What a bunch of bricks: Crooks knock hole in toyshop wall, flee with €35k Lego haul Christmas was (probably not) ruined for several German children yesterday after thieves bust through a toyshop wall in Lippstadt and escaped with dozens of Lego sets said to be worth a total of €35,000. Despite the "picture of devastation" and metre-wide opening left in the wall, investigators are struggling to piece …
I still have two crates full of those little barefoot menaces.
These days I let the nephews and nieces have their fun. I'm guessing in a decade, it'll be the grandchildren.
Personally ? I spent years playing with my Legos. Fond memories.
Now I have a computer. And for my computer, I have Minecraft.
Infinite bricks for the win.
Same here (both with the Lego and Minecraft)
I still feel that I can build more with Lego. Old favourites include a working grandfather clock and a fully-motorised construction crane that was three foot long when packed and mobile, and would fill a room when the outriggers and boom were extended.
"Now a lego kit makes one thing and one thing only."
Not true. Apparently they were moving in that direction around twenty or so years back, but stopped doing that, and none of the sets I bought my niece or nephew in the past few years have been like that.
Yes, some of them to have some fancy, semi-custom parts, but this was the case even when I was a kid in the early 80s.
Or did you mean that they only come with instructions for one thing to build? I'm not sure whether that's correct or not (though they do sell some explicitly '3 in 1' sets), but you can build countless things with Lego regardless of whether or not it's in the official instructions.
No reason not to. The Lego brick patient expired a few years ago so people can now make bricks pretty much exactly the same. The good Lego stores are the ones that sell various bricks from various sellers that altogether make up old models that can no longer be purchased. Cheaper than buying the old kits from ebay sellers.
I keep doing that. Bloody English language!
Despite being an adult fan of lego appears I'm out of touch. Buying a house means can't buy the kits anymore and didn't realise bricklink had been sold to Lego. Still got lots of kits that I'd purchased before I threw my money at a house, so still got lots of sets to build.
My dad (who was a builder) bought me a kit one Christmas that had real bricks and a starch type glue, window and door frames and roof tiles. The starch glue meant that you could take the building apart to use everything for a new project, for the life of me I can't remember the name of the kit but it was in the late fifties UK. I never liked Lego but I don't think I saw it before I was about ten years old.
I preferred the real brick kit.
I remember seeing something like this at school. I've done a search and think it's Brickplayer (which is a nice word-play). Here's some links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brickplayer
https://web.archive.org/web/20150411143536/http://www.brickplayer.co.uk/history
https://www.meccanoindex.co.uk/Other/Brickplayer/index.php
https://www.google.com/search?q=Brickplayer&tbm=isch
In my own family we didn't have such toys. I think there were a bit special for most children.
I remember seeing something like this at school. I've done a search and think it's Brickplayer (which is a nice word-play). Here's some links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brickplayer
https://web.archive.org/web/20150411143536/http://www.brickplayer.co.uk/history
https://www.meccanoindex.co.uk/Other/Brickplayer/index.php
https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/how-many-old-toys-display-1154397
https://www.google.com/search?q=Brickplayer&tbm=isch
In my own family we didn't have such toys. I think there were a bit special for most children.
I had Lego and Meccano. And Bayko. And Arkitex. And the first Lego ripoff, whose bricks weren't compatible. And a real-clay-brick thing where you mixed up flour paste for mortar, and once bored with it you broke it down by soaking it in the sink and started again; how Mum loved that one!
But Playmobil was after my time.
I had a hundred or so Tente sets, and also the full Linkets range for good measure during the 80s, including the Tente sets you got from collecting the tokens off Weetabix packages :p
I also remember in the 90s seeing them in the 50p shop, and Home and Bargains as their popularity faded :( Sad because Tente were the first construction toys that had kits to make Transformers*
*Ok not actual branded transformers, but certainly robots in disguise!
Yes it was a thing but I don't think it was that popular. Me, my brother and cousins ended up with a fairly substantial collection because my mother and aunt were passing a toy shop when they were selling off their entire window display FT model because it wasn't selling. Absolute bargain apparently.
I preferred it to Meccano ever since I got a small kit of that and the instructions included _bending_ one of the pieces. Permanently! The horror...
I had a friend who made a comfortable living from buying lego "model" sets and breaking them up to sell as individual parts. I've never dug into it to find out quite how this worked - presumably a small percentage of the parts were valuable as individual items, and everything else got bagged up and sold in bundles.
As to who's buying them? I'd guess it's mainly people building custom kits. Case in point; someone I know has just finally finished an ED-209 model after 8 years; it's ten inches tall, he used 2,400 lego pieces to build it, and apparently, some of the pieces needed were only released in the last two years!
To be fair, it does look pretty impressive, too :)
Yep, take a look at bricklink.com
Now owned by Lego, but still quite independent. Hundreds of Lego repackers all over the world. Some specialize, others have huge stocks, etc.
A friend of mine is one such seller. There was a recent Walmart sale of "sets" which are just lots of bricks of various sizes, shapes and colour. He got 50, and they are now here for me to sort the 75,000 parts, for his Bricklink store. It's going to take a fair while - my guess is one of the 11 different bags of pieces per week, roughly. He would do it *much* faster, but I've got computer work to do, and he's got lots of regular sets to sort.
"An average of €350 per Lego set??"
Yeah, I was wondering about that too.
On the other hand, Police do like to "big up" a crime so they can go for bigger charges and a bigger sentence if/when the perps are caught. I wonder if they inflated the value by including the damage to the wall as part of the swag? Did the perps steal those bricks too?
I'm trying to scratch my Lego itch with a big, light-up MOC diorama in a cupboard.
Just sticking to used kits and space-coloured knock-off pieces set me back maybe $3000 in Canadaland play money.
No judgements, but no regrets (well, 3 grand's a lot for any toy... so maybe a little judgement is in order).
With the bigger, aimed at adults Lego sets costing north of 200 euros, it's not hard to rack up a good score. And with certain highly useful but rare bricks, the individual brick on trading sites can be quite valuable. I've never understood why Lego doesn't just sell individual bricks as a service. There's still relatively high demand for tiny little bricks (that are easily lost) that Lego no longer sell in any of their official sets. If the tooling is still there, doing an official run of 10k bricks will likely satiate the demand at a few dollars/euros per brick while diminishing the scalper market.
Go to the Lego website and click on "Pick a Brick".
Prices there are high, it doesn't include all in-stock parts, and it doesn't include out-of-stock parts, but it satisifies many needs if you don't want to use Bricklink or BrickOwl.
And of course, if you are missing a part or two from a recent set, just ask nicely and they will send you replacements.
Boy howdy, you ain't kiddin'.
The one store-bought part of the thing I'm building (yellow safety barriers. Gotta have yellow safety barriers on your space station) came in at a cool $500 brightly coloured Canabucks.
Can't help but think years ago when I was buying dime bags from a guy, every so often even he would spot you or maybe throw in a little extra shake on a good day... but Lego?
They are stone cold, bless their bricks.
"If the tooling is still there, doing an official run of 10k bricks will likely satiate the demand at a few dollars/euros per brick while diminishing the scalper market."
Warehouse space and time to sell. No one, these days, wants to carry stock for longer than the minimum necessary to ship it out and put the next batch in it's place.
"If the tooling is still there"
Lego are very precise about their manufacturing tolerances, so as soon as the templates (no sure if that's the correct term?) for the injection-molding are slightly worn, they're destroyed and replaced.
Or rather, not replaced, for bricks they don't expect to need more of.
1 each of the top 12 sets would set you back £5720 thats ~ 6700 euro,
5 of each (60 sets) not an unusual stock level would get to that amount fairly easily.
Star Wars 75313 AT-AT – £749.99
Star Wars 75252 Imperial Star Destroyer – £649.99
Star Wars 75192 Millennium Falcon – £649.99
10294 Titanic – £569.99
10276 Colosseum – £449.99
Technic 42131 App-Controlled Cat D11 Bulldozer – £419.99
Star Wars 75159 Death Star – £409.99
Technic 42100 Liebherr R 9800 – £399.99
Harry Potter 75978 Diagon Alley – £369.99
Star Wars 10221 Super Star Destroyer – £349.99
Technic 42115 Lamborghini Sian FKP 37 – £349.99
Harry Potter 71043 Hogwarts Castle – £349.99
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"For people who see Lego as little more than a bit of fun with the kids, it is striking to learn about the enthusiast scene – where full-grown adults must spend hundreds of hours designing their own custom sets to sell or share the instructions online."
Thing is, it's quite common these days for adults to like what some might previously have referred to as toys or things for children. It's just entertainment and/or a bit of nostalgia. As for Lego: Not my bag, but I know a few work colleagues who collect it. I think they view the kits more as models than something to actually play with though.
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