Seeking Advice On Sorting Minifigures

[SEE AR AR THREE]

When I first started collecting LEGO I never would have dreamed of taking apart a minifigure in order to make an original one. I've just recently gotten into LEGO photography and now a good majority of my figures are mixed or missing hands and heads!

Now that I've joined Eurobricks, I plan on building a lot more custom figures. My question is how do those of you who primarily assemble your own custom figures sort their parts? Do you assemble the figures the way they are supposed to be in the sets and then pick off what you need later, or do you just directly sort the heads, torsos, and legs as soon as you open a set?

Edit: Sorry if I posted this in the wrong place. I just discovered the "Minifigure Customization" forum. I'm still learning how to navigate around here.

Edited July 8, 2015 by SEE AR AR THREE

[Alfadas]

Well, how I used to do it, was buy a set, assemble it entirely (including the figures), then once I got a bit bored with the set (mostly after a few weeks) I got the figures and looked at them and thought what pieces of them could I use? Most often I would only use headpieces and hair, sometimes a nice torso.

Now how I do it, is I took apart all my historic yellow figs (from the castle and viking lines) except the Classic Castle ones, put all the torsos in a boxthingy, all the legs and so on. When I feel like making a new figure, I just search for nice pieces.

Hope this helped, though it's a bit of a mixed way.

[Peppermint_M]

Well, this looks like the right place if you want to sort figures, so I changed the title for you.

I make a lot of mix'n'match figures and I also have just finished my sorting of figure parts so here are my tips:

Using bead/screw storage boxes like this:

or

and other varieties that you can get in the £/$ stores and elsewhere. I have sorted heads, legs, torsos, hair, headgear, body wear and accessories from each other.

I have a lot of figure parts, so the torsos are divided down and down to make them easiest to find what I am looking for. "Town" torsos went from one big bunch to - Female, Formal, Emergency Services, Coveralls and Male/Unisex. The other themes are similar. I keep printed legs sorted separately from plain, and divided by main colour. Heads are sorted by "main" feature (Beards. Stubble. Glasses etc). What matters most is you choose categories that work for you, but keep the partitions easy to look through. It is a real pain to rummage and spill because you over-filled a box!

Keeping figures assembled isn't for me. It means you have to part them out when making a custom figure and then you don't have somewhere to put that spare head/torso/legs you do not need from the figure once you're done.

Hope this helps.

[SweetiePie88]

For my parts, I got a small desktop sterelite drawer set. Top drawer is female hats and overall headgear. Guess my male hair is still over in the çmf parts ziplocs. Second is standard caps, regular helmets and partial minifigures. There's 2 just head and headgear, 5 missing head and headgear, and one assembled figure that needs to go in a different set of drawers. Drawer three are heads stacked together w/ other heads of the same type and put on 1x plates to keep it easier for me to look for them. There's 6 just stacked together, not matching, tossed in since I haven't had time to sort them. Next is my torsos, just loose. Last are legs, also loose.

Then I have the çmf container. Heads r in 1 bag, headgear in another, torsos in another, legs in another, and accessories in the final one. I am going to be looking into adding the parts in w/ my little tower b4 to long.

[mpfirnhaber]

At one point about a year ago when I was still collecting CMFs, I had the same great idea to take them all apart and sort the pieces out into bead boxes.

When I decided to sell them a few months ago, I really regretted it. It took me the best part of a day to put them all back together :(

[dr_spock]

I keep all my CMFs on 32x32 base plates so that I can see quickly what I have. When I need to take apart a few of them to assemble another fig for photos, I grab the ones I need and take off the required pieces. I keep the disassembled figs aside in another container. After the photo shoot, I would put back the pieces used to the original CMF fig and put them back on the base plates.

For more generic figs heads, torsos, legs, I keep those in type of storage boxes that Peppermint-M had shown.