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When faced with the prospect of restoring a classic LEGO set, rebuilding a childhood set from a mix of parts, or evaluating the authenticity of a set bought second hand, the same old issues crop up for the perfectionist in me. I like to make sure that my restored set is made of correct vintage parts, with vintage colour, vintage clutch and vintage moulding characteristics. Sometimes it's easy to tell apart a 1980s part from a modern one, using mould variations, colour changes, mould markings. Buying a 'vintage' part off Bricklink often proves more difficult, especially in the case of common parts -- for instance standard bricks and plates. More often than not a part will be described as New or Used, without further details. The seller most likely won't know the approximate age of the part, and certainly not the original set it came from. Which brings me to this idea I'm bringing up for discussion. Yesterday I opened a mint polybag, set 30210 Frodo With Cooking Corner (Brickset). Could I write down an inventory of this set that would help me to rebuild or restore it in the future, or make it possible to determine if other (opened) sets like it are made of the correct 'vintage' parts? This would involve describing the 'age' of the parts this set is made of. And the best and (to my knowledge) only consistent way to do this would be to inventory the mould numbers used for each part. What are the mould numbers? Most parts nowadays have engraved somewhere both the part number and the mould number. In the example below, a picture borrowed from member tomdobs55, 3710 would be the part number and 58 the mould number. '2' is this brick's position within the mould, and very often this information would be moulded as 2-58 or 2-58. The mould number is a rough estimate of the part's age, mould numbers increasing over time as moulds wear down and are replaced. Very common parts and/or parts introduced a long time ago generally have higher mould numbers, recently introduced parts start at mould number 01 and work their way up over the years (if ever). In my previous example, the 'Vintage Inventory' of set 30210 would look like this: part number - mould serial number 2343 - 03 2489 - 09 3004 - 183 3020 - 77 3021 - 45 3040 - 27 3069 - 62 3626 - 41 3741 - 11 and 12 3742 - 07 3794 - 32 4032 - 16 4073 - 41 4528 - 03 4599 - 07 4865 - 15 10048 - 01 52107 - 05 64647 - 02 unreadable mould number: minifig torso, 3062, 41879, 95228 no mould number: 33078 Note that I don't keep track of part colours or the number of each part in a set. Such information is possibly superfluous for this purpose. If a few more people were to do the same with their copy of this polybag, we would obtain a range of mould numbers for most parts in the set. This range could be very small (a single mould number for some parts in every 30210 polybag produced) or much wider. It wouldn't be the last word on the 'age' of the parts in this set, especially in this case where production may still be ongoing. But it would still constitute a useful resource for: - finding appropriate vintage parts for rebuilding/restoring this set in the future, and - verifying the authenticity of a second-hand/opened set. There are limitations to this concept, including: - Not all parts have readable mould numbers - Parts older than circa 197x? have no mould numbers - Inventorying a set is time-consuming, and - Requires either a mint set or a set kept separate from other parts since its opening. But I still think this approach deserves consideration. Such a resource would grow more valuable over time, and as older sets are added to it. It might not matter today whether my Frodo polybag has the right parts, but in 50 years time when mint 30210 sets might not be available any longer, collectors would want to have a reasonable guarantee that their Frodo set is made of 2012 parts rather than much later ones. This would help the obsessive-compulsive collectors but also the more casual ones who are only trying to make sure that their classic sets are reasonably accurate and not a hodge-podge of parts from all eras. Selling sloppily restored sets as 'authentic original parts' for a premium would become more difficult. But this would also help people Bricklink the right parts for their needs. For instance, if I need 40 1980s-vintage yellow 1x2 bricks to restore my Yellow Castle and the seller agrees to pick those that have a mould number of (fictitious number) '70' and lower, then I can at least be reasonably confident that the bricks I'm paying for are 80s bricks and not more recent ones with different clutch, colour or moulding properties. Mould number ranges can also be matched with other descriptions that are currently used on Bricklink, such as moulding pip positions or 'Pat pend removed' for a more complete picture. So while I'm personally convinced that this sort of (long-term) endeavour is worthwhile, there are probably issues that I haven't though of and this is why I'm opening this discussion. One question that I have considered without reaching a conclusion is the format such a resource should take. Ideally this information would need to be matched/merged with an existing online database such as Bricklink or Brickset. How much information would be enough? Every part of every set, or only the most common (and thus more difficult to filter by age) parts of each set, or even only the most common parts of the most collectible sets? How many individual copies of each set would have to be inventoried in order to achieve an representative range of mould numbers, and how should those set copies be selected -- ideally from different countries? Who should be allowed to contribute to such a database? Has anything similar been attempted before? Any input (comments, suggestions, mockery, potatoes) welcome!
