CP5670

It increases the contact area between your fingers and the bricks, allowing you to get a stronger grip on them without slipping. Without the brick, it's much easier for your fingers to slip if you hold one of the plates too tightly. As I said earlier, this is my preferred method of removing plates too.

For current sets I always use S@H or sometimes ebay, if the latter's prices are significantly lower. I find it a hassle to go to a store unless I need the set quickly, and the prices are generally not that different anyway. I actually haven't bought any Lego sets at standard retail stores in many years. I think the last time I did was in 2000. Depending on where you live, it may still be worth it since buying online often lets you avoid sales tax.

That's what I was saying earlier. It's a little goofy but clever idea.

I've tried making that change on the Robo Guardian and it looks okay to me, at least not any different than the other Spyrius things. Trans-red might go better with the black/red in general (as it later appeared in the Ogel sets), but that could be said about the entire theme. I actually like the Spyrius base better than the Ice Planet one, especially its hidden rocket launcher. It's about average as far as the bases go, and there were both better and worse ones made.

Are you going to be transporting them yourself or sending them through a shipping service? I moved two years ago and brought my entire Lego collection with me in numerous plastic storage boxes, without disassembling anything, although I had to do it in two installments. I took off some parts of models that seemed likely to fall off, like antennas or other things that were jutting out, but apart from that everything stayed together perfectly fine. However, if you're shipping it, you may have to take apart most of the models. The shipping costs will probably become huge if you try to ship everything assembled. Are they official sets or your own MOCs?

This is great stuff. I like the "classical" appearance and construction of your models, and the color scheme certainly stays true to the original theme. The ship's hangar with the large trans-blue panels above it looks especially cool. The only thing is that Spyrius is not exactly a peaceful faction. Since you have made so many Spyrius themed models, you might also find this thread an interesting read.

The key is to spread the pulling force over the whole brick instead of doing it all from one edge like the brick separator does. I keep a couple of removal tools (bricks) at hand for doing this. If you need to separate two plates, for example, it's much easier to get a grip on them by attaching a brick to one of them, removing the plates, and then removing the brick. There are also some pieces with a particularly strong grip on studs, like transparent 1x4 antennas and the Technic pin joiners, which work well for this too. You can mainly notice it with plates. An extreme version of the kind of damage I'm talking about can be produced like this: take a 1x8 plate and put a 1x4 plate and a 1x4 tile on top of it, so that they fully cover it. If you remove the tile by lifting it up from the short edge, the other side of the tile will get crushed against the 1x4 plate and cause the 1x8 plate's stud to dig into the tile's plastic. This is essentially what the brick separator does, although to a lesser degree. The damage adds up when you do it many times though.

I would not advise buying this thing or using it. See my post here for details.

The only steering parts that are worth a lot are the special ones that the various supercars used. The ones in that picture appeared in almost every small set in the 90s, and I have quite a few them I haven't found any use for.

This is only partially true. The Technic holes are very slightly smaller than the stud receptacles on the bottom of a brick/plate, which means that a stud grips it a lot more tightly. This doesn't cause a problem for a single stud/hole connection, but if you connect pieces together with several such connections, they may become very difficult to remove. TLG was more lax about this in the past (I have some pieces with 5 such connections from 8448, which I have never managed to separate in the 10 years I've had that set), but their current internal rules are that there cannot be more than one adjacent stud/hole connection between any two pieces.

The soccer line had a bunch of cool "side" sets, like stands, lights and so on, even though the main playing fields were nothing interesting. The best one was that riot police squad. Of course, they also gave us the balls for the Great Ball Contraption.

This has been the case for a long time. I have minifig heads going back to at least 1992 (with Space Police 2) with small variations in the positions of their eyebrows or hair. In a way it's not a bad thing though, as it gives the minifigs a bit of variety. Real people don't all look the same, after all.

I have 5 of this variety, which are enough cover my spare parts stash (along with the Technic storage case from 8062 and a UCS Batmobile box for large wheels and panels). Most of mine are the older kind with the hard, clear plastic, but it doesn't crack and actually feels more solid and robust. I got four in 2003, and a fifth one with the flexible plastic last year. I just noticed that you can buy the dividers separately on Amazon (as I mentioned earlier, the drawer sets don't include them for free anymore). You would need to have at least two or three of these drawer packs to make the dividers worth the cost though. The nice thing about all of these is that the width of the small drawers is almost exactly 6 studs, so Lego bricks can be packed into them nicely.

I love the appearance and design of this MOC, especially the slide-out compartments. You have added quite a bit of detail into it without using any flimsy techniques. One thing I would suggest is to add a third axle on the truck though. It looks big enough to justify it.

It's a nice collection, but as others have said it's not huge. However, the most interesting thing about it is that he has several old catalogs and posters from that time period. He might have actually gotten all those sets MISB.

The clear ones in his picture are probably a few years old. These drawers used to be better at one point, made of a higher quality plastic (which looked clear instead of translucent) and including some dividers for the drawers. Despite that, they're still the best option for storing and sorting Lego, if not the most economical, and are apparently TLG's own preferred choice. That Amazon price is quite high though. Home Depot sells the 30 small/9 big version (seems to be the most useful overall) for $18. It seems that a few other companies have similar products available on Amazon. The Akro Mills ones have gotten better reviews on there and seem to include dividers, although they cost more and are still made of the cheap material.

Maybe you could hang up parallel rows of strings above your Lego town and make the plane move on them like a cable car, although it might be hard to hide the cable contact mechanism.

Actually, I think the outsourcing was done under him in the first place, along with the other production-side changes in the last few years.

Very nice, it certainly looks like what it's supposed to be. I know that game well. "Do not kick dumpster. Do not sleep in dumpster. Usage of this container for the disposal of human remains might be in violation of local health ordinances."

Unfortunately, this can only be said about the set designs, not the pieces. It's impressive that they are doing so well even in the current market situation though.

Ironically, the last time the catalogs were separated like this was the late 90s, and Technic was all stud-based back then. There has been no such distinction made after 2000 or so though.

I think the company that makes those is actually called Stack-on. I use the same things, and they are actually TLG's recommended solution. You can get them at Home Depot and many other stores. They're a little expensive at $15-20 per drawer pack, but you do get what you pay for.

Yes, that bulldozer was the only model in the last several years to have a substantial amount of studded construction, and it's one reason why I like that set so much. Although it looks a lot more studded than it really is; the studs are only used on exterior components, while the chassis and internal sections are entirely studless.

Interesting discussion here. A few comments on this point, Technic actually has a long history and has been around for as long as the minifig. However, the trend towards removing the studs from everything is relatively recent and started around 1999 or 2000, and by 2002 most sets had almost no studs at all. I'm a big Technic fan, but I partly agree with Norro on this issue. I use a good mix of both types of construction in my MOCs, but I don't like how TLG has made Technic sets completely studless and almost seems to have made a deliberate effort to remove the studs in many cases. The actual models have continued to be great, but the construction often feels less intuitive and less like Lego than it used to.

Cool model. The PF functions are nicely designed and it captures the look of the old set very well. I'm not sure what the original set was supposed to be. It was called the Rally 6 Wheeler in the US and the Moon Buggy in the UK, although it doesn't look much like a moon buggy at all.