Which Pirates sets have (or may have) problem with brittle brown bricks?

[eldiano]

1 hour ago, CAESARBLACK said:

Lego 4194 was a write off for me. Every single brown piece broke...

Noooooo That one’s going for a pretty penny, no wonder the black pearl is sought after 👀👀

[nmbd]

I recently rebuild a 6243 Brickbeard's Bounty and had multiple pieces break either during building or disassembly. Some reddish brown (plate lost some part of its underside and a middle hull piece lost an open stud), some dark red (broken headlight pieces and 1x1 round bricks) and some pearl gold. From my experience with the old Monster Fighters sets (2012?) I'd say these colours (together with dark brown) have been the worst offenders.

BUT Lego replaced all of the broken pieces, for free, even for a set as old as Brickbeard's bounty! I just filled out their form on the website and got replacement parts. I think they would even have replaced the middle hull piece if it was still available (they were even missing the middle hull pieces of the Brick Bounty / Neo Barracuda which might have served as a substitute and apologised a lot for it!).

So if you have pieces break, even from old sets, Lego will possibly help you out if the piece is still available. No luck for old minifigures, I am afraid.

[jodawill]

My son had a reddish brown Duplo piece break recently. It's from one of the 2014 castle sets. It broke just by assembling it - no rough housing. The piece that came off is a choking hazard. My son is seven years old, but if this had happened with our baby it could have been a problem. I contacted customer support and they said they'd send me an envelope to send it back, as well as a replacement. I never got either. A few weeks later, I got an email from another team that deals with safety issues. They apologized, saying they didn't have any more information other than I had a broken Duplo piece, and they wanted me to share all the details with them again. So I did, and it's been a few more weeks and I haven't heard back or received the replacement or envelope.

Their customer support is normally great. I wonder what's going on with this. I kind of wonder if they're afraid to handle this issue because they don't want to issue a product recall. They seem to take a lot of pride in the fact they've only had a few recalls, and it's been something like 20 years since the last one. But, honestly, all of these brittle brown and brittle blue Duplo pieces should be recalled for safety.

As for the minifigures, I think they've gotten better recently, although some colors may be problematic. One of my white minifigures from Benny's Space Squad cracked just sitting in the closet. I measured the thickness of the wall a while back and compared it to the new ones. I forget the exact numbers - if I remember correctly, a torso from the '80s was 1.4mm, the Benny's Space Squad one was 0.9mm, and the new Black Falcon torso was 1.2mm. (Or something like that - the difference was pretty large.)

[Bfin9691]

My imperial flagship has pieces that fall apart in your hands, o leave it on a shelf and try not to touch it now. Some parts out of production which makes them too expensive to replace 

[_R_R_]

Sorry to necro post but the dreaded brittle brown brick curse finally found me today.

I was cleaning the Black Pearl since it can get quite dusty and noticed the two grey canons were loose from the brown holder parts, I don't recall separating these parts and they were fine when I assembled them. I took one cannon and attempted to connect it to the brown holder and the hinges immediately snapped. I didn't even bother touching the other canon once that happened. Now I'm afraid of touching other brown pieces on the ship and my other PoTC sets. 

It did get me wondering, are there are any recent brown canon holder parts available? If I recall the 2015 Pirates line only had red canon holders and I'm pretty sure the same applies to PoBB so I don't know if there's been any brown canon holders produced since the Pearl which means even if I were to get replacement parts they would likely just snap too.

[thewatchman]

2 hours ago, _R_R_ said:

Sorry to necro post but the dreaded brittle brown brick curse finally found me today.

I was cleaning the Black Pearl since it can get quite dusty and noticed the two grey canons were loose from the brown holder parts, I don't recall separating these parts and they were fine when I assembled them. I took one cannon and attempted to connect it to the brown holder and the hinges immediately snapped. I didn't even bother touching the other canon once that happened. Now I'm afraid of touching other brown pieces on the ship and my other PoTC sets. 

It did get me wondering, are there are any recent brown canon holder parts available? If I recall the 2015 Pirates line only had red canon holders and I'm pretty sure the same applies to PoBB so I don't know if there's been any brown canon holders produced since the Pearl which means even if I were to get replacement parts they would likely just snap too.

I bought one of these in mint condition for an moc I built and did the exact same thing about a week ago!

 Noticed on my display shelf that it was sitting out of the clip, so I gently attempted to push it back into place and it shattered. 
 

I had never had this problem until this year when half the reddish brown I own seems to break.

[PxChris]

11 hours ago, _R_R_ said:

It did get me wondering, are there are any recent brown canon holder parts available?

Unfortunately they haven't released the cannon holder in reddish brown since 2016. Many of us are impatiently waiting for this piece to come back to the market again so we can comfortably replace the many broken ones in our collection.

[zinnn]

I bought a couple of small POTC sets on Ebay a couple of years ago, and a few pieces snapped while I was building them. I put them up for sale the next day and decided it's best to forget that theme existed ;)

Edited February 8 by zinnn

[_R_R_]

11 hours ago, thewatchman said:

I bought one of these in mint condition for an moc I built and did the exact same thing about a week ago!

 Noticed on my display shelf that it was sitting out of the clip, so I gently attempted to push it back into place and it shattered. 
 

I had never had this problem until this year when half the reddish brown I own seems to break.

That's really interesting, I had never heard of the cannons just popping off the brown holders before, usually it just snaps. I am worried about reddish brown parts now, maybe their shelf life is coming to an end and they'll begin to snap no matter how good you took care of them.

1 hour ago, PxChris said:

Unfortunately they haven't released the cannon holder in reddish brown since 2016. Many of us are impatiently waiting for this piece to come back to the market again so we can comfortably replace the many broken ones in our collection.

That's disappointing, if I had to guess we won't be seeing the holders in brown ever again as it seems pretty intentional on TLG's part to avoid having those snap. What I'm thinking about is getting some off-brand brown canon holders since those brands are the only ones that still seem interested in giving us pirate ships.

1 hour ago, zinnn said:

I bought a couple of small POTC sets on Ebay a couple of years ago, and a few pieces snapped while I was building them. I put them up for sale the next day and decided it's best to forget that theme existed ;)

It's not just PoTC, there's soooo many themes that utilized brown parts even on minifigures, Pirates from 2009/2015 uses a lot of reddish brow, looking at my shelf I also see some other sets with tons of reddish brow like the LoTR Shelob and perhaps most infamously, the Star Wars Sand Crawler. Now I heard TLG had a program for users where they could get replacement brown parts for their sets but I'm not sure if it's true and even if it is I doubt they still produce a lot of those pieces in brown, as is the case with the brown cannon holders.

[Pirate_King_1982]

Brown has always been a bad colour for cannons. I remember one year I had a pirate themed birthday party and ended up with five or six harbour sentry sets that came with brown cannons and every cannon carriage or holder or whatever you want to call it broke. In contrast I owned heaps of sets with red cannon holders like the Clipper, Eldorado Fortress, Renegade Runner andSabre Island and not one of them ever broke.

[jodawill]

I've had lots of (old) brown cannon holders for almost 30 years and I've never broken one. Maybe you were just too rough with your toys. 

Edited February 9 by jodawill

[thewatchman]

43 minutes ago, jodawill said:

I've had lots of (old) brown cannon holders for almost 30 years and I've never broken one. Maybe you were just too rough with your toys. 

This is exactly what I used to think until the last 6 months. Baring in mind I live in Australia and we are having a heatwave! 
 Might be accelerating the process 

[JaBaCaDaBra]

Maybe you just claim then at lego as bad and order new ones

these are kids toys and shouldnt break, not in australia, not in finland, not anywhere

[Pirate_King_1982]

3 hours ago, jodawill said:

I've had lots of (old) brown cannon holders for almost 30 years and I've never broken one. Maybe you were just too rough with your toys. 

By that rational the red cannon holders should’ve broken too.