As you know from past updates, I have received two small deliveries of bricks, built the portcullis and finished some minifigures for the 6080 King’s Castle. My project took another step forward as I started dismantling my old sets for bricks and combined these with the newly acquired pieces. I decided to sort the relevant bricks by color: castle grey and black. Sorting by color is often recommended in LEGO building tips, so I thought I’d give it a try. Other bricks from my collection I’ll keep handy nearby, unsorted.
It took me around an hour to dismantle, collect and sort the relevant bricks from the most obvious places. You can see the results in the picture. Also, I have separated minifigures and accessories such as shields and flags (not pictured). I still have more generic grey and black pieces tucked away elsewhere, but I’ll look into sorting those later. I can start building with this. I used two orange 630 Brick Separators (also seen in the picture) to help the process along and they worked great. Using two of them was especially useful when twisting two 1×2 plates apart. Also, the flat end of the separators worked well as a prying tool when lifting flat (non-studded) tiles from baseplates.
There was a familiar smell of decades old dust in the air as I sorted away. In the end, sorting by color seems to work well. It is fast to do and requires relatively little in terms of space or containers, yet looking for parts is much simpler now that you simply have to look for a shape instead of digesting a cacophony of colors. Unfortunately, I do know my sorted boxes contain too many unnecessary pieces and too few necessary pieces, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get there. Next up, washing and bricklaying.
13 Responses to Sort by color
[…] two on this blog, but finally got the baseplates a month ago – and eventually got around to sorting my bricks in yesterday’s post. Now I start […]
[…] taught me a few things. First, how much easier things would have been, had the bricks been sorted somehow. Second, trying to dig into a large container full of LEGO, holding back the avalanches with one […]
[…] think I have learned a few lessons since then. The first one was sorting the parts. As I have gone through my old collection, I have began to move them around a little to create some […]
[…] actual building, I had trouble settling back to a rhythm. I again had my brick pool set up, and separate boxes for all of my black and castle grey bricks, but the process of picking a brick, washing and drying […]
[…] with repetitive sets like castles and trains that require a lot of specific pieces. Second, sorting as well as washing hundreds of bricks is really tedious – I will eventually do more with my […]
[…] glass pan with cold, soapless water and set it onto my building table. As I picked bricks from the sorted boxes, I dropped the pieces into the pool for a while and then toothbrushed them and dried with a kitchen […]
[…] have already set aside most of my black and old grey parts during the past project (that will come in handy) and as […]
[…] from color sorted parts helped a lot again, I can’t stress how much it helps, even with all the bags mixed […]
[…] much the only inkling of organization is the sorted grey and black parts. One issue, certainly, is the fact that I still lack an organized building space – as I […]
[…] for the Quest for Inter-City train have yielded me roughly half the train in brand new bricks, now sorted by color. This is completely excluding whatever used bricks I have managed to find from my old collection […]
[…] before, there isn’t much to report there. It is still dusty as heck and in terrible need of some sorting. That said, here is a photograph of some vaguely LEGO Trains related parts I have put aside as I […]
[…] a well sorted brick collection (actually, finding most black pieces was easy because my black is mostly sorted), but also simply how vast the LEGO parts library really […]
[…] Shop. On top right, leftovers from my Quest for Lion Knights’ castle – unfortunately black and old grey mixed together at one point, I only really need old grey from there. (Old grey is my weak link, I […]