CP5670

This is a strange but known issue with the stickers in that particular set. Mine had the same problem, and others have reported it too. You got a good price on that set in any case.

This is useful to keep in mind. The initial cost of a console is usually cheaper than PC gaming hardware, but the games cost more and don't fall in price nearly as fast, so you may end up spending more in the end if you get a lot of games. Microsoft and Sony both sell their consoles at a loss and make money from game licensing fees.

I'll add a new entry on this issue. It would be useful to know if any other pieces are made of this type of plastic. I think the metal detector I mentioned may be one. Thanks for the picture. TLG often makes small revisions to various parts and such changes aren't necessarily a problem, but if the new gears don't fit tightly on axles then that's not good. I'm not sure how well the thicker teeth will mesh with existing gears either. Which sets did you get these gears in? I just checked my 8265 and 8263 and they have the normal type of gears. It will be interesting if they do anything about the letter. I think they will just send you more replacements without any explanation. Has anyone else had this issue with the slopes in GG?

Do you have a link to the article or paper? That might be interesting to read.

I had the same thoughts as a kid. There was a long period from about 2000-2006 when colored (non trans black or clear) transparent pieces had become rather uncommon in general, and that only really changed in 2007 with the return of Space. That guy does have a point about the S@H shipping charges though. The shipping is fairly high and the discrete price brackets make no sense. That encourages people to buy less instead of more. I placed an order there earlier today and dropped out some stuff to make it $49.50, so that I wouldn't get charged the $50-75 shipping price.

The Swiffer products work nicely for removing dust. I run those over my built models and it's a lot quicker than taking them apart and washing the pieces.

There was an interesting thread in the Technic section recently about understanding (and maybe optimizing) a pneumatic control system mathematically. It had never occurred to me to think of Lego models in those terms, even though I do some work in control theory. I went there last summer to see some professors. Nice place.

I much prefer the older boxes with the flaps and windows with clear "featured parts" trays. There were a couple of versions of these. Some had large windows that let you see everything inside and others had only small openings in the window (late 90s). Apart from the clear parts trays on top, some contained additional, large plastic trays inside (90s) while others had cardboard dividers (80s). Some of the early 80s boxes also had a thick, polystyrene interior. A few large boxes around 2000 had smaller sub-boxes inside them, for different parts of a model. My favorite boxes are probably 8448 (8 smaller sub-boxes arranged in a jigsaw pattern and the wheels lined up along one side) and 6990 (multiple layers of big, featured parts trays). The late 80s Light and Sound boxes were also cool, as they all had flaps/windows and parts trays regardless of their size. We still have the flaps today on a few of the largest boxes like the Technic flagship sets, but there are no longer any windows or trays inside.

I have always been a PC gamer and never found any console that attractive. Mods and a much greater level of customizability in general are the biggest draws for me. Some of the best things I played over the last year were mods for various games. Multiplayer is usually better on the PC too due to the user-made content. Other factors include mouse control for FPS and RTS games as well the superior graphics and other technical aspects. I like the higher resolutions, AA and often better framerates on the PC, and don't mind getting whatever hardware is needed to achieve that. The one thing I do like about consoles is splitscreen gameplay, which is a lot of fun. The PC can do this too but it has hardly ever been done, and I can only think of 2 or 3 games over the years that had it.

Very interesting, this is probably the best description of the bleaching techniques I've seen yet.

Nobody is making you buy it. I found that post interesting and it made sense to include the links there. We occasionally talk about clone products here on EB too. I have no use for the beams but might be interested if he makes more types of axles and gears, particularly gears that don't exist in Technic yet. I've wanted to see planetary ring gears and helical gears in Technic for ages now.

I'm happy they even included one log here. Previous sets with claw arms like 8443, 8446 and 8868 didn't include anything for the model to pick up. 8446 even had the box art showing it picking up something that looked like a glowing log, but the set doesn't include anything like that.

I have kept all my boxes so far. I have them in a big pile at my parents' house since they would take up too much room in my current apartment, but I intend to collect them at some point. The modern, post-2000 boxes are easy to stack inside each other since they are hollow, but I'm not really convinced that those are worth keeping. They are nothing like the old 80s and 90s boxes, which had transparent covers with flaps, featured parts trays, internal dividers and alternate models in the back. I currently do it for continuity more than anything else, as most of my boxes are the older kind which I do want to keep.

I added a few things to the first post. The 20t gear has always had this issue to some extent and seems to be simply designed like that. The light gray ones I have from the early 2000s are even worse. From what you say about the 16t gear, it actually sounds like they have gone back to an early version of that gear used in the 1980s, which was exactly as you describe. I didn't notice them or the weak #2 connectors in the 2009 sets I got, but I will take a closer look at those sets. I added green and brown to the color list. Green at least has been fine in the past, but the problems with these colors were quite obvious in the review pictures you mentioned. My 4996 also contained examples of a number of the different types of recent problems. That set is quite cheap for its piece count, but there have obviously been compromises made to achieve that price point. I've said before that Lego's reputation for part quality is undeserved today and is based on the company's past history, not on the present state of affairs. As far as the color problems are concerned, the key to seeing any changes is to get enough people to notice, and in a way I think the AFOL community is more at fault than TLG for largely ignoring this issue. Many who claim to be discriminating about quality and avoid clone brands for that reason seem to turn a blind eye to this, even though this is by far the most widespread quality issue. If people had raised anywhere near the kind of stink that they did with the 2004 gray change, we might not be having these problems today. Is this the same material that the metal detectors are made of? I have noticed the same issue with a few of those after putting them into minifig hands. The printing consistency issues in general have been noted, but the cracks on that piece are something I haven't heard of before. I'll keep that one in mind.

That's the idea. One "setting" makes it move (all wheels go in the same direction), the second setting makes it turn (only wheels on one side move, or it can be modified to have the wheels go in opposite directions like a tracked vehicle), and the third setting moves the forks. Technicopedia has a detailed description of this model, but I can't load the site for some reason. This model actually uses a more advanced version of what I had in mind, as some of the settings connect the main motor to multiple functions, but it illustrates the general principle that when you have two motors, you can produce as many functions as you like out of them.

If you are talking about the torso, I can't see any obvious problem at least in that picture, but "lemonade yellow" sounds a lot like the junk yellow we've been getting for the last few years. Do the arms have any square markings on their insides, as discussed earlier? Someone else brought up a separate issue with that piece a little while ago. I think we'll need to wait for those sets to become more widely available to learn more.

You have a point, but it depends on just how picky you are about piece condition, and whether you have the time and patience to resell sets you are not satisfied with. I've certainly gotten many great deals off used sets in the past and have actually become pretty good at deducing the condition of a used set from its pictures and description, but today I prefer to avoid the whole lottery and don't mind paying extra for it. I have a number of other used sets I got that are in reasonable shape, but are not quite up to the standard I want and which I haven't gotten around to selling for years. I do make exceptions if a set is specifically advertised as a display model and decent pictures are available. Such display models (with boxes and catalogs) are as good as MISB sets as far as I'm concerned, but they can be quite difficult to come by reliably. I picked up many of the older MISB sets around 2000-2002, when ebay was not as popular as it is today and sniping was easier to do, so I got many sets for considerably less than what they go for today. I have also bought more at certain times of the year or taken advantage of auction oddities (mislabeled title, seller does not take Paypal, etc.) to get lower prices. Mid to late 90s MISB sets can still be had fairly cheaply today. I got a 6575 last week for $45, less than its original price. Another thing to keep in mind, especially with 80s sets, is that prices which seem high today might be fairly close to the set's original price once you take inflation into account. You should check out some of the real hardcore collector vaults. I've seen some pictures on Brickshelf in the past.

The clutches and driving rings are not the only way to switch between functions. As I said earlier, the model may use something like the system in 8082's forklift, which was fully motorized. This would actually be easier to do today with the double bevel gears, which didn't exist back then.

This is something that seems to vary with every forum, and there are pros and cons to it. I'm a moderator on another forum and it's traditionally frowned upon there. On one hand, it can be confusing to see a string of posts from people who haven't frequented the forum in ages. I've seen cases where a guy posts a comment or response to someone's question, even though the person asking the question hasn't been seen in years. On the other hand, it could well be that the new poster has something to contribute to the thread that would interest other, current forum users. Personally, I think as long as the new poster makes it clear that the thread is an old one being bumped, there is no problem. It only becomes an issue when the new poster acts as if nothing is going on and he is just responding to a currently active thread.

I buy MISB sets for their part quality. I have gotten equivalent quality from some used sets in the past, but you always take a risk with used sets and it can be very difficult to tell what the piece condition is like in advance. I know from experience that "mint" or "excellent condition" can mean just about anything, and these days, I would rather avoid the uncertainty. If you scour ebay regularly like I used to, you can find good deals on many such sets. I actually have over 100 MISB sets from the 80s and 90s in storage. They have piled up over time because I bought them on ebay whenever I spotted a good deal, over the course of 7 or 8 years. At one point, I was building them at a slower rate than I was getting more of them. I currently lack the space or time to build and display them all, especially as I spend more time with MOCs than building sets these days. I still build one every two or three weeks though, and I intend to build them all eventually (and modify them/MOC with their parts).

I find that the "baby" instructions we have these days in Technic, where only a few parts are used on each step, actually make it easier to mess up like this. If you're like me, the small steps make you want to do two or more of them simultaneously, but that also increases the tendency to make a mistake because you weren't examining the picture carefully for any one step. This one is partly TLG's fault. It's well known that these colors can look very similar in some instruction manuals, especially if you are reading them in less than optimal lighting.

It depends on what kind of things you build. I build modern and futuristic MOCs and I want them to look pristine and perfect, as if they had just been constructed or come out of the factory. So any color variations look bad for such MOCs.

This is really nice. Probably the smallest model I've seen working pneumatics on.

It does seem like there were some bad batches of plastic at the time. I haven't seen any meaningful pattern in which pieces are affected though. Like you said, in most sets only certain pieces have the issue. I have a few yellowed parts in 8480, but they are all made of non-ABS plastics (axle joiners, 1x5 Technic plates, etc.). On the other hand, my 8880s and 8839 contain normal bricks and plates with the same issue. In 8839, all four 1x8 white plates have the problem but nothing else does, and other, non-Technic sets I have from the same years contain white 1x8s that look fine. Anyway, apart from these special pieces (which only came out around the early to mid 90s), I think it's fairly easy to avoid yellowing by just preventing direct sunlight on the bricks. Artificial, incandescent lighting poses no problem. This article has been posted here before, but it's a good read on this whole issue.

I simply keep the blinds down in the rooms containing my Lego. That has worked well for about 8 years now (many of the sets are much older than that, but I've owned and had them on display for that long), with no noticeable yellowing on white pieces. The incandescent lighting I use in these rooms seems to have no effect on Lego. The one exception to this is the type of pieces I talk about here (look under "oxygen sensitive white bricks"). There are certain pieces that will discolor quite noticeably regardless of the ambient lighting. Depending on what time periods your bricks are from, this may or may not be an issue. I have some 8880 wheels that have become strongly yellowed even in a completely dark box. I intend to try the bleaching techniques that people have discussed on them.