Do you sort your sets?

[Zorbas]

I prefer the old school lane. During the past as a child, I never got into thinking of sorting the pieces before starting to build and that is because trying to find the needed pieces is part of the charm and the whole Lego experience.

Today, the situation is a bit different because there is already a small sorting from the beginning, meaning the numbered bags.

[webeaulieu]

Before building, I sometimes inventory the set just to make sure there are no missing pieces. This is easiest to do by color since that is how the parts are inventoried in the instructions. So, I guess I do sort by default of the inventory process.

Since returning to Lego from my dark age of about 25 years I have found the missing piece to be an all too common event (never happened to me when I was a kid). It's pretty dissapointing to get halfway through a build just to realize you will have to wait days (maybe weeks) for a replacement part to come in the mail before you can complete it.

I fully understand the fun of searching through a large pile of unsorted bricks to find the needle in the haystack, but it's only fun if the needle actually is in the haystack.

[samthelegoman1]

I just keep them in buckets and empty them one-by-one, looking for that elusive piece!

[Lord Admiral]

It depends on the set, really. With the smaller sets, I pull the pieces straight out of the bag when I'm building. With bigger sets, I may or may not sort the pieces. I tend to only sort pieces if the color scheme is fairly monotonous (bley, light bley, dark bley, white, black) and if they're spread out in more than five unnumbered bags. Actually, I don't like the numbered bags too much, but it isn't a rational dislike so I'm not going to go into it. I can keep track of around five bags, give or take.

I don't spill either. I just find and pick the piece inside the bag. It's probably not as efficient as spilling and sorting, but I like building sets that way.

[Spyder]

Lego already sorts them for you, they put the big pieces in one bag, the medium in another, and all the really small ones like pins and studs in another. All I do is dump each bag out and keep them in their piles, not mixing them with other bags. (Unless their are two bags of small pieces, big pieces, medium, etc.) If it is a bigger set, then I just dump them out as described above. If it is a small set, then I just dump it into one pile.

[Klaus-Dieter]

That's a great and very interesting topic, Tom Bricks!

I voted for

Yes (sorted)

I don't sort the bricks of a set by color but take away the very little parts since you can't find them otherwise and even take away the very big parts that I've got a better overview over all the other elements.

When the sets are only small I mostly don't sort the bricks included but with big sets I do.

It's great that TLG divides the most sets into several building episodes with their own numbers and bags so that you can find the bricks much better.

Klaus-Dieter

Edited July 22, 2009 by Klaus-Dieter

[desultor]

I don't find the "where is it...WTF.... where is it?!...just my luck to have an incomplete set...oh never mind, found it..."-experience very relaxing or enjoyable.

LOL! Oh man, I hate that experience. For me it's usually about half-way through a build, having thought "Wow, TLG is pretty great for including exactly the right parts in this box. Even some extras, I'll bet. I wonder how they manage that kind of accuracy? Wait a minute... I've been pushing bricks around looking for that part too long now...."

I don't sort small sets. I'll sort a medium set into rough categories. Large sets without numbered bags get the methods I've used on my collection; for example, I group 2x4 and 1x4 bricks and plates of all colors together. I've found it's easy to find the right part this way.

[Milan]

Sorted!

Plates, Bricks, Technic, Slopes, Tiles...

And every group is sorted further by size and color. Especially Technic has lots of drawers for each part group.

Very easy to find and looks cool, but very long time to sort the model you have just destroyed.

[brickzone]

I don't sort but I build from the bags. This way the parts are already roughly sorted, and there is a happy medium between avoiding hassle of searching and searching for parts, yet it slows it down a bit.

With old sets I buy from ebay, I sort very roughly by size - sort of like Lego does with the bags!

[FlyChicken]

I don't sort, because I enjoy building and looking for some parts is a part of it.

Also, todays sets are already sorted in numbered bags , so you don't need to sort them anymore.

[rriggs]

My sets are all sorted into indivdual plastic boxes set by set when they are broken down. This means I can easily recreate any set at any time. When I build a MOC I put a slip in the container listing the parts I have used in the MOC so they can be returned whence they came when the MOC is broken down. As most of my MOCs are variations on Lego's own designs this works well for me.

When I get a new set, however, the first thing I do is open all the bags and mix the pieces up. Feels more like building a set from the good old days. They make it too easy sometimes!!

Cheers

Rog

Edited July 27, 2009 by rriggs

[JCC1004]

I never do. I haven't even gotten a set over 100 bucks. I didn't know about the numbered bags when I built the first Spongebob house, Race for the Stolen Treasure, and Shanghai Case. The Spongebob one was difficult, on top of that I was comming out of my dark age then so it took over 2 1/2 hours. In most sets there are 3 sizes of bags. Small(tenic pins, studs, etc.) meduim( bricks) and large(big plates). I do sort them like that though.

Edited July 27, 2009 by JCC1004

[Morgan19]

Nope, no sorting here. Numbered bags are a godsend for me, so much so that I'm disappointed if a set doesn't use them. I just open all the bags and throw them into a small one of these, which allows me to easily find most all colors and small pieces, and keeps everything contained to a tight space that I can manage. It generally doesn't cause me much trouble except with the large $100+ sets.

I like someone's suggestion about keeping each bag separate, though (when un-numbered)... Never tried that but I'll have to give it a shot.

m19