When Do You Order A MOC?

[ejayb]

I'm new to Lego and it is my first and only collecting hobby.

While I enjoy putting together a MOC in Studio, I agonise over optimising the build and trying to order from BrickLink.

I live in a smaller EU country so most of the of the suggested carts from Bricklink are international and the postage can easily be half or more of the cost of the order. Free shipping from Lego.com is only for orders above 55€ and we only have Pick-a-Brick, not Bricks and Pieces.

I'm am happy with the design and I can afford to place the order but I guess I keep asking myself a) is it really finished and b) is this design worth the cost.

 

When did you decide to order the parts for your first MOC?

[Phil B]

This is not a direct answer to your question, but something to consider: unless you already have a vast collection of bricks of all different kinds, take into account that no matter how well you plan your first brick purchase (be it from BL, BrickOwl or LEGO.com), you will find that once you start building you will have to make one or more additional purchases. For three reasons:

1. You will invariably have missed something from your list of parts, or ordered the wrong quantity.

2. You will find out during the build that what seemed to work digitally does not render a stable build in the brick, or simply does not fit due to unexpected tolerance issues.

3. Most annoyingly: shops might not send you the right bricks, or the right amount of bricks, or tell you at shipping time that a specific part or quantity could not be filled. As a seller, if that happened to me I would always make it right and order the parts from somewhere else without cost to you, the buyer (as it is my inventory mistake), but not all sellers do this. Lots of sellers just refund you the cost of the missing parts, but that means you now have to pay for a new order at another seller, often for just a few pieces, and pay more shipping. Quite unfair and I would love to see BrickLink mandate a replacement policy for sellers, but I doubt that will happen.

Net, expect to spend more than what your first attempt at ordering all the pieces is estimated to cost. This is not a cheap hobby.

[Alexandrina]

I've recently been working on set designs for a foolishly large-scope brickfilm series - which essentially means designing about a hundred MOCs. I quickly came to notice certain parts that I was using a lot, in large quantities - things such as trans-light blue 1 x 2 tiles, and medium nougat 1 x 2 masonry bricks, which I need in great plenty (on the order of several hundred). I set up a wanted list on Bricklink just filled with parts like this, that would be expensive enough to make anybody blanch if ordered in one go - and every time I place an order, I'll buy that store out of the parts I need from my list. In the meantime, I've been scouring Facebook marketplace and gobbling up just about every big job lot in my local area, which has given me a considerable supply of bricks to be working off. I recommend doing that anyway, regardless of whether you need parts for your current MOC - lots of people listing big tubs of Lego on Facebook don't know that what they have is worth a ton, so they want it gone (last year I picked up a £50 job lot with about 5000 pieces in it, all vintage, including a few boxed sets from the 1970s, the entirety of the yellow castle and most of the Alpha-1 Rocket Base). You can accumulate plenty of Lego cheaply, and if there's stuff that you don't want/need that's worth a chunk, you can then sell it on for more than you paid to recoup your costs and have more cash for Bricklinking your MOC.

At the same time, I've found it helps to split your MOC into chunks (not in terms of the design, but mentally) and buy the bits for a certain amount first. For example, if you were doing a street scene with a well, it might be good to order all the parts for the well (and anything else you need that the seller happens to have) and build that, taking the time to make sure your digital design looks the way you want it in person. By spreading out your Bricklinking, you're amortising the costs over a longer period. £400, for example, would be a lot for you to drop on individual Lego parts and shipping in a single go. If you buy it over ten months, you're spending £40 a month, which is a much more manageable chunk. Course, there's only so much you can do to save pennies - Lego is expensive, there's no way around that. But every little helps.

You mention you're happy with the design and you can afford to place the order. In that case, I would say go for it. Perfection is the enemy of productivity - if you're like me, you'll constantly want to be tinkering and never be truly satisfied that it's as good as it can be. At some point you have to take the leap and say "right, this is finished now", so why not do it now? When you have the parts in front of you built into a physical model, you'll either still be happy about it (hooray! Job done!) or think up changes. And if the latter happens, you've ordered some pieces you maybe aren't using right now. Doesn't mean they won't get used later.

[1963maniac]

2 hours ago, ejayb said:

I live in a smaller EU country so most of the of the suggested carts from Bricklink are international and the postage can easily be half or more of the cost of the order. Free shipping from Lego.com is only for orders above 55€ and we only have Pick-a-Brick, not Bricks and Pieces.

In the US we are able to order from "replacement parts" also. The link is near the bottom of the LEGO shop page.

[Phil B]

30 minutes ago, 1963maniac said:

In the US we are able to order from "replacement parts" also. The link is near the bottom of the LEGO shop page.

That is the “Bricks and Pieces” OP refers to :) . Only available in a select few countries.

[zephyr1934]

4 hours ago, ejayb said:

I'm am happy with the design and I can afford to place the order but I guess I keep asking myself a) is it really finished and b) is this design worth the cost.

When did you decide to order the parts for your first MOC?

1) Keep your first build small, e.g., one or two cars, nothing fancy. That will help with figuring out parts ordering

2) Be strategic, e.g., for the key train parts (wheels, motors, couplers) there is a good chance it will be cheaper to buy one of the city train sets to part out

3) Buying from bricklink can be a mind-bending optimization problem- balancing slightly higher prices from a seller with more of the parts you need. I typically find the most expensive/rare parts and use those as my starting point and then expand from there. Of course what I manage to save in money doing it this way I probably lose many times over in time, but the hunt can be fun.

4) If you know it is a work in progress, on your first buying round you can skip some of the most common (i.e., cheap) parts that none of your "high priority" parts orders cover. Plan to get these in a later order so that if it turns out a redesign needs other parts you can probably consolidate the new parts with those you skipped on the first round and save some of the postage that you would have spent.

5) Once you start buying for MOC's, similar to what Alexandrina said, buy extra of the parts you know you will use all the time

6) Keep the BL price list open as you design, sometimes you can replace a 1x6 with a 1x4 and a 1x2 for a lot less money, or the other way around, etc.. It helps to avoid price shock and it is a lot easier to redesign while you are designing in the first place.

[ejayb]

4 hours ago, Alexandrina said:

When you have the parts in front of you built into a physical model, you'll either still be happy about it (hooray! Job done!) or think up changes.

I agree Alex, I need to see if I get the satisfaction of actually building and running the model.

 

Phil and Zephyr, thanks for the tips, I'll keep those in mind.

[Hod Carrier]

10 hours ago, Phil B said:

This is not a cheap hobby.

Amen to that.

One tip that I've learned is to keep one eye on Bricklink during the design process. Not all parts are available in all colours and some parts that show as being available turn out to be rare and, therefore, expensive. You can also check to see whether or not the parts you need are available in your territory or at least nearby. With this information you can make better choices about the parts you can use and tailor your design accordingly, avoiding the use of non-existent, unavailable or excessively expensive parts. Ordering parts from other EU states shouldn't be a big problem, although they can sometimes take longer to arrive. Just adjust the Store Filters to take out any vendors outside of the EU area where postage and other fees may inflate the cost.

If you're building in Stud.io, take some time to do some good quality renders of your design to get a better idea how it will look when completed. I always build my MOCs digitally first and I find that rendering them gives a much better impression and I can make a better decision about whether or not I'm happy with the design or if it still requires tweaking. If you've any unusual design elements that you are unsure will work in real life, try prototyping the technique with some table-scraps to see how it works and make any changes before committing. It can pay not to rush to Bricklink with credit card in your trembling hands until you're absolutely 100% happy with how it looks, but you will have to accept that you are almost always going to have to come back for more parts because some aspect didn't work out quite as you'd hoped.

When it comes to uploading your design to Bricklink I would recommend that you cross-check the parts list Bricklink has generated against the parts list in your Stud.io file. I have found that sometimes they don't match as Bricklink has been known to miss things off. If you use it, it can also sometimes be worth running the "Auto-Select" function a few times because sometimes it compiles the parts differently which can sometimes affect the total cost. 

[Duq]

Not the question I expected from the topic title 'When do you order a MOC'...

It depends on what you want to do. Some people enjoy building something from parts they have, some people design in the likes of studio and then order all the parts they need.

To answer your questions:

• Is it really finished?
  > It's never finished but at some point you just have to stop and build it. You can always revisit your MOC at a later date.
• Is this design worth the cost?
  > That's a question only you can answer.
• When did you decide to order the parts for your first MOC?
  > Err... I think that was before BrickBay had started, can't quite remember...

In Bricklink, create a wanted list. Then let Bricklink figure out the best combination of shops to order from. You can put in restrictions like only ordering from the EU.

I have many wanted lists; one for each model I work on, one for general train parts, one for missing parts in sets I bought used etc. Over time those lists change of course.

When I'm going to place an order for a specific model I let BL figure out the stores, then I go into each of them and see what else they have from my other wanted lists. That may change my selection of stores. When placing the actual order I often round up amounts and have a look through some categories like minifig accessories and printed tiles. Sometimes you find interesting parts you weren't aware of. Adding those parts means the shipping costs are a smaller portion of the cost.

 

[ejayb]

8 hours ago, Hod Carrier said:

19 hours ago, Phil B said:

This is not a cheap hobby.

Amen to that.

Yes, but at least sets generally have a good resale value. 

 

8 hours ago, Hod Carrier said:

Ordering parts from other EU states shouldn't be a big problem

I'm generally seeing postage costs between 7€ and 14€. I'm adding any stores with postage above 10€ to my filter list.

 

6 hours ago, Duq said:

Is this design worth the cost?
> That's a question only you can answer.

That's my problem, I'm trying to think objectively.

 

Thanks again everyone

[Tierce]

22 hours ago, ejayb said:

When did you decide to order the parts for your first MOC?

When I already had a lot of bricks from teared down older sets, ebay sales, and the LEGO store walls. However, I only did that for one build. I hated all the extra cost for shipping and handling. Not worth it in my opinion, so now I just build stuff with the bricks I have or acquire through LEGO store walls and tearing down sets.

2 hours ago, ejayb said:

Yes, but at least sets generally have a good resale value. 

Sometimes, I tell this to my wife and myself, knowing full well that I would never sell anything of my collection. 

8 hours ago, Duq said:

It depends on what you want to do. Some people enjoy building something from parts they have, some people design in the likes of studio and then order all the parts they need.

This is the way.

Edited February 4, 2021 by Tierce

[zephyr1934]

16 hours ago, Hod Carrier said:

When it comes to uploading your design to Bricklink I would recommend that you cross-check the parts list Bricklink has generated against the parts list in your Stud.io file. I have found that sometimes they don't match as Bricklink has been known to miss things off. If you use it, it can also sometimes be worth running the "Auto-Select" function a few times because sometimes it compiles the parts differently which can sometimes affect the total cost. 

And you probably have many of the parts in hand (e.g., common black plates) so to save money you can weed those out of your shopping list before you start buying.

 

[Hod Carrier]

4 hours ago, zephyr1934 said:

And you probably have many of the parts in hand (e.g., common black plates) so to save money you can weed those out of your shopping list before you start buying.

Spot on.

One other thing I do is not to specify the colour of parts that will remain hidden inside the build. It makes it easier to use up unused parts you might have left over and to take advantage of buying parts at lower prices.