Bill Ward’s Brickpile

First-stage sort of all the parts from all 14 of the Friends sets. In January I did a review of each of the sets in 14 days called “Fortnight of Friends” and these are the parts after dissassembling all the sets.

This first pass uses a bunch of my sorting bins to divide the parts into the following major categories. Each one will require its own second-stage sort (and perhaps in some cases, a third) before the parts reach their final resting place. These categories are totally arbitrary and seat-of-the-pants, and though they do roughly correlate to how I store the parts, really anything that reduces entropy is helpful.

Left column:

• Slopes, curved slopes, and anything that has a curved upper surface
• Animals
• Tiles
• Cylindrical parts and anything that has a curved side
• SNOT pieces and Technic parts
• Modified plates
• Wheels, fenders, and other car parts
• Small parts (1×1 rounds, jumper plates, grille tiles, Henrik/cheese slopes, etc.)
• Transparent parts
• Bars, antennae, flags, and controls

Middle column:

• Panels
• Printed parts and modified bricks (grille bricks, log bricks, bricks with clips on them, etc.)
• Fences
• Minifig accessories, including the new flowers (which should probably go under foliage) and bugs (which should probably go under animals)
• Foliage (plant parts and old style flowers)
• Minifig and minidoll body parts

Right column:

• Bricks
• Large parts (tall bricks, windows, doors, large detail parts, etc.)
• Plates

Now that I’ve finished the initial sort, I need to process these further.

I’m having trouble deciding how to integrate these into my collection. For bricks, plates, and tiles, I sort by color and then within the bin for each color I have Ziploc bags for each size, so I can put the new colors into their own little mini-categories, probably just one bag for each color… But for the other parts, I generally sort by type, and I’m worried the exotic rare colors will get lost among the ordinary ones… so should I mix them with the other colors and maybe never see them again? Or should I put all the purple pieces together regardless of shape?

This is a problem I’ve been facing for some time and I keep going back and forth on how to deal with it. Any new ideas out there?

Related posts:

1. A sorting conundrum
2. Fortnight of Friends – Day 7: Emma’s Design Studio
3. Sorting bins
4. Fortnight of Friends – Day 8: Stephanie’s Cool Convertible
5. Fortnight of Friends – Day 1: Stephanie’s Outdoor Bakery

Tags: fortnight of friends, friends, lego, sorting, storage

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 4th, 2012 at 12:05 am and is filed under Ideas, LEGO Sets, Storage/Sorting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.