Vee

Opening this thread brought me luck. The seller sent me the invoice one hour ago. Yay! Thank you all for the positive words.

And this is how my Bricklink'ed Ole Kirk's House is going to look after I assemble it (waiting for the parts): That 2x2 tile with the Lego News will actually be a 2x2 tile with the Lego logo.

Here, nobody gives me any Lego so I buy them myself. I have 3 of them underneath the Christmas tree.

The 5770 set extended with one more white and red section. I know, I know, too silly for a serious Lego MOC'er, but sometimes silly things make me happy and I am not a serious Lego MOC'er.

I bought parts from 8 vendors from BL on December 21st. By Dec 23rd, 7 of them had invoiced their orders and 6 of them had already shipped the parts. Today it is the 24th and still one of them has not even invoiced the order yet. Besides the automatic messages sent by BL, no communication from this seller. Is this usual? Is it because of Christmas time? There is no message in his store regarding a "time out" for Christmas or the Holidays. His reviews are good but I did find one that says "4 days to invoice, 3 more days to ship, but parts were ok", something like that. I am worried because the parts I bought from this seller had a good price and are fundamental and if s/he fails, I am sure I will not find them all at that price in one only seller.

I am using this application, Brickstore, and it provides an easy way to get the total weight of only the plastic, no paper, which I think is a lot better. All I have to do is to look at the status bar, that sums up the total weight of the set minus the figurines, and then I adjust it by adding 3.5g for each figurine since they have no weights (but are shown as part of the set). There are a few things that may be wrong, like a few parts of the figurines are maybe being counted twice, but then it is too much preciosity and I still don't know exactly some things. I am having fun doing this for all my sets. Architecture sets seem to be the ones with the lowest ratio of grams per dollar.

I had read this news too which made me amazed! And now every time I spend a dollar in Lego plastic, I know that an unknown % of it is going to his pockets. Anyway, I think it is nice that Lego is still a business in the hands of one family. This guys surely deserves what he's got. And now I have two heroes: Bill Gates and KKK!

My plan for 2014 is to spend no more than 30 dollars a month in Lego plastic. IOW, I defined a budget of $360 to spend in 2014, period. My wish list ATM has a retail value of $520.

I have been buying from ebay since 2000. I have had two problems so far. In one, long time ago, I got my money back, no problem. In the other it just happened. I bought a new sealed Lego set for a "too good to be true" price (retail price but set is sold out already) from a seller with ZERO feedback. I didn't care about the risk because the worst it could happen was that I was not going to get my item and I psychologically prepared myself for that. And, indeed, the seller is not sending the item, I have already started the process with ebay to get my money back, only around 50 bucks. With the guarantee ebay gives to buyers to get our money back if you get the wrong item or no item, I don't see a problem to take risks, even if high, when the money involved is not much. I am patient and waiting for the refund is not a problem as long as I do get the refund in full About Bricklink, since I am new to lego fever, I started using it at the end of November only. I have already made a bunch of purchases and only one problem: one vendor forgot to add 3 pieces. I contacted him and he right away told me he was going to send them to me (from Europe) at no cost to me. But, since the 3 pieces were not expensive and I soon had more stuff to buy from BL, I added them to another order (from another seller) and told him not to bother. He sent me a 10% discount coupon for my next purchase at this store but I am not sure I will ever use it because I chose my sellers now based on Brickficiency and chances of choosing that store are slim - there are too many. But it showed that he is a good seller and cares about his reputation. I am thinking now to record, on camera, when I open a bag received from BL seller. I feel weird if a piece is missing and I complain because it is my word against the word of the seller and I am always worried that s/he will think I am not telling the truth. I assume they have a way to check what they really sent, like taking pictures of the lot, to record. I would do that.

Since I like numbers and this idea of weight, I came up with this now: $ grams g/$ Set 200 2873 14.4 10224 Town Hall 150 2059 13.7 10232 Palace Cinema 150 2133 14.2 10197 Fire Brigade 150 2194 14.6 10211 Grand Emporium 180 2244 12.5 10228 Haunted House 150 2151 14.3 10218 Pet Shop 150 1353 9.0 21050 Architecture Studio 140 1995 14.2 10182 Café Corner 90 1405 15.6 10190 Market Street 150 2285 15.2 10185 Green Grocery 300 4932 16.4 10198 Taj Mahal 200 5095 25.5 3450 Statue of Liberty 200 3769 18.8 10181 Eiffel Tower 320 4193 13.1 10234 Sydney O. H. 240 3828 16.0 10214 Tower Bridge 35 224 6.4 21015 Tower of Pisa GREAT! I copied and pasted my Excel sheet here, preview showed me a beautiful formatted table, but when I saved, it was this unreadable way. Well, there is a screenshot here. To be fair, we shoud account for inflation... The question is, inflation where? USA, Denmark, ...?

I have found a solution to manage this very recent and dangerous Lego addiction of mine before it gets out of control. Using my most beloved application ever, Excel, I cataloged all the sets we bought since we arrive here in the US (never bought any while living in Brazil) and I included my recent shopping spree with expensive sets (to raise the average to a reasonable value ), I summed up all the _real_ prices we paid for all of them, Bricklink purchases were included, and then I came up with a total: how much I have spent on Lego toys so far (taxes, S&H included!). I divided this total by the number of months we have lived here in the US and I got to a dollar/month average. I rounded down a bit this average and then I established that this value should be kept for the future! Still it was 50% higher than what my wife told me she thought would be an acceptable value . The result is that - if I stick to my own rule - it will take almost two years for me to be able to buy the 3 remaining modular buildings that I want, considering that I do not buy anything else in between. DANG!

Set 75017 is one example. Parts 73983, 90266 and sw471/472/473/474 come up as errors. These last four (sw???) are complete minifigures. IDK if the conversion is supposed to work on minifigures. 73983 = 2429c01 @ Rebrickable: it is an assembly so maybe its two parts need to be listed separately, 90266 = 99206 @ Rebrickable. There are a few more that I came across but I can't remember ATM. I'll let you know if I find more.

I will try for the next months to buy it from ebay instead of BL'ing it. I just BL'ed Ole Kirk's House and now I need to give some time to replenish my wallet. I was able to buy all necessary new parts for Ole's House with $103, but since I used 6 vendors, there was around $20 in added cost for S&H. Still good enough considering this house, in the box, is sold for around $300 to $400. I ended up spending a little bit more to add some landscape to the house and something to "replace" the irreplaceable stickers. Now all I need is to stop spending with Legos for at least 5 months!

From Wikipedia: "Collecting for most people is a choice, but for some it can be a compulsion, sharing characteristics with obsessive hoarding. When collecting is passed between generations, it might sometimes be that children have inherited symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder." Extremes are 99% of the time dangerous.

Whoa! You should submit this Cuusoo. I would support it right away.

Yes, Brickficiency needs to find at least one solution, be it a 2-store solution or better, for the report to be useful. Anyway, even if it didn't find any solution, it will show you how many stores carry each piece, as you have found. This is useful. If it didn't find any solution means that you have rare pieces, pieces that are carried by few stores, hence the number of combinations possible decreases dramatically and hence you have a much lesser probability to get a solution. Remove from your wanted list (move it to another wanted list that you can deal with manually) the rare items, the items that are carried by a few stores (20 or less, for instance) and then run the application again, for 2 or 3-store solutions. It may then be able to find solutions and then it will help you narrow down to the stores you can use. You will also find that although Brickficiency finds solutions (when it does), some parts that it tells you are available in the vendors it selected actually are not. This has happened to me constantly, which then will make you manually increase your n-store solution to a (n+1)-store solution or worse.

The relation was that why worry too much about very fine scratches if the brand new directly-from-the-factory pieces already arrive in much worse conditions? I am new to "observing Lego" because until very recently we bought Legos for our daughters and never cared about how they treated them. But now that I have bought a few expensive sets and I will keep them in my office as ornaments, being a perfectionist as I am (when possible), I already noticed that even new pieces are sometimes already scratched. But I know what a hard brush can do to a shiny smooth plastic surface.

Just to correct some information, I found that the application I mentioned (BrickStore) does not add the weight of the minifigures to the total, it does not carry them (its data comes frmo Bricklink databases it says), so the weight of 5 minifigures from 10228 and 4 minifigures for 75017 are not accounted for, which should make them more similar to 10234 that has no minifigure.

For these three sets: 75017 - weight 342g, pieces 391, retail $40 => 8.55 g/$ 10234 - weight 4193g, pieces 2989, retail $320 => 13.1 g/$ 10228 - weight 2230g, pieces 2064, retail $180 => 12.4 g/$ Number of items in the application does not match number of pieces so something is still off. Anyway we measure, 75017 _is_ above average: less plastic for each dollar spent. I don't think so. Dreadful and ugly ounces vs. beautiful and useful grams is just a matter of conversion.

Dang, the weight was RIGHT THERE! But I have a problem. I was researching this weight, API thing and found this application. I installed it for tests (in a VM) and right away found that it is a paid application, if you want to use all of its features. But it runs in a "private mode", crippled, but anyway when I select a set inside the application, there is a status bar that shows apparently the "min weight" of a set and it does not match. For the Haunted House, it shows 2230g. For 75017 it shows 342g, Sidney Opera House = 4193g, so on. No matches! Also, Brickset has no weight for the Haunted House or Sidney O.H. as easily accessible as 75017, so I am confused. The numbers don't match, what is the method being used here?

Oh, ok, thanks for the explanation. When I read about the API Key I assumed it was not free. A bit of programming would not be a problem for me but I am not sure I am interested in doing this, just curious about the idea. Shipping weights from amazon, etc, includes packaging (box), AFAIK.

Didn't know about an API at Brickset but a quick search tells me it is not free to use it. By the way, Brickset seems to retrieve its data "directly from Lego databases". So instead of getting info from an intermediate, how to get it from the main source (Lego)?

I guess the steps to calculate the weight of a set is to go to Rebrickable, build the set, upload the full material list to Bricklink in a temporary wanted list (usually there will be errors during the conversion Rebrickable->Bricklink that are a PITA to correct), then find enough stores that have all pieces, put them in the cart (which also can be a big PITA because even with auto-filling, you can't trust it because it will add used AND new pieces if available in the same vendor) and see how much the weights are, sum them up. Don't worry about prices because it is just a simulation so I would use the stores with the most unique lots. If there is an easier way, I'd like to know.

Speaking of cost of a set, Café Corner just became a bargain! Let's say you pay $1400 for a new Café Corner set (minimum ebay price that I found). That's 68 cents a piece (dunno about price per gram). Then you want to buy set 4000002. The one offering in ebay is for $405 and it has 174 pieces. That's $2.33 dollar a piece! Who in this world would be fool enough to pay such a price for such a set with only common pieces except for the 2 printed tiles?

And I believe in Santa Claus! :classic: