Ever miss a piece?

[Master_Data]

I've had a lot of problems with missing parts. My 7414 Elephant Caravan came missing the cloth elephant saddle, my Vezon and Kardas came missing Vezon's cape, Kiina came with the Glatorian neck piece instead of the shoulder piece, and I remember that I had a few more missing pieces but I can't remember them off the top of my head. I've also had quite the share of defective parts, especially in the LEGO Minifigures line.

But they replace everything without any problem if you ask.

Not always true- I've had some pretty bad experience regarding replacement parts. If they think you are trying to scam them, they will refuse. I had to provide proof in order to get some parts replaced.

[Lady_Scarlett]

Sorry to hear that... They always been very nice with me and give me a replacement with no question and very quickly. But it probably depends where you live.

[BooBooLand]

I have only recently gotten back into LEGO and while I have purchased many, many sets, I have only opened and built 3 so far. In those 3 sets, I have had quality issues with 2.

My second opened and built set was the Farnsworth House from the Architecture series. I purchased this in a reputatble independent toy store. Upon flipping open the instruction book for the very first time, pages started to pop out. It was obvious the glue was disintegrating. Now, I know the Farnsworth House is a few years old as it was released in 2011, but I'm not sure that it's so old that the pages should be popping out. In the same set, I found a deformed 1x1 tile. There were extras so it didn't affect my build. But, as it was my first set after getting out of my Dark Ages, you can imagine I was disappointed.

After reading on various forums about how people steal minifigs from LEGO sets, I got a little paranoid and decided to go and examine the sticker seals of all my unopened sets and shake the boxes to see if everything sounded right. Most of my sets seemed ok except for 1 Star Wars set. Now, background info on this set - I got it after Christmas, it was the only one left, it was on sale, and it was a set that the LEGO employee told me he hadn't seen in stock for months. All of these facts suggest that it was probably a return. When I shook the box, you could tell individual pieces were rolling around in the box, outside of the polybag. But the seals seemed to be intact. I was so scared that someone had bought the set, stolen the minifigs (which were unique ones), sealed the box up and returned it to the LEGO store. While I did not intend to open that set, I just had to find out if I was a victim.

When I opened the box, I found that polybag 3 was torn in the middle, not like how a person would open it from the top or bottom at the seams, but torn in the middle, like a dog tore it open or something. All of the other polybags were intact. So, I built the model to make sure everything was there. At the end of the day, NONE of the minifigs were missing! This was a surprise to me as I suspected that someone had stolen the minifigs. However, one piece was missing from the torn polybag - a 1x4 tile. This was an odd piece to be missing. Anyway, I called LEGO, told them the story and we were both stumped as to why this happened. It just doesn't seem to make sense that someone would go through all that trouble just to steal a 1x4 tile. I guess we will never know what happened, but they had no problems sending me a replacement piece.

After all that, I'm not sure if I'm just horribly unlucky or LEGO's quality isn't all its hyped up to be. Issues with 2 sets in 3 is a poor statistic.

[Vindicare]

I've never had any missing pieces in all my 400+ sets bought.

[Chorduroy]

I have purchased over 750 sets and only had missing pieces in 2. The strangest instance was when I found 2 Creator Ferris Wheels (http://www.basebrick.com/sets.php?s=ferris) on clearance at a local store well after they had been discontinued. In one I was missing an entire bag of pieces, but had a extra (duplicate) bag of other pieces. Lego still replaced all the parts in that bag no questions asked as always. They are fantastic at Customer Service. I really thought they might balk at me saying I was missing 50 plus pieces.

[Lady_Scarlett]

I received today my Council of Elrond set and a piece (a pillar) was broken. First time it happens to me.