After the near-disaster in the first “scene”, I was able to complete the second step in building 6080 King’s Castle without incident. My washing routine with the brick pool was also working well. But by the third scene, I was back to square one: another castle grey 1×2 angled roof tile required. By this time I had decided to simply make notes of missing pieces and move on for the time being, but considering how basic this brick seemed, I decided to go have a look-see anyway. It turns out, I was also missing two grey 2×2 inverse roof tiles for the staircase, so why not search for those as well. I must have these lying around the house somewhere, right?
First I went through the same box that I found the previous roof tile in, but while a new search contributed another couple of dozen black and grey pieces to the project, even some grey 2×2 roof tiles, no luck with the inverse ones or a 1×2. At this point I realized how much time it actually takes to look for bricks from my childhood LEGO collection. I literally spent a couple of more hours scouring through it and indeed found many more relevant bricks, including several much-needed LEGO Castle minifigure pieces and weapons. No luck with the grey 2×1 roof tile, though, I have that brick in many other colors but apparently none more in grey. Also, I couldn’t find those inverse tiles either.
This time spent with my old LEGO collection 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 hand and searching with the other, is not really very effective in a complete search. It turns out (no pun intended), the most effective way is turning the box upside down and pouring all the pieces out – and then searching while refilling the box. I actually did this for my sorted grey brick box and some of the storage boxes I had my childhood LEGO in. Here is what one of those piles looked like:
While laborsome, this process yielded me the most new bricks so far. I walked away with a much replenished brick stack, especially important were many of the smaller bricks and bars I found. It was also a welcome walk down the memory lane, reminding me of all the bricks and dismantled sets I have in there. This information should come useful later. What I did not walk away with, however, were the 1×2 roof tiles and 2×2 inverse roof tiles in castle grey. I must have these lying around the house somewhere, right? Wrong, it seems. Time to mark those bricks as missing in action and continue the fight.
Note: You can click the images for larger versions.
8 Responses to Treasure hunting
[…] I’ve been piecing the 6080 King’s Castle together, step by step, I’m beginning to realize how big a task I have selected for myself, trying to recycle […]
[…] second lesson was how to efficiently hunt for bricks from your collection. Trying to dig in by hand and attempting to navigate around brick avalanches […]
[…] pieces that are no longer manufactured. For those, my first stop will be going through my old LEGO collection (I’m still intent on re-using it through my quests and future projects) and where that fails, […]
[…] for Inter-City train: It has been a while since I last dug into my childhood LEGO collection. That time it was for the (still slightly incomplete) Quest for Lion […]
[…] bley issues, online catalogs, building instructions and parts databases, brick washing, collection management, part evolution, computer aided design, LEGO history and things like LEGO in Japan and CUUSOO, SNOT […]
[…] have discussed excavating and searching my old childhood LEGO collection sufficiently before, there isn’t much to report there. It is […]
[…] several containers and places. For some earlier photos of the mess, see Old parts, old friends, Treasure hunting and The Excavation […]
Hi there
I love this image and wondered if I could have your permission to use it for a training course I’m running. Funnily enough the course is on categorising things so that it is easier to see the differences. ( I would of course include a link to this page. There are a number of lego fans in the community. )
Regards
Chris
P.S. I bought my son a huge box of random star wars lego bits without instructions for next to nothing. He was able to identify sets (and find the building instruction on websites) from the mini figures and then we had a huge hunt. My sons did the building whilst I did the searching. We ended up using boxes, bowls and and transparent plastic bags. I sorted them by shape, size and thickness with a big box for the “random” stuff. Flat pieces were stuck together. Eventually we built five or six sets. There are more to go.