62Bricks

I have already noticed that blue space minifigs are now selling for upward of $20 each on eBay, and shady or clueless sellers are misrepresenting the auctions to capitalize on the movie. Here's one example where someone has a later-issue blue space figure (with the modern helmet) and is selling it as an "original" like the character in the film. It's kind of ironic, because the difference in helmets is that the newer one has a chin strap that is thicker so it doesn't break as easily as the old style thin ones. And in the film, the character Benny has a broken chin strap - a little nod to the parents in the theater who remember those figures and how easy it was to break those helmets prying them off the figures. It's too bad, really. Truly original blue space figs from LEGO sellers who know what they are talking about are available on Bricklink for a few bucks. It could be an opportunity to bring more adult fans into the fold, but not if their first experience is to be disappointed by paying 10 times the going rate for a minifig that isn't even the one they really wanted. Edited to add: Well now that I've looked more closely at some stills from the movie, Benny does have a modern helmet in the film, not one of the old style ones. So it was the filmmakers who made a mistake! But that makes it even worse - the blue figs with a modern helmet are even less expensive than the originals on Bricklink, meaning the price is being inflated that much more!

It does work on colors, too, with mixed results. It works OK on yellow and old gray. not so well on blue. But you're right it is not a general cleaning solution. Just used to reverse the yellow/brown staining on old bricks.

If you need a gap that is exactly one-half a plate thickness, which is 4 LDU, it is pretty simple. This is one technique:

Are you looking for a way to make a gap that is more than one coin thick but less than two? If so, here is one possible technique. You say two coins are the same width as one-third a brick height, which is one plate. If you convert to LDraw units (LDU), that is 8 LDU. So one coin is approximately 4 LDU. you need a gap greater than 4 LDU but less than 8. The lattice fence piece has a center section that is 6.67 LDU wide and can be used to make a gap of this width:

This is a wonderful tribute! I agree keeping him in his "original" state is the proper thing to do. The modern minifig came along right about the time I was making the switch from Universal sets to Expert Builder and then Technic, so I never really played with them as a child. As a result I don't have much attachment to minifigs or much desire to collect them. This has worked to my advantage, since it has allowed me to add about 30,000 pieces to my collection for free. I buy mixed lots, then make my money back by selling the older minifigs to people who did not manage to hold on to their favorite figures from their childhood as you have done.

Those were the ones I was most intrigued by. The same seller has several early LEGO items and is located in Copenhagen. Has some more early slotted bricks (and macaroni bricks) in white. Also has some early wooden toys. I don't really collect systematically, but I could see myself getting in over my head quickly. Maybe best to just appreciate the occasional odd or rare part that I find in mixed lots.

I put a bid in on these today, but then the bidding rapidly went beyond my price range. They sold for 56 GBP (about $91.00 USD).

If you place two 1x1 bricks at the corners of a 6x6-stud space, the distance between the centers of the studs will be equal to 7.07 brick widths, or nearly exactly the distance between the centers of the end studs of an 8-stud plate. Like this: I used this geometry for this construction of a 45-degree smooth wall on an 8x8 corner plate:

This item was just listed on eBay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Kraft-Lego-Special-Offer-Lego-Set-75-Pieces-/111266586828?hash=item19e80160cc Judging from the models visible in the instruction sheet, this would seem to be set #1 in the series, listed at 74 pieces. This eBay seller says there are 75 pieces present, so it may be complete. It also has the original packing box from Kraft.

You have mail... I bought a lot of very dirty and yellowed LEGO online for very little money with the intention of seeing whether I could restore any of the sets by cleaning and un-yellowing the parts. This Octan tanker was one of the complete sets I was able to pull from the lot.

Wow - I've been trying to salvage the old stickers on this exact set. I'm going to give this a try.

Pick a Brick is a separate operation from Bricks and Pieces. The Bricks and Pieces program is part of the Customer Service department, and is mainly for replacing missing and broken parts. If you read the support pages at Bricks and Pieces, they say "We’re sorry, but we can’t combine your bags from Pick a Brick and Bricks & Pieces." That suggests that the Bricks and Pieces program gets parts from a different location than Pick-a-Brick, meaning it is possible for a piece to be out of stock at one place but in stock at another.

There may be some reporting error, here, too, as cracks may be more noticeable on some colors. I have taken to inspecting my white headlight bricks for cracks when I'm building something I want to photograph because it seemed to me they crack more frequently than other colors. I have not gone through all my headlight bricks and surveyed which are cracked, though, to verify this. It may just be that I notice the cracks on white pieces and not on other colors.

You're right that these neutral-faced figures will usually be seen as male, but my point is that this is not because of anything intrinsic to the design of the minifig face. They are classified as male because of stereotypes picked up from all over, and in many cases passed on by a child's parents. Where does a child pick up the stereotype that an airport worker, police officer or race car driver is "normally" male? Most of them are not observing people in these professions and applying generalizations to their minifigs. I think perhaps they are picking it up by hearing their parents refer to the race car driver minifig as a "guy" or "he." And I really cannot get over that we're talking about a building toy that children are encouraged to build, take apart, and build again in a different way. The same is true of the minifigs. Part of the reason this issue strikes me as strange is that I don't think of minifigs as distinct units, but as an assembly of pieces that can be changed around at will. Somehow this fact is being lost on many parents. (The Friends figures did not help to reduce this misconception.) I think LEGO is flexible enough that if a parent wanted to use it to reduce gender stereotypes and reinforce positive images of women all the pieces are there (literally). This of course requires some hands-on involvement and attention which I believe many parents don't want to be bothered with. They would prefer to get it "out of the box" from LEGO.

You're right, but take the minifig below: If LEGO were to adopt this proposal and make a "male" and "female" version of this face, what would it look like? Is the current one "male" or "female"? There is no symbolic indication of either gender. To make it male or female LEGO would have to add something like facial hair or lipstick or some other gender symbol. In other words, this proposal would require more gender stereotyping (i.e. all men have facial hair, all women wear bright makeup) in cases like this one. That makes me think the people proposing such a move have not really thought this through and are largely unfamiliar with what the current state of affairs is regarding minifigs.

I was packing two cups at once at the Chicago PAB. In one, I had columns of 1x2s around the outside and a column of palm leaves down the center, with cheese pieces and 1x1 round plates packed in the gaps. I put the cup down (without a lid) on the shelf by the wall and turned my attention to the other cup for a while. I heard a teenage voice behind me say "cool" and as I turned around I saw him pulling my stack of palm leaves up out of my cup! He looked at me and saw the reaction on my face and instantly realized what he had done - everything was so tightly packed it had lifted it all up and cheese pieces had flowed down into the bottom edges. No solution but to start over. He felt really bad, but I didn't get angry. I just told him it was OK and then showed him my strategy for getting as much in the cup as I could. His eyes got big and he grabbed a cup himself. He and his buddies were still there discussing strategy when I finished.

I don't disagree that children are influenced by the roles they see, but whose role is it to make sure a child is exposed to a wide variety of experiences? Toy companies? Television producers? I think it's the responsibility of a parent. Sure, it would be easier if every toy company and television producer shared our own personal values and could instill them in our children for us. That isn't a realistic expectation. When I hear of an outcry like the one to put "male" and "female" faces on each minifig I think to myself, "Here are some parents too lazy to make sure their kids understand about gender equality and want LEGO to do it for them." I also think, "Here are some parents who haven't really spent a lot of time on the floor playing with LEGO minifigs with their children." If they had, they might realize that they may be projecting some of their own stereotypical notions into the issue. For example, here are some City minifigs from 2013: Are these figures male or female? I'm going to guess that most people, on first reaction, would say these are male figures. But is there anything specific about them that makes them "male"? Some minifig faces have lipstick and some have facial hair, but only a fraction. Some torsos have female anatomy, but only a fraction. Some have more feminine patterns, like soft colors and jewelry, but only a fraction. What makes these minifigs "male" is the projection of a stereotype onto them. Any one of them could just as easily be imagined as being female. And if ones imagination isn't vivid enough, of course the heads are removable and interchangeable. Put long flowing hair on your fire chief. Give your garbage collector some lipstick. Speaking of lipstick, it reminds me that in order to make a face "male" or "female" LEGO actually would have to come up with some more stereotypical gender images. Right now, unless a minifig face has facial hair or lipstick (or long eyelashes) it's pretty much gender-neutral. But not all men have facial hair and not all women wear bright red lipstick.

I haven't been through this whole thread to see if this has been posted before, but check out Akiyuki's cool sorting machines: - Part Sorter - Axle Sorter - Liftarm Sorter

LEGO does take "fake" minifigures seriously. It recently sued COBI in an EU court over their line of minifigs and won the case. The court ruled that in the EU, LEGO has a valid trademark for its minifig design and that COBI's minifigs violated that trademark. That ruling only covers the EU, though. I don't know if LEGO is pursuing COBI in the US, as well. COBI is still selling the minifigs, including shipping to the EU, but they may have to stop after the court case is finally closed. Sorry - The simple answer is there are no simple answers when it comes to what is allowed under copyright. There is a lot of wrong information out there that can get people into trouble if they follow it. And the laws are different around the world.

I have been thinking about this, and had an "Aha!" moment last night as I was looking at a similar piece that is also 2-wide with pinholes and has a slot. It was this piece: I was wondering about that slot on the top, which is really too narrow and too deep to use to pry out any pins that might be stuck in the side holes. Then it occurred to me what it's for: It's there because of the way LEGO pieces are molded. Like you say, there is a recess inside the hole where the tabs on a connecting pin can expand. But the recess is larger than the hole itself, meaning the part of the mold that creates it has to have a larger diameter than the hole. This would be impossible, because then the piece could not be separated from the mold. The solution is to have a tab that pokes into the hole from the side and creates the recess.

Again, it really is not so simple. If a kid is making Iron Man pictures and Disney sues him and wins, that means the court has decided that his Iron Man pictures are not his.The court has ruled that he has created a copy of something owned by Disney, which has all rights to it. [Edit for typo]

Yes, that brick will be useful. I was lucky to buy a 12-pound lot of bricks on ebay that had many parts from a Winter Village set, including 40 of these masonry bricks.

I also noticed this problem. If you think about it, it would be a difficult puzzle to design a profile pattern that created the correct offset masonry pattern when the 1x2 bricks were also connected in the correct offset masonry style. It would either require two versions of the brick, or each brick would have to have an odd number of patterned masonry rows. If they imprinted three rows on brick on each 1x2 instead of two, it would work for example. One partial solution is to use the same technique actual bricklayers use and change the pattern from time to time to break up the visual monotony of the offset pattern. You could do this by flipping the masonry brick around to the other side and offsetting them. Still not ideal as far as strength, but does increase it over building long columns of 1x2s.

Adding "customization" to a copyrighted work may be creating a derivative work. Derivative works are not protected as new works, so someone who customizes a licensed Iron Man minifig is not automatically entitled to do so simply because they came up with a new armor color or pattern, and their customization is not automatically protected by copyright. Only the original copyright owner has the right to authorize derivative works based on its property. If a manufacturing company starts producing unauthorized knockoffs of other unauthorized licensed minifigs, neither the company nor the customizer has any rights in the matter. They are both infringing on the original owner's copyright if they do not have permission.

This is not correct - copyright and intellectual property do not only cover "commercial production", and a copy can be an infringement if there is one or one hundred of them. It can be an infringement if it is sold or if it is given away (indeed, one of the biggest areas where these laws are called into effect is in the free distribution of protected material like movies, TV shows and music) or if it is kept personally . There is what is called a "fair use" doctrine that allows a person to make a copy under certain circumstances. A single Darth Vader statue made to decorate your own home may be a case of fair use. A single Darth Vader statue made and put on display at a convention may be an infringement, even if it's not for sale. The commercial impact of a copy is only part of what a court would consider if it became the subject of a suit. There is also the question of whether the copy is a "derivative" work or is truly unique (which would mean the artist had his own copyright to it) Ironically, creating a statue of Darth Vader pooping probably would not be an infringement in the US, as the courts have established that parody is a protected form of speech. The upshot is that there are no clear "rules" about what makes a copy an infringement or not. These questions are usually decided by courts that consider many factors and what might seem OK in one case could provoke a lawsuit in another. Some companies, like LEGO, have adopted a policy that is very permissive with their protected property - LEGO allows people to share scans of LEGO instructions, for example, even though they are explicitly protected by copyright. On the other hand, Lucasfilm once sued a man in the UK who was making (and selling) Storm Trooper masks. It went to court where a judge had to decide what kind of protection the masks had (whether they were "design" items or "sculpture" - these two categories had different types of protection under British law).