Lego

Organizing A Big Lego Set

This is a real issue, especially if you have kids who LOVE Legos. How do you reign in a massive Lego set? Yes, it’s a ‘first world’ issue. But it is an issue.

Adam Savage’s Tested channel on YouTube focuses on ‘one day builds’ for small to medium sized projects, but for the task of taking on his Lego collection, he may have bitten off too much than he could chew. He does end up with a really nice custom built unit to hold ArtBin Super Satchels of various shapes and sizes, but it apparently took him 10 days to really get his full Lego collection under control. The issue, which I have observed with my son’s substantial Lego collection, is that there are just so many variations of Lego pieces. And the variation has accelerated over the past 10 to 15 years as all these unique, custom kits have been developed. Back in the 80’s, when I was a kid playing with my Lego collection, the variation of pieces was not nearly as wide as it is today.

I really like the ArtBin Super Satchel storage containers that he used for some of the smaller and ‘wide variety’ pieces and I may look into buying some of these bins to use. And it also appears that ArtBin has storage ‘cubes’ for the Satchels, which alleviates the need to build a custom unit the way Adam did above. We have already gone down this path to a degree by using the small plastic Gils storage units from Ikea. The one drawback of these for Lego storage is that they are a little deeper than the Super Satchels and not as big.

This may be another ‘quarantine’ project worth taking on.

Lego Pricing Analysis

An impressively thorough analysis of the price of Lego bricks and Lego sets over the years, dating as far back as 1960 when Lego was first brought to market.


Over time, it appears that the price per brick of Lego has actually decreased to the point where the nominal price per brick and the real price per brick is essentially even and on par with what they were in 1980.

So with the pricing of Lego bricks essentially staying flat from 1960 – 2013, Lego had to increase penetration and share by releasing more sets per year. As noted in the graph below, from about 1995 through 2013, the number of sets released per year has roughly tripled.

So even though it feels like we are spending more for Lego sets, what is really happening is that we are getting sucked in by our kids to buy more sets over time.

OK, I need to go to the local Lego store to buy the Chima set for my son.

via Reality Prose.

Lego In Space

A pair of teenagers in Toronto constructed a homemade weather balloon that they then released into the sky with a few Lego accessories – including a Lego Minifigure. After a bit over 90 minutes up at an altitude of around 80,000 feet, their balloon came back to earth but not after taking several photos of the Lego

Via Make Magazine.

Analysis of Lego Pricing Over The Years

Lego in the head

Over at Geek Mom, an interesting analysis of the pricing of Lego sets over the past 40 years or so. Looking at the pricing on a “price per brick” point of view, the average cost has actually been trending down.

As it turns out, after going up in the 70’s and 80’s, the average price per brick has actually been trending down. I sampled the prices of sets through the years as listed on brickset.com from across themes and set sizes. To try to make it an apples-to-apples comparison, I excluded minifigs by themselves, accessories, promotional items, games, or anything that required batteries, as well as Mindstorms, Duplo, and non-brick items.

One theory noted in the article is that the Lego sets of today are far more complex and thus have far more pieces than those of the 1970’s and 1980’s, So looking at it on a “per brick” may be skewing the numbers lower.

At the end of the day though, I think what this is telling us is that we should go out and get that epic 3,000 piece, 8 lb, 50 inch long Star Wars “Super Star Destroyer” kit for $400.

Lego Star Wars Droid Control Ship

A guy named Paul Yperman spent the past two years constructing a scale model of the Star Wars Droid Control Ship from scratch, using schematics he found in a Star Wars Cross Sections book in a bookstore.

He found a software on the Internet that helped him figure out the orb in the middle and then he continued from there. 30,000 pieces later and 2 years of building, he was finished. The God sent idea was finally done, and as a result, he constructed one of the worlds most elaborate Star Wars LEGO creations. Forget the small 200 piece builds you can buy off the shelf. This one was carefully executed and took some custom ordering to fit the purpose.

This is just another amazing example of the super cool things that can be built with Lego.

Why The Internet Rocks – Reason 4504

Recently, my 6 year old son acquired an old Lego set from the Star Wars line – the old Millennium Falcon set from 2004. Problem was that it was acquired from a school thrift sale, meaning the set was used, it was in a brown box and not in the original packaging, and the instructions were nowhere to be found. We (OK, my son) decided that we wanted to start building it today but with no instructions, this would prove to be quite the challenge. With about 5 minutes worth of searching, with relative ease we were able to find the instructions booklet online. Click, download the PDF, and we’re in business. Yet another reason why the Internet rocks.