Posted: 01/11/2021
Sorting Lego
I have become a bit obsessed with Lego recently.
We could never afford it as a kid, and now I have a kid and a bit of spare cash, lego has become a favourite in the household.
It helps also that Lego Masters (Uk, Australia and USA) has become a bit more prevalent on the TV, and my son has picked up my interest in it.
I have bought over 30kgs of assorted lego over the last few years, and I am still sorting through it!
My son is old enough now to want to build sets too, so instead of buying new ones (which he loves), we are trying to build old ones. The loose lego came with a lot of instruction booklets, so there should be some sets in there.
My sorting strategy has worked like this:
- Separate flat pieces
- Separate standard bricks
- Separate bigger and smaller than 2 studs
- Separate technic
This worked well to start with, and got the lego into a more findable piece state, but I found when building sets, I needed even more granularity of piece.
So my strategy then became:
- Pay close attention to small bits around 2 studs and smaller, and put them in separate pots based on shape.
- Separate flat pieces into rectangular and "other" shapes
- Separate bulky pieces out (e.g aircraft hulls or car chassis)
- Separate wheels
- Separate windows and doors
- Separate minifigs
- Separate "shrubbery"
- Separate "slopes"
This then worked well, but I found it could still take me a while to find specific colours of items in a 5Litre tub, so I have now added colour sorting to the bigger collections of bricks.
Oddly I have found this very therapeutic, and massively time consuming.
Now I sort while I am finding pieces for a set, so if I am looking for a purple 2x4, I will pull ALL the purple flat pieces out and bag them up.
I now have a reasonably well sorted set of lego, in containers and resealable bags, and I can track down a specific piece quite quickly (If I have it).
One big tip that has come out of it all too, is to have good lighting when sorting and finding pieces. An LED anglepoise lamp has made things so much easier.
I'll post some pictures of our models up soon.
Thanks for reading this post.
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