Subject:
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Lego Storage Thoughts
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.storage
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Date:
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Tue, 16 Jan 2001 17:03:27 GMT
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Viewed:
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2898 times
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Last weekend, I got a chance to break out the Lego again and work on some
stuff that I'd like to build.
I couldn't find anything. I had about 25 gallons of unsorted Lego, and
another 10 or so gallons of sorted-in-plastic-bags Lego from my last
sort-fest, back in late 1996.
I'm still not completely done (even though there were two of us working on
it and we didn't realize we wasted, oh, the entirety of Saturday), but
I figured I'd share some of my thoughts and musings.
1) The last time I did this was in 1996, and I had then on the order of
35,000 pieces. I haven't done an inventory, but I'm guessing I now have
on the order of 75,000 pieces. Somewhere between those figures, I think,
is the breaking point between multiple types of pieces can go in the
same container and otherwise.
On the other hand, it looks like at my point, subsorting by color is only
useful for some sorts of pieces.
2) I'm warming to ziploc-ish bags, but not as something to work directly
from. One of the things Eric Harshbarger's done struck me as a good idea,
though in my case it's on a much, much smaller scale: _all_ of one's, say,
yellow 2x4 bricks don't have to be in the same place. A working supply
that's easy to get at can be stored separately from the rest of the bricks.
I think that at the level of bricks I've got, bins full of sorted Ziplocs
make excellent bulk storage to replenish the working supply from.
3) I'm still not sure what to do with plates.
4) I'm still not sure I _want_ to do anything with minifigs...
5) Okay, more on the minifig thing. I put all minifigs and minifig
accessories in one 10 gallon rubbermaid tub. (it's not full, thankfully.)
Sorting out accessories would be pretty easy, and would probably only require,
oh, two more 60-drawer cabinets (yikes!), but sorting minifigs... Legs
would've been easy-- but these days, those are printed, too. Smiley-face
heads in one bin, "weird" in another? "weird" with beards? Ugh.
6) I'm running out of places to put storage cabinets.
7) I wound up with two types of cabinets; Plano and Akro-Mils. The Plano have
a better drawer set-up, with two fingers to hold the drawer in always (on the
edges of the Akro-Mils, there's ony one.) However, the Akro-Mils recess into
each other to make stacking more stable.
8) Sorting plates by color is somewhat interesting. I used a 6x10 drawer unit
for 1xn plates. I had ten colors of 1x2. I had 5 colors of 1x10. (I used it
for 1x2, 1x3, 1x4, 1x6, 1x8, and 1x10.) I didn't sort out the 1x1s.
On first glance, 10 x 6 looks like a good idea, with 10 colors of 1x2.
Trouble is, the intersection of all sets of colors I have has cardinality
12. And I haven't shredded the Life On Mars sets, so I supect it's actually
larger. Similarly, adding in the 1x1s would have made that even larger, as
I have many translucent 1x1s of random colors, but only have translucent
1x2s in anti-freeze. I count off the top of my head 24 colors I have Lego
in (ooh, 25: chrome) and don't have a given part in at least half of
those colors.
I gave some thought to combining the lesser common colors together, but a)
Half the reason for sorting is so I can find the lesser common colors, and
b) I suspect some of these colors won't be so lesser-ly common in a couple
years.
So, I suspect that while 6x10 looks really kind of cool with a row of black
and a row of grey and a row of blue and a row of red..., it'll wind up being
a little unwieldy.
9) My girlfriend commented many times that I have "too many Legos". She's
wrong; I have too many of the _wrong_ Lego. "Wrong Lego?! Blasphemy!" you
say? Not really. When all is said and done, there are a number of sorts
of pieces I have that I have more than I ever seem to use of them. And
then, other stuff I don't have enough of. But I can't convince myself to get
rid of some of the parts I have "too many" of, because while I know what
I have is too many, I don't know what's "enough".
And, after all, every time I say, "What the heck am I going to use yellow 2xNs
for?!", I go and do something like
http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?i=28244
So what do I know about what I need?
10) Organization is expensive.
-JDF
--
J.D. Forinash ,-.
foxtrot@cc.gatech.edu ( <
The more you learn, the better your luck gets. `-'
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Lego Storage Thoughts
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| (...) This is an almost constant condition for my collection (having gallons of unsorted pieces). (...) I've spent the last week's evenings and have just managed to sort most of my littlest pieces from the gallons mentioned above. (...) Yep! Been (...) (24 years ago, 25-Jan-01, to lugnet.storage)
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