What is this? It is a brand spanking new 6080 King’s Castle portcullis of course! Sort of.

Why there is a piece of brown minifig hair in there as well, I have no idea.

As you may have gathered from my previous postings, I am currently acquiring more bricks to start building the castle. A couple of orders were sent out last week, one via BrickLink and one to TLG (the LEGO Group), and the first to arrive was this package from the TLG’s Pick a Brick online store. I decided that since the portcullis was so central to my past efforts to build this castle, I would invest in new bricks for it. Unlike other pieces so far, I did calculate what I would need for the portcullis. It will be the pièce de résistance of my castle. Luckily TLG still makes all the pieces in the portcullis and black has not gone bleck.

Pick a Brick is seemingly a part of the regular LEGO online store, the only exception being that it has a sort of separate collection bag that eventually appears only as a single item in the actual order. I wish I could have reviewed it in the order page as well. Also, only standard shipping was available. As I ordered some other items at the same time, my order shipped in two separate parcels, regular items shipping almost immediately from the online store and the Pick a Brick set a day later from LEGO’s supplier in Strykow, Poland. For some reason, the Pick a Brick shipping notice arrived three days late. Unlike standard shipping for the regular items, though, the Pick a Brick package featured online tracking at least once the shipping notice arrived.

The Pick a Brick parcel took eight days to arrive in Finland after shipping (nine days after order), the regular package came in five days. Apparently the delivery used for Pick a Brick was Deutsch Post DHL Paket International, so additional tracking was available at the DHL site (using the shipper’s reference/referenz number). The progress of the package seemed painfully slow, I wonder if they used the 6010 Supply Wagon to carry the parcel through Germany. The age of airmail has spoiled me. Curiously, the TLG and DHL sites showed slightly different tracking data. Tracking mostly stopped once the package left Germany. All in all, a decent experience, though unfortunately the brick selection at the Pick a Brick store is not classic-friendly. That remains a job for BrickLink.