Sorted by color finally finished!

[GeorgeMendes]

Hello everyone,

I just had to post this because I was so excited. My family and I just finished sorting what we estimate to be around 600,000 bricks by color last night! We started in January when we purchased another collection and decided it was time to get everything dkt nsw     in order. I have been spending 2-5 hours a night sorting parts out parts almost every single day. It was such a relief to finish the final bin of tiny parts last night. Now of course the urge to start sorting by style is taking hold...wish me luck.

 

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Edited October 18, 2019 by GeorgeMendes

[MAB]

I would have sorted by part type first. It is much easier to sort bricks / plates / technic parts etc when colours are mixed up.

[ukbajadave]

Ah, the age old dilemma of how to sort bricks. I mainly build Technic so for me part function is more important than colour but I can imagine that for modulars, big landscapes and greebling it could be better to have colours. Whichever way you sorted 600,000 (!) bricks I would imagine you need to sub divide by type. 60 separate colours is still 10,000 bricks in each bin to hunt through.

@GeorgeMendes Do you have pics? I get a strange sense of rightness from nicely sorted Lego 

[ShaydDeGrai]

@GeorgeMendes Congratulations!  I've been sorting for about 30 years now and I'm starting to think my "to be sorted" bin will outlive me.

As for the age old question of how best to organize a collection, I think the only true answer is "whatever works for you."  An awful lot depends on how you build, what you build and how many bricks you're talking about.  Personally, I sort Technic stuff by shape and system parts by color (and usually shape as well if its a high volume color); that's because, when you're only taking about finding a 36 tooth gear, often you don't care what color it is as few will ever see it and, if you _do_ care, finding a tan piece in a bin with a few dozen gray ones is pretty easy.  On the other hand, if I'm, say, working on a building and need 100 light gray 2x2 tiles I don't want to be picking them out of a bin of 5000+ tiles in 20 different colors.  Much better to sort by both color and shape at those volumes.  For rare colors, I find sorting by color alone is more than sufficient because if I only have, say a few hundred purple parts, its enough to "browse purple on hand" for accent parts as I'm unlikely to actually build anything that is predominately that color.

But again, this is just me, this scheme works well with respect to the way _I_ build.  Everyone's mileage varies.

 

[Erik Leppen]

Actually the system by @ShaydDeGrai is quite similar to mine. As a child I sorted by color, later I sorted everything by type (colors mixed - I don't have such quantities), which I kept doing for years, but a few years ago I suddently thought "what are all orange pieces I have" and started going back to sorting by color, for things I use by color. Functional parts, such as snot bricks or Technic stuff, is still by type.

One main reason for sorting by color for "outside/nonfunctional/shape" parts is that you can get "inspiration" from the variety of parts in a bin. Looking for a red piece in a type-sorted bin only works if you know which red piece you need. When I build in a color, I don't always know which parts I need. I search through the bin and stumble on interesting parts that give me ideas of how to build things. This only works for color-sorted mixed-type bins. So for example I have all my orange System parts divided into only 2 bins - "everything that's rectangular" (i.e. basic bricks, plates, tiles) and "all the rest". For basic colors I sort functional parts by type, because I need them by type (I need "part X" in "any color"), but I still have all slopes by color because I use them by color (I need "a variety of slopes in color X").

2 hours ago, ShaydDeGrai said:

As for the age old question of how best to organize a collection, I think the only true answer is "whatever works for you."

To add to that, I have found that - at least I - needed a few iterations of different sorting systems to even find out what works best for me.

[Peppermint_M]

I sort by type, like the others it is according to how I create. Basic parts like bricks/plates/SNOT parts etc are sorted. Then I have "car stuff", "plane stuff" and such.

Maybe one day I will have space for type and colour sorting 

[Retro]

We only sort by colour (apart from a few specialist pieces like tiles). I suppose I'm mostly inspired to build by colours in the first place, and when I want to do this...

...I need to scrounge absolutely every brick we have in a particular colour...!!

 

[Sucram]

Sort by colours looks cooler but by type is better