61–70 of 179 posts
Top tip. Buy used Lego cheap from ebay (or similar) and stick it in the dishwasher in a string bag. Try to avoid Lego from a smoker's house or that has been heavily gnawed. And keep the dishwasher heat low, unless you want Salvador Dali Lego.
Someone should figure out how to quantify how “creative potential” a piece has so you can measure how reusable pieces in a set will be for building unique things.
Apply some form of modulo by piece count (8 1x1 bricks are more "creative" than a single 2x4) and you'd be close.
Lego is a plastics company; they're trying to become net-zero, but, unfortunately, being a plastics company, this is extremely hard: https://www.ft.com/content/6cad1883-f87a-471d-9688-c1a3c5a0b...
I just thought that particular issue around new equipment was interesting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
exactly, that's been my concern as well - more and more parts now are very specialized and hard to reuse in other projects. Makes me sad for the kids - this limits creativity...
So buy Lego Classic. They're not like 80s-era simplicity, but they definitely reuse peices. They're not rare; they're on every shelf. (But they're not Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc.)
Isn't the point of Lego that every set can be Harry Potter, or Star Wars, or whatever you want?
/Haven't Legoed in 45 years, but have fond memories.
Another factor is that Lego is using more greebling than in the past. So you have more "parts", but they're all small pieces used for detailing rather than larger structural components of the build.
exactly, that's been my concern as well - more and more parts now are very specialized and hard to reuse in other projects. Makes me sad for the kids - this limits creativity...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many sets do you buy per year, out of curiosity? I got into Lego during the pandemic and bought around 50 sets in the past three years. Over that sample, the number of missing pieces was precisely zero.
I've also always questioned this. I have purchased about 60 sets in the past 4 years. I have a friend who has purchased well over 100 (he runs a Lego YouTube channel - he spends > $6,000 a year on Lego by his estimation). I have never had a missing piece. There have been two times when I thought I was missing a piece and then found it stuck in a bag or hidden under another piece. I've never had to write to Lego to ge…
I made a script last year that scraped LEGO pricing data from their website. Besides finding out that the Bugatti Bolide Technic set is a pretty good deal as a parts bag, I found that there's only a weak correlation between set size and PPP. The Dots sets throw a wrench in things, of course, and large Technic sets often have expensive electronic and pneumatic parts that must be considered. My conclusion was that PPP…
I loved going to Valley Faire Mall in San Jose and scooping parts by the pound.
I didnt see any of the lego store by-the-pound model.
An interesting method for sus-ing up what parts they had would be looking into the shipments to-from lego entities in NL and USA - sea shipping bills of lading can be found on import yeti (now obviously unless someone has digitized historic bills of lading, etc (and we all know that ship hands (pirates) and long-shoremen (mob) have famously been the definition of corruption - so we can hardly ever trust any bill of lading...
So with that in mind though:
Lets look at the shipments of LEGO https://i.imgur.com/HgLlBuF.png
Nathan appears to be a top importer of Lego https://i.imgur.com/xYDvko5.png
Ships mostly a container a month to LA. https://i.imgur.com/7ZALaMi.png
LegoLand is his customer: https://i.imgur.com/I0oS1wu.png
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But I cant find out contents of shipment .... AH Check this out: https://i.imgur.com/7CjqVBW.png
So you can see that they are ~1,000 lbs per shipment... rounding up - then remove ~30% for weight of packaging and basically you have 750 pounds of plastic bricks - then apply part existance probability and you can see how much of each part is being imported and a costing idea...
We could probably map out all lego sets and shipments with some dilligence.
Should also look at the environmental impact of lego long term. its a LOT of plastic.
Is it just me or does the data aspect of the site feel horribly designed? E.g, the main graph is hard to read since most of the data points are in the $0.10/part range but the graph's y-axis is overwhelmed by the right side with it's $3.11/part train set. And if I click on that, https://brickinsights.com/sets/categories/26 shows 4 data points and it's overwhelmed by a single outlier from 1991. And the time-sequence c…
