Hi everyone..!

Recently my LEGO Technic interest has been re-kindled due to a recent purchase the other day of some DUPLO sets for my 2 and half year old daughter...

My last foray with LEGO Technic was in my teenage years when I had purchased a couple of 8868 sets. My first ever set was an 856 Bulldozer when these were first released [brings back a lot of memories]. I still have these sets and just the other day I pulled them out for a closer look.

Anyway, at 46 yrs of age I have decided to get back into the scene so to speak.

Quite a lot has changed with the studdless parts and the wider variety of gears/axles/power functions etc etc.

Impatiently - I rushed out and purchased a couple of sets [8043 & 8110] to get my feet wet again and have just been busy on Bricklink ordering bits so that I can knock up an 8043 Ultimate thanks to Jurgen.

I will also be purchasing a few more sets over the next few weeks to basically bring up my parts inventory to a reasonable level.

Question I have is what is the best method to keep track of parts and sets especially when raiding sets for a few parts? Is it better to sort [and treat] all my sets as a generic global parts inventory or to sort sets as a unique entities and keeping track of parts removed from individual sets?

TIA

Costas

@ Costas: Welcome to Eurobricks! You're not too old for Lego -- you're as "young as you feel"! If you intend to keep your sets BUILT and sitting on a shelf, then yes you should keep track of any parts "borrowed" from them for your MOCs ("My Own Creations"). If you want to build the sets and then later dismantle them to make something else, then you should sort them in a "generic global parts inventory". You probably will end up doing both.

Welcome back to Technic - your story sounds so familiar!

I have been back for a couple of years now and so far I have been keeping my sets separate from my regular inventory. I purchased a couple of extra copies of sets I had to boost my non set inventory and have been adding pieces from Bricklink as needed. I color sort my inventory and so far that has been working pretty well. If my inventory starts getting out of hand, I just build something for display and that knocks it back down a bit.

Have fun and enjoy catching back up. I'm close to your age and Technic has come a ways since the 856 days!

I have over a million parts in my "parts" collection and I can tell you that theres no one right way to do it. The best way I have found to explain it is an article that a friend sent to me that perfectly describes the situation with lego collecting.

http://news.lugnet.com/storage/?n=707

That being said, look here to see a previous post on storage.

http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=64423&st=0/

Edit: Fixed the link.

Edited July 6, 201212 yr by nychase

Some usefull tips:

http://www.evilmadscientist.com/2008/how-to-organize-your-lego-bricks-for-efficient-building/

I have over a million parts in my "parts" collection and I can tell you that theres no one right way to do it. The best way I have found to explain it is an article that a friend sent to me that perfectly describes the situation with lego collecting.

The second link is broken. I can't post links yet but the part after eurobricks.com would be: /forum/index.php?showtopic=64423&st=0/

This thread comes up every year or so. Here is the one I started in 2009.

If you keep most of your parts in one bin like I do, it helps if you sort out all of the small interesting parts that you don't have a lot of.

Thanks for the warm welcome everyone.

The links posted above came in handy. I had already purchased a number of plastic trays with re-positionable dividers [similar to Blakbird's idea] so I'll opt for that method initially and see how I go.

Once again - Thanks...!

For me its draws of differing sizes and a few big bins for mixed stacks, seems to work quite well

Welcome back!

Sorting is a really hard problem, the best approach I know is: start with defining your priorities.

I'm under the impression that most AFOL here don't have 0-2yo kids which might mean their systems are optimized from priorities far from yours

For Duplo: quick'n'easy to get in and out. My 3yo has 3 IKEA VESSLA crates (with optional lid). I can highly recommend these crates, not so much the lids.

The crates are big enough for her to rummage around and for me to easily put stuff back in them from 3-4 meters away. Their wheels often come in handy too.

My wife insisted that lids were necessary to stack the crates, although I pointed out they'd stack nicely so long as they were reasonably full -- which they are, so they do

For Techcnic, you should probably think of growth strategies. Try to make really easy to reclassify your parts as your collection grows.

Other things I would/did consider in a similar situation to yours: keep your Technic parts out of children's reach and take as little space as possible.

I've been reading several threads here in the last few days and found a few "x vs y" choices that repeat all the time:

1. Stanley organizers vs drawers: I went for drawers and highly recommend it for the priorities above (growth, children, space). The drawers system I use (see 3rd pic here) has a few 3x and 6x wide drawers, but most importantly: I can very easily move them around. Even just take the right-most drawer in a row and shift all the others at once, which I do every time I get a big set, to accommodate (a) too many parts of one group no longer fit one drawer, need to use 2 drawers and subdivide. With all Stanley organizers I've seen, you move parts from one compartment to another, rather than moving compartments. Also, when building, I only need to take out about a dozen drawers and keep them handy on my desk, while 80-90% of my stuff remains hanging on the wall, not taking space on my desk.

2. Vertical vs horizontal storage: Horizontal storage tends to take more space and maybe more dust. Vertical fits nicely along walls

3. on-the-ground vs on-the-wall: Here's the child safety part. My drawers are handing on the wall, so that by the time my child was able to reach to the lowest drawers she was already out of her grab-lick-suck-chew-and-maybe-swallow phase.

news.lugnet.com/storage/?n=707 is a funny read, although I find it hard to believe than someone really derailed as bad as sort the obvious way: by color.

Another priority I set up-front was precisely to make my system color-blind-friendly. Not because I'm color-blind, which I'm certainly not, but because discerning colors among pieces of the same shame is much much easier than discerning shapes in a pool of pieces of the same color. So I sorted mine by function, and then size. So far so good.

The one big problem I still haven't figured out how to deal with is tyres. As you can see in my setup, I mostly just piled them up in a big unstable tower... not proud of that!

Sorting by color is counterproductive with black or dark toned parts. I've had hard times finding my required part in a shallow pile of black parts due to the poor contrast . I usually sprinkle a few % of light colored parts in my pile-of-blacks to my life easier :)

The first thing I would do, a process that I am in the middle of currently, is logging all your pieces on Rebrickable using the Part ID. This way, you can see what other sets you can build.

technic is one of those things that it sometimes takes a few tries to find the right method.

I'm currently storing my technic parts in baskets in pull out drawers. I have bricks and plates mostly sorted by size, axles and pins in another container, bricks with technic pins in another, gears/connectors, misc, liftarms/beams, par assemblies/misc/2 brick seperators, and a small basket with the start of my short and long wings. whenever i take parts out and put them in a smaller container to build with, i try and stick with the same method. My collection isn't huge but it used to all fit in 2 of large stack on drawers with room to spare!