman »

Waterluvian wrote: post #24
jjkaczor wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: LEGO Building Instructions

#38

Post by epiccoleman »

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”.

For us growing up, the point of the sets was that you got a cool spaceship or whatever, which you would put your personal Lego guy into, park near your "base", and play with until some other project demanded the parts. Then it would be disassembled mercilessly and consigned to the bin as grist for the constantly evolving construction project laid out on our much-abused air hockey table.

If a set was a particularly cool build, we might disassemble it and then rebuild it - but most of the time, once something got taken apart, no one was ever going to bother trying to reconstruct it from the manual, since doing so would have involved finding all 500 necessary pieces in the mega-bin.

Re: LEGO Building Instructions

#39

Post by epiccoleman »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #33
bluetomcat wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

See, I love all those detail bits. I love to make tiny, intricate models that say a lot in a small space. I love grabbing a couple of random gribbly bits, sticking them together, deciding they look like the beginning of something, then sticking on more bits to make it more like the thing. The "voxel sculpture" style where you just stack (mostly) rectangular bricks into a shape is perfectly valid, but it's less intere…

What I'd really like to see is a "brick bucket" that contains mostly large bricks and maybe a few doors, windows, and slanted tiles. I'm all for gribbly bits, but it seems harder to accumulate a good collection of the basics these days - because the big "brick buckets" you describe are probably half gribbly bits. In my experience as a kid, what we really wanted was enough mass to build walls and houses and forts, and were not as interested in small detail stuff.

Re: LEGO Building Instructions

#40

Post by rkangel »

bluetomcat wrote: post #29
dsr_ wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> In recent years, there is a general drift towards "collectible display models"

I think there is an actually an "addition" here rather than a change. You're an adult conversing with adults (I assume) and therefore the discussions you have and the marketing you see are more about sets targeted to AFOLs (Adult Fans of Lego).

The classic Lego childhood lines (Lego City) still exist and still work just as well for play and creative construction as they ever did - and they don't use a lot of 1x1s. It's just that we've also gained these new lines of large adult sets that never used to exist.

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