Tips on work area when building a Technic set

[Edwin Korstanje]

Do you have cleaned your table Ryan

[Lipko]

Oh, the container naziness

How do you find the right container from the forest of containers?

Edited October 27, 2012 by Lipko

[Alasdair Ryan]

Do you have cleaned your table Ryan

That picture is quite old its a mess now....

Oh, the container naziness

How do you find the right container from the forest of containers?

With skill.

[Moz]

How do you find the right container from the forest of containers?

Practice and memory. It helps if there's a pattern to the organisation. But mostly it's just practice. It gets worse as you get more containers, but I've seen people with hundreds of compartments who can still find things very quickly.

[dr_spock]

I have a dozen or so of these containers. The near transparent top helps identify what's inside.

[Rixo]

Heh, there's a huge ongoing thread on this in the general area that has some Technic content. I have a desk for Lego (and I keep moving non-Lego off it, and one it shall be for Lego buildinhg only!) with shelves above it to hold parts. The wooden trays for plastic Lego bemuse some people, but custom sized plastic trays are out of my price range (I have compartments 12,10,9,8 long for axles, for example)

Moz, respect to that building area! Full on greatness! I wish I had the space for this.

[S.I]

When building sets I either dump it all out on the living room table ot the carpet, only sorting is kind of spreading out the different bags, but as the build proceeds it gets more and more mixed up. MOCs I have some parts sorted, but mainly have several large containers with random parts in them. If I can't find what I need after some searching I look for a container with the correct part.

[750ACE]

I use akro mils 64 and 24 bins. No stacking cases flat and all the parts are sorted by element. Easy to find what you need and fast.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/s/ref=is_s_?ie=UTF8&k=akro+mils&i=aps

[Kronos]

I use akro mils 64 and 24 bins. No stacking cases flat and all the parts are sorted by element. Easy to find what you need and fast.

http://www.amazon.co...akro mils&i=aps

I use those too. They work great. I do need a couple more though....

Edited January 16, 2013 by Kronos

[Moz]

The easy addition that I find very useful is a towel laid on the work surface. It really does help to not have things bouncing and rolling everywhere.

Moz, respect to that building area! Full on greatness! I wish I had the space for this.

I don't really have the space for it either :) It takes a couple of hours to unpack it to that state, and the same to pack it away again afterwards. Normally that desk is covered in computer stuff (I work from home, on the computer, so have 3 monitors etc). But for holidays or when I'm in a build frenzy I use the desk for Lego and put one monitor and the computer on the dining room table. Eventually the complaints get aggrieved enough that I have to put it back. Right now the shelves are taken apart and stacked in the garage, as is most of the Lego. I'm just using a big towel on the dining table and the random big for building stuff with.

Edited January 16, 2013 by Moz

[jadedomg]

This is my lego work area

I have the parts sorters from canadian tire for stuff I use a lot and it is great because I can pull the entire drawer out and then put it back when I am done with it. It helps keep them organized. I also use little round stackable containers for usually when building a new set, I will dump a entire bag of small parts into it. I have the blue mat it is some anti slip thing I found at the dollar store, it is great because no lego part is that colour of blue so it always stands out and pins dont roll away on it. For the bigger parts I space them out on the table and try to organize best I can.I find the L shape way I laid out works well for me because I can have small parts off to the side and then my build area. Obviously in the middle of building stuff gets messy but when its done it is all neat and tidy!

I love my hobby :)

[Alasdair Ryan]

Is that my seat?

Nice set up.

[shadowhearth]

this is, how i build:

I found that those food containers are just perfect for storage and building lego. Usually I got instructions on middle screen, but crawlers instructions were a mess.

I sort in to 3 sections my parts. large,medium,small parts.

[jadedomg]

Is that my seat?

Nice set up.

I have more then one chair :-p I sometimes have help and it would be rude if they couldn't sit. I have since bought a rolling table that goes under the larger one so I can box myself in and still have a place for my instruction booklet. The monitor set up above to have them digitally seems nice and maybe one day I will try it!

[Traktor]

I simply just put each bag in its own box. Sorting pieces by colors seems just stupid in my opinion, since it is then almost impossible to dived the different parts from each other. When you do it like I do there are no peaces that are to similar in the same box and you will quickly get used to where to find the different pieces. And of course you do not waste time on sorting the pieces. I have been building like this since my very first Technic set.

[bord4kop]

My workspace:

I use the dinner table. Shitty part is set up and clean up again in 3 quite large boxes. This takes approx 20 mins. of valuable Lego time

Picture was taken 1,5 yrs ago, amount of Lego has grown since. I still use those trays however (only most smaller ones have been replaced by bigger ones and bigger ones have multiplied )

I think this is the best way to build, parts organized somehow.

Edited January 17, 2013 by bord4kop

[CisFran]

I think I see IKEA containers on your table ..just missing are the green covers....

[bord4kop]

Yap, that 's true!

IKEA Pruta ftw

[Strikeman]

I have transformed my attic into the LEGO room as it was getting a bit out of hand downstairs. The real "attic" (for the Christmas tree and stuff) is now 1/3th of what it was; the other 2/3th is all mine. It's not that big though, but it's still better than nothing

I have just (mid December) reorganized it all to have a more comfortable building experience; before this, I was sitting on the ground with all the stuff sitting around me. Now I have an actual building table (small one, 120x60cm) and I have built a U-shape to have almost all my LEGO readily accessible.

It looks like this:

For storage, I use a few of the drawer thingies (left top on previous picture, close-up in this picture):

But most of my LEGO is in "Really Useful Boxes". I use the trays that are in the Boxes; the boxes themselves are mostly used to put the trays ON instead of in. Since I'm the only user of the attic, I don't have to worry about dust too much.

For the small elements I found that I was running out of space in the drawer thingies; since I was already using the larger "Really Useful Boxes", I bought a bunch of the smaller ones and made some (amateur) wooden frames so I can use them as drawers. I have built it with less than a millimeter of play so I can pull them out all the way and they won't fall out:

I have found, until know, that this setup works pretty well for me!

Some more pictures of my attic can be found in this Brickshelf gallery

[Phoxtane]

I have too many of the small fiddly bits to try the setups with small drawers. Whenever I do get around to sorting my Technic properly, I'll have it sorted into general categories and find parts from one of seven or so drawers.

[DarkShadow73]

Hello,

I was a massive fan of Lego and in particular Technic as a child. Now I'm coming back to it as a 31 yr old AFOL.

As I child, when building a large set, I used to put all the pieces on a large tray (un-sorted). As an adult, I realized that this was rather inefficient so, I now sort into about 5 groups of parts, each in there own tray or tub. It's a bit of a pain as some of the tubs can be quite deep with pieces making it hard to find what I'm looking for. It's also annoying when I have to put it all away as i have many tubs and trays to pack up.

How are the rest of you doing this? Is there a preferred organization process that I could adopt? Maybe you have some sort of large tray with dividers in, for example?

Any advice would be great,

Paul.

LIke you I had this same problem and I had to find a solution, especially for the larger sets. I happened upon some fabric sorter trays at Bed Bath & Beyond. For medium to small sets this works great. I organize the pieces in a logical manner, pins in one, axles in another, thin liftarms, full liftarms and beams in one, gears/axle joiners, etc in one, and another for 'odd' pieces like fairings, lights, etc. They came in 2 different sizes, I used the larger one for the above sorting, but with sets that are large, I bought 2 smaller ones, and it works out well. They are about 2" inch high, so not too much digging around. This was a few yrs ago, but I'm betting they still sell them. Nice thing is you can keep the pieces in them when done with a building session. My main problem is, especially with the larger sets, is the actual room to build them. I have a bunch of 30"x30" card tables, and when building a small/medium set, one works fine, but on the larger builds, I tend to move 2 of them together.

Edit: One other note, I tend to put the wheels/tires, sticker sheets and PF elements if applicable in a ziploc bag since they take up too much space in the sorter trays.

Edited January 18, 2013 by TechnicFreak

[Splat]

While building official sets, I use up to four kitchen drawer sorter trays that I got from Ikea. They are extremely durable, and they only cost a few dollars each:

I empty the bags from the sets into the trays, and as the sections of the tray aren't completely closed in, they let me move pieces around within them without having to juggle them from one container to another.

When not in use, they nest on top of each other so they don't take up very much room.

For the rest of my Lego, I store the pieces in Fischer boxes, which come in a variety of sizes as well as a various number of compartments per box, and various compartment sizes. The compartments have fixed dividers (I don't like the removable dividers), and as others have mentioned, they are almost transparent so you can easily see what is in each box.

I then put about a dozen of these Fischer boxes into larger 60L boxes that look something like the one below.

This lets me store my Lego away reasonably compactly, and also move large quantities of Lego around quickly (the wheels on the bottom help with this).

Lastly, I use the lid from the 60L storage box as a type of 'tray' when making MOCs. I turn them up-side-down, so they have a lip around the edges to stop pieces rolling away, and the lid also has a number of small ridges in it that help me roughly sort the pieces as required.

Edited April 9, 2013 by Splat

[Boxerlego]

Here is a tip don't use your bed as a place to build. Otherwise you will be to tired to clean off your bed for sleep.

[DLuders]

Boxerlego should know -- here is his room:

Edited January 19, 2013 by DLuders

[efferman]

today i have made some tuning at my table to prevent the parts falling off the table

i have used plastic L profiles and strong double sided adhesive tape at the side and the backside from the table.