20091211--Look at all the bits

Day One and Two:

So I learned quite a while ago that sorting the pieces of a Lego set of any significant size helps immensely in preserving sanity during actual construction. As the Lego sets have be come larger and more elaborate and the number of piece shapes and colors has multiplied, it's in fact become essential. (Even Lego has a graphic suggesting you do so in the front of many of their instructions!)

So how do you go about sorting 3800+ pieces? First let me show you just how many that is.

Most Lego sets have the bricks in various little baggies. I guess partly to provide more durability for the larger box, the Death Star box opens up to reveal four plain white boxes, each the size of a largish Lego set itself.

I noticed while taking these pictures that each box had a different symbol on it. I hoped it meant some kind of modular building system (e.g. conquer a box at a time) but alas, no. They're probably for the packers to make it easier to get a set of four different otherwise very similar looking boxes together.

In the boxes were the little baggies. There were 54 in all, plus some smaller ones hidden in the bigger ones.

For sorting I use a lid from a large plastic bin as a tray. For the very large sets I've build more recently I've added a box or two from another large Lego set, each with a closing lid. When I'm not building I can just close the lid(s) and cover the tray with a plastic bag--this seems to work to keep the my out of things. This time I used a tray and two boxes, and that turned out to barely be enough. In fact, I could probably stand to have a third box instead of the tray.

Dumping the sealed bags on the floor, I dug in. I worked on sorting for over two hours before my back started bugging me. When I called it a night I had sorted 31 bags, with 23 yet to go.

The next day went much better--I finished in about an hour. I had done a lot of the bags with the small (and downright tiny) parts in the first round, and the larger bricks and plates went much faster.

Anyway, here's the whole lot, sorted out:

As tedious as sorting can be, especially when you're tyring not to spill/drop any of the tinier components on the floor, it also is fun because it helps build the anticipation for the actual construction. You see odd parts and wonder where they're going to go. For example I've got two cylindrical parts, frequently used as the body for R2-D2 and other Astromech droids. These two however, appear to be dark green, and they are the only parts in that color in the whole set. Where could they possibly go? I can't wait to find out!

One thing I can already tell is going to give me a problem is the subtle shades of the colors. The set is (unsurprisingly) mostly comprised of light gray, dark gray, and black parts, which are easy enough to distinguish in reality, but not always so much on the instructions. Also there are a few pieces of a very subtle dark shade (blue and the aforementioned green) which for me at first glance were mistaken for black. I believe the part shapes in these colors are unique to those colors so it should be OK.

As before, I've sorted them by size (large pieces more than 4 studs in any direction in one box, parts 3 to four studs long in another, and the itty bitty stuff in the "tray." As I said before, I could have used a third box--I'm going to have to be careful when moving the tray so as not to spill anything. Note the bowl in the lower right hand corner. I decided early on to keep all the mini-figure and easily identifiable droid parts in a separate bowl, since that's what gets built first. The people parts were like little Easter Eggs--a handful are in each bag with no apparent rhyme or reason. The downside to that is you really have to open all the bags before building. Of course, by doing that, since you build the mini-figures first, you'll know right away if you're missing a bag. (Not that I've ever had that happen in 30+ years of collecting Lego, however.)

So, now that the tedium of sorting is done, we can get on to the fun stuff. Next: little tiny people!