Zeya

No, don't feel embarrassed. I only knew because I remember reading that other thread a while back. I thought you might get a kick out of either reading that thread or posting there. Everyone in this area of the forum wants pirates to come back. *sigh* I sort of "got too old" for Lego around the time the islanders and armada came along. I supposed I would prefer more of a doubling-up on pirates. Like competing crews of pirates. You know, characters with more flavor. If the Chima/Ninjago thing works so well for TLG, how about more of a cohesive story to the pirates, and more named characters? I'm not going to lie, if they made a pirates TV show, I'd probably like it. I draw the line at card games and zip cords though! (Okay I'd buy those too, but only out of sad, sad devotion.)

So are the two different sizes of boxes for series 10? One with 30, and another old-style with 60?

I'm in the US, and I have not had that put on my cups. Last one I packed was a year ago. I know there are warnings inside instructions whenever there are shooting cannons and flick-fire missiles, a little graphic indicating not shoot objects into a person's eye. I don't really read the fine print on the set boxes; there's definitely an age range printed on every box though, and I think that's a law requiring that (in addition to part count).

There's a thread for that. :) http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=67013

I'm not sure if this is relevant, but I see "Fenzance" and that makes me think of The Pirates of Penzance, a Gilbert and Sullivan stage operetta. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates_of_Penzance Penzance is an actual city in the UK (on the coast). Could it be that the Imperial Trading Post set is based on that real world location? Could you be hearing an F where there is really a P? Fenzance / Penzance?

I'm in the process of parting back together my childhood sets. I even plan on doing reviews of them at some point. One of them apparently doesn't have a review here yet, so that should be fun. So you should be in for some fun times ahead. My advice to you is to make sure to wash all the pieces (pick out cloth/string, printed, and lacquered bricks first) and then sorting and Bricklink inventories will be your friend.

About how long will 9499 Gungan Sub be available on store shelves? I don't typically buy SW sets, but I want that Amidala fig, and she goes for over $22 on the aftermarket, which is like 1/3 of the set's value. Trying to figure out if there's another way, maybe a sale or something... Thanks.

There's a fence named McMoney! I love it!

What you should do is be very polite. Cancel the order, and send a follow up message politely explaining the high price of shipping is due to the long overseas distance gap. There's a real possibility here that the customer simply doesn't realize that you are on a different continent. Also know that anything other than politeness could very easily escalate and end up with you having a negative feedback on your record (not to mention drama and annoyance). Just cancel the order with a friendly smile and go about your other business.

Haha, yeah you've got to love eBay lots. I love scrolling through minifig lots and generally throwing out lowball bids. Every blue moon I'll win something decent, but then almost "not worth the time spent" for most sane people. :) In this case I legitimately needed a few key parts there and that justified my higher bid of almost $2 per fig.

Here's a lot I won on eBay for $16 USD (with shipping). It caught my eye because of the small black feather, which tends to go for about $10 USD on BL just by itself: http://www.bricklink.com/catalogPG.asp?P=4502a&colorID=11 I also need some of the old gray swords and hats to complete some of my old sets I'm parting back together. This will help cut back on some BL orders I will have to make soon. It's been really fun parting together my old sets, btw.

Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean Online http://piratesonline.go.com/welcome I didn't play it, but my friend did. I remember him saying it wasn't the best MMO ever, but he still had some fun with it. Me? I'm done with MMOs for good. Gettin' too old for that _.

I think the gold figure looks really good. The top hot is great. I wonder what type of material it will be. He doesn't look chromed, and I'm wondering if it will be the "pearl gold" color/material. Anyone else notice how they made his hands white, and not gold? Maybe the material is too brittle for a thin part such as minifig hands.

If you want to start talking video games (why not?) there was a couple of MMORPG (multiplayer PC games) with a Pirate bent. There was a PotC one, and another one called Pirates of the Burning Sea. I played the latter one for a little while. They also like to re-do Sid Meier's Pirates! every once in a while. Same with the Monkey Island games. I also read just today that the next Assassin's Creed game might be heavily pirate-oriented, but that's just a rumor at this point. Might be some truth there though because the one that just came out (number 3) had a healthy portion of the game where you're doing naval battles. And they did those naval battles very well, probably the best part of the game. There's probably dozens of pirate related video games out there from years past.

Kristel & Artanis: Thank you. I'll just have to make sure to read the splash pages carefully before placing my orders.

Before I start placing BL orders to complete some older sets I have... I'm wondering what the etiquette is on ordering a long list of parts with low counts for each. Imagine I place an order for 200 different parts, but most of them I'm only asking maybe 1-10 of that particular part. Do BL stores usually specify if this is okay? I've read sellers over there complaining about people who do this, and I don't want to anger anyone or cause trouble. I'm thinking if the part is low-cost enough (1-5 cents), maybe I can just round up and order 10 of those types of parts to make it worth their while. Suggestions?

In that case, I personally wouldn't risk using it. The fraying isn't too bad for me, and I'm not worried about it. Thanks for the suggestion though.

One thing I always have my envious eye on are parts drafts. That's where a group of people pool their money together to buy several copies of some set that happens to be on discount. (The trick is finding a nicely discounted set.) Then you do the draft where you go around in a circle and each person gets to pluck out X number of elements. There are different methods, but that's the general idea. I've always wanted to be part of a parts draft; maybe one day. I wouldn't stress too much about the $100 founding fee. If you put up flyers or get the word around, I'll bet you can scrape up the member base to cover that fee. From there, you all can decide about pooling your money together to buy bricks, trips to conventions, and stuff like that. You'll have a good bullet point for your resume after college (put towards the end of your resume though).

This reminds me of these two more recent mosaic sets: http://www.brickset.com/detail/?Set=6162-1 http://www.brickset.com/detail/?Set=6163-1 I assume "MOSAIK" means mosaic, right? :)

That's awesome to see. I haven't seen a mold before either. Thanks for sharing. By the way, I think that's a 2x3 plate, not 2x3 brick. It looks shallow to me.

We saw "Wreck-It Ralph" and it was great. Family friendly too, for those of you with kids. If you've played video games at any point in the past 40 years, you'll especially love this movie. John Lasseter is the executive producer, and since moving to Disney proper, he's really continued to bring quality to the movies he works on (Princess and the Frog was another Disney/Lasseter film that was good).

I'm doing the same too. In fact, I'm even putting all the elements together in their sets, and if (when) I'm short pieces, I'll be placing BL orders to complete the sets. I imagine I'll be keeping them together as sets. And that's different from the rest of my adult collection which is all parted out by element shape/type. I have a feeling I'll never sell any of these sets. I have given some thought to sending some of them to my cousin that likely belonged to him, such as the classic space sets. We shall see...

Thank you. I haven't done anything about the fraying, at least not yet. The only thing I would imagine doing is to carefully snip some of the frays shorter so they're less visible. I've never heard of Fray Block.

This past weekend, I managed to finish off cleaning the rest of my childhood Lego. Every last piece has been cleaned, with the exception of the rope/string (which I'm not even sure why I'm keeping all of that - someone talk some sense into me!) So it's all laying out drying now. I've found that the batches usually need a good 3 days or so of air drying before all the water is evaporated. I snapped some more photos to share. Here are some shots of what came out of the bags before washing: DSC_0008 by ZeyaV, on Flickr DSC_0007 by ZeyaV, on Flickr DSC_0006 by ZeyaV, on Flickr DSC_0005 by ZeyaV, on Flickr DSC_0004 by ZeyaV, on Flickr DSC_0003 by ZeyaV, on Flickr DSC_0002 by ZeyaV, on Flickr Here is a special batch of elements that have metal in them. I wanted to dry them off on the ironing board with a hair dryer to minimize their exposure to moisture, so they wouldn't rust any more. DSC_0001 by ZeyaV, on Flickr Here is the last batch of printed elements soaking in water before final rinsing: DSC_0015 by ZeyaV, on Flickr For anyone interested, here is how I've been using my dishwasher to clean the bricks. The thin mesh bags work really well. I've run this final batch through about 5 times, which wouldn't normally be necessary, if not for the very strong moth ball odor on these bricks. I wish I had run my first batch through more than twice. DSC_0013 by ZeyaV, on Flickr And here are my cloth elements after washing. If you want to read more about how I washed the cloth stuff, head over to here. DSC_0015 by ZeyaV, on Flickr So now I can get to the fun part of piecing sets together. I've already gone through a fair bit of my Pirate stuff. I plan on writing reviews for most of not all these sets. I anticipate that will take quite some time. I have a couple orders of photography equipment coming this week to help with the reviews (and also general photography is an expanding hobby of mine). I've got a nice tripod and head coming, and also a "light shed" or "light tent" with lamps, which will be used to photograph the Lego for the reviews.

I washed my childhood sails and other cloth elements yesterday, and I wanted to post my experiences here, particularly for anyone stopping by in the future looking for information. These sails and other cloth elements are from my childhood Lego collection. We're talking 20+ year old Lego. You can read more here about my collection unboxing and cleaning. But I wanted to go over here about just the sails and cloth elements. I took some photos as I went along. Here's a "before" shot of the cloth elements. As you can see, it's a decent mix with some large, some small, and 2 small flags and a tiny cape from the dragon knights (circa 1993). The condition here isn't horrible. The Caribbean Clipper (blue and white) sails have some yellowing around the edges, and one is worse than the other 2. Of the two red/white striped sails, one of them has yellowing in the white area while the other one doesn't. And one of the tan sails at the top has a stain going all down it, visible from both sides. I'm not sure if that is mildew or just some old coke/coffee stain of some sort. And all together, the sails are wrinkled and folded. Some of these were packed away with string, masts, and poles attached, which deformed as well. I might be making it sound worse than it is here. They actually weren't all that bad, all things considered. DSC_0002 by ZeyaV, on Flickr So on to the cleaning! I've read through this thread in the past and want to thank all of you for the advice in here. I decided to be somewhat cautious, but not overly so. My first step was to fill a bucket with hot water and regular laundry soap (Tide brand "brighter whites" is what I used, but still safe for colors - no bleach!). DSC_0005 by ZeyaV, on Flickr Then I just used my hands. I tried a toothbrush, but that wasn't going very well because the cloth is very thin and saggy and hard to work on with a toothbrush. So I just used my hand and worked over the surface with my fingers. I would hold the element against one palm and lightly scrub with the other hand. When I was done with one, I would put it in another bowl filled with clean water: DSC_0006 by ZeyaV, on Flickr When all were done scrubbing, I took it all over to the sink to rinse: DSC_0007 by ZeyaV, on Flickr I've been washing a lot of Lego recently, and my advice when hand washing is to nest a colander inside a slightly larger bucket. This makes it easy to dump away water and repeatedly rinse. So after rinsing, I left the elements in a clean bowl of water. My initial idea was to leave them all out to dry on an ironing board. I laid them all out flat on top of a clean cloth (the ironing board had some cruft on it and I didn't want my precious Lego to get even more dirty): DSC_0009 by ZeyaV, on Flickr But I quickly realized that as they dried they would wrinkle up. So I decided to go ahead and iron. I read someone else on here recommend putting a protective towel across the elements during ironing. But I threw caution to the wind and just ironed away. I made sure to use the lowest iron setting. I also made a point of putting the elements face down, with their printed sides down. For the red/white striped sails, both sides seemed to be printed, but everything else had a backside. DSC_0012 by ZeyaV, on Flickr After ironing everything dry, I laid it out on a table: DSC_0015 by ZeyaV, on Flickr But I realized that despite ironing, the cloth had a tendency to curl up as it was before cleaning, to a slight extent, as you can see here: DSC_0014 by ZeyaV, on Flickr Here's a close-up to consider: DSC_0016 by ZeyaV, on Flickr As you can see, that one sail still has that stain on it. My cleaning faded away the stain just a little bit, but maybe only by 15% or so from what it was. Likewise, there wasn't really a rousing success with the yellowing on the other sails. I'm not so worried about all that, though. After all, real-life sails do tend to get dirty, so it's not all that bad. But another thing to note here is that the elements tended to fray a bit. The photo makes it look worse than it seems to the naked eye. That's an unfortunate consequence of this cleaning. I'm not sure if the scrubbing, ironing, drying, or all of the above caused this. The final step for me was to go over to the bookshelf and find a sufficiently large hardcover book with a spooky nautical theme to it... DSC_0017 by ZeyaV, on Flickr ...and place the sails inside to help keep them flat! DSC_0018 by ZeyaV, on Flickr Just don't forget which book you put them in! Okay, some final thoughts on this whole process. It wasn't as dramatic as I first thought. The cloth Lego uses is pretty durable after all. I was also afraid about some talk on here about the cloth losing its starch-like coating. I think that happened to me here, but just a little bit. I haven't had a chance to play around with the sails yet, but I don't anticipate much of a problem with sagging, at least for me. But my final thought here is that I would only recommend sail cleaning if there's a real need for it. If your sails are significantly folded, dirty, or smelly, then by all means go ahead and clean. But if it isn't so bad, I wouldn't clean them. I say that because you'll run the risk of getting a little bit of that fraying around the edges like I did, and maybe also a little bit of the sagging/softness issue. Also as you can see here, I wasn't really able to get rid of stains or the yellowing all that well. What cleaning really did do well was to get rid of the wrinkles and creases. Just the act of getting the sail wet and laying it out I think would have done wonders; but the ironing really sealed the deal. Okay, thanks for reading. Hopefully this post is helpful to someone in the future.