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LEGO Building Instructions

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Re: LEGO Building Instructions

#81

Post by CWuestefeld »

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”.

I'm with you. I remember my childhood experience with Legos. Me and a friend down the road would drag out this big bucket full of random stuff. We'd build forts, and then crazy many-wheeled trucks that would assault them.

The whole thing was about those designs just springing from the imagination, and I really don't get what fun building toward a prescribed design would be, especially since it's so low fidelity.

Re: LEGO Building Instructions

#82

Post by jonathankoren »

Internet Archive is a great resource, but man the interface sucks. Part of it’s because there’s no good way browse online, and part of it is because the search is broken. Indexing so much data in such diverse formats with questionable or missing metadata is hard. I’d love a better interface, but I also suspect that a crappy interface is what help IA stay alive. There’s plenty of legally questionable data hosted there if you know where to look.

Re: LEGO Building Instructions

#83

Post by FeteCommuniste »

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...

Wow, that just gave me a crazy flash of nostalgia. I think I must have had this set, or at least a very similar one.

Re: LEGO Building Instructions

#84

Post by zgluck »

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…

Lego nailed it in 1980 with the 8860 Auto Chassis, IMO. It does all of those things in a nice balance with piece count of 662 (for a 57 cm long car) and IMO still ends up looking better than today's 3000 piece models.

http://www.technicopedia.com/8860.html

Re: LEGO Building Instructions

#85

Post by jedberg »

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 purpose of the instructions is to learn the techniques. First you build with the instructions, then you tear it apart and build what you want.

Not everyone is into the instructions -- my daughter follows them meticulously and will only build with instructions. My son refuses to follow instructions and will only "master build".

When I was a kid I'd build with the instructions, and eventually I destroyed everything and built a whole city from scratch.

Every kid is different.

Re: LEGO Building Instructions

#86

Post by grigri907 »

gumby wrote: post #42

It wasn't until I started buying Lego for myself (in my 20s) that I learned that Lego came with instructions. When I was a kid my parents would open the box and discard the instructions before giving it to me. Back then (60s/70s) the sets were quite general and open ended. Modern day Lego has the thinking done ahead of time, and has too many specialised pieces.

Agreed - the constraints of a limited set of bricks really forced creativity.

However, there's been a huge paradigm shift in terms of what is "allowed" as far as odd brick placements so the realm of what's possible to build has expanded at least as much as the inventory of brick options.

Re: LEGO Building Instructions

#88

Post by OliveMate »

My old man recently got a bunch of boxes from my childhood out of his, including multiple tubs of mixed Lego and a box of incomplete instructions. This will prove to be a valuable resource in the coming months, thank you very much!

I keep staring at all the artwork included on some of the early Bionicle instructions and I love that dark mysterious island aesthetic.

Re: LEGO Building Instructions

#89

Post by fxtentacle »

FeteCommuniste wrote: post #83
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...

Wow, that just gave me a crazy flash of nostalgia. I think I must have had this set, or at least a very similar one.

me too :)

Re: LEGO Building Instructions

#90

Post by omoikane »

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.

> 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.

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