Zeya

No no, the bags weren't previously holding food. I was just explaining what a ziploc bag is typically used for. They may or may not have been sanitized. In the case of the Lego, they probably were not. I fully intend to wash them before putting them to use or storing them away with the rest of my collection. That's a good point about the oil and such. I'm all but certain it's the type of plastic that causes these smells. That's why I call it a fume and not just an unpleasant stale odor or something. I can't recall what the really bad ones were called, they weren't any sort of well known brand, just some adventuring city people action figures from the 1970s. (I left those ones for the estate sale, lol.) Some other ones like Ghostbusters gave off something similar, but to a much more reasonable degree. I think what happens in general is that the plastic and paint on these things breaks down over time, because some of these things have gone really soft. Like if you run your fingernail over them, it will leave a mark. Really makes me glad that Lego stands up so well to the test of time. Anyway, it sounds like Lego doesn't have this problem. My whole point was just to check before I started cracking open bags inside the house. I think what I'll do is quickly sort through stuff to remove cloth and stickered stuff, and then do some kind of bulk cleaning. Maybe I'll go with the laundry bag + gentle cycle cold water washing machine method. Thanks guys.

Sorry, I must have been unclear. I'm asking if these sealed bags of Lego will let off fumes when I open them. I had some other completely different types of toys (that are not Lego) give off fumes upon being opened, and I want to make sure the same won't happen when I open the Lego. And yes, those fumey non-Lego toys were definitely the toys themselves giving off the fumes, and not just stale air. It was some hardcore fumes, not just a slightly unpleasant odor.

I managed to get my childhood Lego collection back. I've found that it's all been bagged inside of a bunch of separate ziploc bags. It all must have been bagged up at least 10 years ago, probably more like 15 years ago. So these things have been hanging around in these ziploc bags for a while. (If they don't have that brand in Europe etc, they're plastic resealable bags often used for left-over food you put in the refrigerator. These bags keep things inside them air-tight.) My question is: when I go to open these bags of old Lego, will the bags be releasing fumes? In other words, does your typical ABS material that Lego is made of give off fumes over time, especially in an enclosed space? I ask because I found this Lego along with other childhood toys, and some of the toys really let off some nauseous gasses when I opened their containers (and that was just big plastic bins). One bin in particular I had to take outside and let sit for some time, and even then it was still pretty bad on the nose and stomach. I'm hoping Lego is made of higher quality stuff that isn't subject to this fume issue. Thanks!

Looking at the pictures, it seems like they are using the same color/material for the metallic elements across multiple figs: Pirate sword Pirate hook Conquistador helmet Diver helmet Football trophy And if those are all the same color/material, is it going to be the copper color like the Gladiator had? Or will it be pearl gold? Because I highly doubt it will be chrome gold, and from these renders, those parts don't look chrome anything to me. My guess is that it's the same as the copper used on the gladiator helmet. Maybe the pirate isn't so gold-laden after all?

The thing about listing each one individually is that there are dozens of these things. That's a lot of packing and shipping work. Although I do wonder if I can pick up the small flat rate USPS boxes or flat rate bubble mailers or something like that. Hmm. I have never heard of specialist toy auctions before. I'll see what I can find. Another question to add: does anyone know of a "Bricklink for vintage action figures" or any such resource, maybe on a per-series basis (one for He-Man, one for Ghostbusters etc)?

I'm hoping some people in the EB community can help me out here with some advice. My sister and I are selling my mom's house and contents. Sad times. Most things will go through an estate sale, but we're making an exception for certain things. I insisted that we try and sell our old toys ourselves, or half of them anyway. We always kept our toys in good shape and put them away before bed in nice painter buckets, so nothing is horribly damaged, and most of it is in surprisingly good shape. Okay, so what I took home to try and sell are about 3 big rubbermaid bins full of stuff. Luckily they're pretty well separated and not jumbled together. I've got He-Man, Battle Beasts, Ghostbusters, Dino-Riders, "Bone Age", and Micro Machines (Micro Minis?) that I took. These were all mine as a kid. I left my sister's stuff back home (I live very far away), but she had My Little Pony, Barbie, Strawberry Shortcake, Cabbage Patch, and some other lesser stuff. I also left behind my Hotwheels/Matchbox cars (godawful heavy). I need to decide soon if it would be worth it to ship the rest out to me to try and sell. Shipping all that might cost around $800 with the method we've been using (industrial pallet shipping - a friend has a shop and hooked us up). If I end up not making a special shipment for that stuff, it'll get sold at estate sale. Which means, they will ask something reasonable for it, but they won't be trying for top eBay dollar for it, and then the estate sale people take a 30% cut. Just FYI. By the way these toys are all from the 80's and early 90's, not any re-release sort of stuff at all. Anyway, I'd just like general advice on how to sell these. I've sold stuff on eBay before, but not nearly in this amount of bulk. I do want to stretch the dollars for us. However, there's a lot of stress right now and my time and stress is a consideration. You know, I don't want to be burning a lot of time I don't have, just to get another dollar per action figure. Would you guys recommend trying to sell these things in one bulk lot on eBay? Like *boom* here is all the He-Man laid out on a table, all 40 figures or whatever. Or would it be better to find some kind of price guide (do they even exist?) and try to weed out the "cloud city Boba Fetts" from the bunch, if you know what I mean? Any advice is appreciated. Thanks for reading. P.S. The silver lining is that I also found my old Lego collection!!! Almost forgot to mention that. I've got some sweet old stuff in there that hopefully I'll get around to playing with some day soon. I'm keeping the Lego of course. The rest of the stuff, while nostalgic, I'm fine with selling somehow. Go figure.

It is the same way with series 7. I went through a new sealed box, and I would find 2-3 in a row, but then find that same figure on the other side of the box as well.

The vampire could be the angsty, glittery teenage type: They could use the elvis hair that the mechanic had.

Hi guys, I'm a big pirate fan, but I'm not up to date on all the Ninjago news and gossip. Can anyone tell me what the speculation is about the appearance of pirates in the Ninjago theme and what it is based on? I remember a while back there was an episode listing for the TV show that mentioned pirates, but some people were saying that's not necessarily an indication of what sets will be like. Has there been some other solid evidence since that episode list reveal? Thanks in advance. ::

My allegiances lie with Lord Cthulhu.

Thanks for sharing, CM4S! I hope you had permission from Angeli to post this though. I would be inclined to believe that. TLG has ben putting at least one female with printed slope legs in recent series. And we've seen more than a couple figs come from that design sheet people always link to, so there's that trend. That would be a very plausible fig. From that cropped image there, I would only be skeptical about that white sleeve part that goes between the hand and arm. That would be a very small piece, even smaller than a flower bloom piece. Very interesting concept though. The wings seem quite large as drawn there, as well. I could imagine a piece like a sword scabbard coming down the back, but I would think they'd shrink the wings down by half if they actually made that mold.

Because some men just want to watch the world burn? [Minifig 39/365] Some People Just Want To Watch The World Burn by nhussein, on Flickr

According to the internet (which is never wrong), Cuusoo means "wish" or "imagination" in Japanese. And that's the whole point of it, to have your wish come true. And as such, I don't think this dark bucket project is so ridiculous. It's somebody's wish, and in a perfect world free of problems, this would in fact make a lot of SW fans happy. I think it's better to err on the side of too many of these "wishes" than for some nice ones to go unspoken/unshared. Also, this one isn't as bad as other projects on there. There seems to be a half-baked entry for just about every popular movie/TV show under the sun, most of which don't even have a decent MOC structure associated with it, let alone concept art of any sort. But luckily I saw that blog post on Cuusoo that Lego made about beefing up the standards for entries like that so hopefully those types of things will go away.

I'm trying to decide between these two scenarios: Scenario 1: 2 x "Monster 4" 1 x "Banana Balance" Scenario 2: 1 x "Monster 4" 2 x "Banana Balance" I'm considering these as parts packs for MOCcing (could care less about the gameplay). I just need to get above a certain price threshold to trigger certain coupon codes. (This is on yoyo.com by the way. Have a groupon that I need to cash in before month's end and they're having another sale too until the 14th.) I like Banana Balance for the leaves you get so I can make more trees. And I like Monster 4 for the neat heads and a healthy amount of other parts. I particularly like the pumpkin heads. I kind of feel like Monster 4 is a better value overall. But then greenery is always foremost in my mind. Hmm...

Good god. I missed the clearance and Kmarts are scarce here on the west coast - none near me. But at 30 bucks for a QAR, I would seriously buy all I could. I mean, the Angelica fig alone sells for around $15, and that's half of your cost right there. A couple of the other figs sell for like $7 each, so there's your other $15 you paid. So jealous! (Not to mention people like me paid $100 for that set not too long ago!) http://www.bricklink.com/catalogItemInv.asp?S=4195-1&viewItemType=M

I would recommend putting the contents in a spoiler tag for that post, just to be safe. (No hard feelings though.)

Sometimes in my eBay searches, I will come across ceramic items that are described with the word Lego. (Sometimes they are bowls or plates etc, and sometimes I've seen it pop up for porcelain statuettes.) Until today, I always assumed it was some sort of mistake or misspelling. Today, I found this item that has a clear photo of a logo on the bottom that says "Lego". http://www.ebay.com/itm/Lego-Made-in-Japan-Pirate-Mug-/230794072539?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item35bc6611db#ht_1217wt_108 (Can't link the exact photo. See the very last photo for the logo and date.) My best guess is there happened to be another company called Lego. This says Japan and 1960 on it. I looked up Lego logos on brickipedia and didn't spot this particular logo style either. Anyone know about this? I have a modern-day Lego mug, but that's clearly very different from this.

Add minifig hats/hair to the list of things I need to put in these divider cases. Same goes for all of my tiles! The tiles are getting way too overflowing and unorganized. The organizing never ends. Does anyone have a storage solution that they like for minifig torsos (torso assemblies)? I'm thinking of sorting them by a kind of ad-hoc heuristic, kind of by theme, time period, and gender. But then, what to put them in? Torsos are so awkward to store, I find.

I had been meaning to mention this for a while. Here in the USA there is a chain of craft stores called Michael's. There's a section for beads and whatnot, and the area with storage containers is golden for small Lego parts. I got this one, after keeping an eye out for a while: http://www.michaels.com/Medium-Bead-Box/bd1058,default,pd.html?start=40&cgid=products-beads-beadlandingtoolsandstorage This one is great because it has these little plastic partitions that you can move, so you can make a bin of a better size to hold longer technic pins, for example. Or have a smaller bin for tiny technic pins or something. This is an advantage over other containers that just have fixed size bins in them. There are two latch clips that hold the lid on pretty securely (lid hinges, as opposed to being removable, for better or worse). The only drawback of these are: - A decent number of partitions, but could have used a handful more. (Could have stolen some from another unit on the shelf without any suspicions, but that would be wrong.) A fix would be to cut your own partitions out of a milk jug or similar thing. - I don't think you can find this exact one to order online. I think you have to go in-person to Michael's. So if you're in the USA, I recommend these.

Wow. I was totally wrong. My apologies. I'll be less hasty to make comments like that in the future. Now I need to decide if I want these or not and how to get them on this side of the Atlantic. I just got a box of CMF7 from Amazon.fr, so maybe they will carry these when they come out.

The Target on Stevens Creek in Cupertino had a bunch of packets in a box, as of 24-48 hours ago. I picked out a couple brides and viking ladies. It was a little picked through, but other packets looked pretty fresh. You have to start from the back/bottom of the heap.

There was also a case this past year where the PotC Fountain of Youth set showed shiny gold coins and bars on the box, but then everyone was opening them up to find pearl gold for those pieces. Us crazy AFOLs were able to write in to Lego and got sent chrome versions. And then later in the production run, TLG started putting in the chromed version instead of pearl gold. The most fun is when people get misprints on their figs. I guess time will tell if the swamp man head is a one-off misprint, will be changed later in the run, or just the way it's intended to be.

I think there's something more significant here than the chess set itself. The release of that set seems to be proof that Lego has not given up the ability to release castle sets during the LotR run. I thought that Lego might have agreed to a clause in their contract with the LotR intellectual property people that they would not release competing products such as this. So I'm hopeful that we may see future Kingdoms products as well. There might be more beyond the chess set and the exclusive joust set.

Well, I would comb through photos of all the currently available Ninjago sets, particularly the Destiny's Bounty. You'll probably want to grab those sails for any ship you build. There will also be other Ninjago elements for buildings for your land-based MOCs. If you're willing, you could also track down the older asian-based Lego themes. I don't know much about them since it was during my dark age, but it's a lot like Ninjago, except minus all the... zaniness. I would recommend doing some internet searches to find some inspirational artwork, maybe of period ships and forts, to get an idea of what to make.