ShaydDeGrai

I did a theater MOC a while years back and the way I solved the "smooth" elevator problem was to make the shaft a stud larger than the car in both directions and to put small rubber wheel assembly on the top and bottom of the lift cab. The wheels were mounted at the end of lift arms with a wheel on one end and a tiny rubber band (shared by opposing wheels) on the other. Each lift arm pivoted in the middle so the wheels were pressed against the walls as the rubber bands pulled the other ends of the levels inward. This allows the cab to "roll" along all four walls of the shaft while using the rubber bands to both keep the cab centered and give the wheels a bit of suspension/play when crossing small irregularities in the surface. For moving the lift cab, I found I had to pull it in both directions (gravity drop for going down didn't cut it). I rigged up a string system with a loop of cable attaching to the top of the cab at one end, the bottom of the cab at the other and running over pulleys at the top and bottom of the shaft. A high friction pulley (actually two train wheels with rubber bands around the rail flanges head to head) was my driver pulley and was attached to a motor. I don't know if I'm explaining this very well, but I'm at the office right now and have neither photos nor parts available at the moment to illustrate. Feel free to ask questions if the basic concept intrigues you. Overall, it was a bit bulky, but the overall MOC was about four times the size of the Grand Emporium modular so space for the elevator wasn't really an issue.

"bob's your uncle" is a uniquely British catch phrase dating back to 1887. British Prime Minister Robert Cecil (a.k.a. Lord Salisbury) appointed one Arthur Balfour to the prestigious post of Chief Secretary for Ireland. Lord Salisbury was better known to Arthur Balfour as "Uncle Bob" and when the public got wind of this, the appointment was seen as blatant act of nepotism, "Bob's your uncle" became a popular sarcastic comment applied to any situation where the outcome was preordained by favoritism. Eventually the phrase lost its political edge and became a synonym for "no problem."

I visit (and post) far less frequently than I used to as well, but it has nothing to do with leaks or the lack thereof. Between losing my parents and gaining a daughter I just haven't had the time to do much with Lego in general for a few years. I enjoy a reliable sneak peek of upcoming sets as much as the next AFOL, but it's not why I came to EB in the first place and the lack of such postings isn't what's limiting my participation now.

Another source to explore is the lego education site. They usually have classroom packs of generic mini-figures (as of this writing they have two, community and fantasy - each with 21 figures and supporting props). Economically it's not the best buy out there (you're also paying for "classroom" resources that you may not care about) but if you just want a bunch of figures without the hassle of putting together multiple bricklink orders (and paying multiple postage fees, etc.) it doesn't hurt to check it out. Nominally this site is for educational sales (I used to be a professor) but last time I checked, they'd sell to anyone, verified teaching credentials only seem to matter if you're applying for tax exemption or trying to pay with a purchase order.

More often than not, I skip the sticker sheet entirely, but that's just me. I used to know a guy who took just the opposite approach and meticulously applied every sticker in advance of actually adding each brick to the model and would make the stickers "permanent" by painting over them with several coats of clear nail polish. He said he'd stumbled over the method when the stickers started peeling off of his Star Wars blockade runner a few years back and tried using clear nail polish as both a glue and a sealer for the old curling stickers. I'm not sure I'd recommend this though. Most nail polishes are acetone based and (pure) acetone eats ABS plastic, so I think what this guy was doing was not so much gluing down a sticker to a brick as he was fusing the paper into the slightly dissolved surfaced of the brick. For cosmetic purposes I'd assume the solvents are pretty mild, but still, the idea of chemically dissolving/pitting/melting my precious Lego for the sake of a sticker just sounds wrong. If you really want to go the multiple protective top coat route, you might want to explore enamel paints (specifically clear top-coats) designed for use with ABS such as those produced by Testors. But even then, test the coating on a sacrificial sticker and tile first to make sure the chemical isn't going to either soften the brick or cause the ink in the sticker to bleed Again the best I can offer here is second-hand knowledge and a few cautions born of too many hours stuck in science classes, most of my sticker sheets are safely stowed in the instruction books.

No, you can't blame the customer, they're just following human nature. And I agree with you that bad sets are their own problem, if you release a piece of rubbish of course it's going to rot on the shelves until it's discounted enough that someone is going to pick up to scrap it for parts. Future products cannibalizing current lines is a well documented phenomenon across industries (though some of the most spectacular failures on this front have happened in high tech and video game companies where the promise of something new hurt sales so badly that the companies in question didn't have the cash to actually produce the new product in the end), but from your mention of low quality sets, I suspect you misinterpreted the term. Product cannibalism only pertains to a situation where sales of a well performing product decline prematurely because a different product with equal or greater appeal to the same demographic appears. For example, people ask things here all the time like: "Should I buy the Detective's Office or Assembly Square?" or "I can't decide between the Technic Porche or the Bugatti?" all fine sets but the asker only has money for one and has to make a choice. These good quality sets are competing with each other for the same market dollar/euro/yen/whatever and, you're right, it is up to the company to have a plan to maximize their sales in the face of human nature and economic factors, sometimes beyond their control. Part of that plan and staggering the release of new kits that appeal to the same demographic to minimize the number of things vying for attention/shelf space at the same time; part of it is an announced end-of-life/end of availability timeframe to get a final bump out of an aging set that has reached a natural market saturation ( that point in the product's life cycle where sales have fallen flat because _most_ everyone who wants a particular item has either already purchased it or realized that actually getting it isn't realistic for other reasons); and the final part of that plan is to time product announcements, releases and retirements such that the company has a steady and (reasonably) predictable cash flow across fiscal quarters and tax years. It is in this last category where leak-based cannibalism can throw a spanner in the works. Now TLG is privately held, so they are buffered somewhat from the consistent earnings pressure publicly traded companies are often victim to, but few companies have enough cash-on-hand that they can ignore issues of debt management and variable revenue streams. Many states and countries also have graduated tax rates where if you earn $3 today and $3 tomorrow, you pay fewer taxes than earning $1 today and $5 tomorrow - both cases you brought in $6 but in the former case you got to keep more of it because it was seen as steady income not a windfall profit. Leaks can both suppress current sales and spike interest in future ones, as such, they can play havoc with a companies' "planned" revenue streams. (Again, sales bumps from retiring sets and staggered, overlapping releases of "similar appeal" kits were already part of "the plan" so they are orthogonal to the question of "unexpected" cannibalism due to leaks.) You want a customer to chose between current sets X and Y and give you their money today, not have them sit on their money for four months and buy Z when it becomes available. Sure, maybe all three sets cost the same, but in the four months the user is waiting for Z, you, as the manufacturer still have expenses, unsold inventory and possible debts that need servicing. On the flip side, if you sell set X or Y today and Z comes out next spring, the customer who only had money for one kit (and spent it) may have already started saving up for another, whereas if they'd decided to skip both X and Y and set today's money aside for set Z, they may have decided they'd saved enough for your product and have spent more of their disposable income elsewhere. Again, this is not unique to Lego, they teach entire courses on this stuff in Psych departments and business schools and the companies that usually fail most spectacularly when face with this reality are the start-ups and niche markets that said "_my_ product/audience/industry is different, those models don't apply". And, as I said before, personally, I like knowing what's coming and I don't think leaks impact my personal buying habits because (now, wasn't always the case) I have the luxury of buying what I want when I want (at least as far as Lego is concerned), but I get the big picture and understand where the anti-leak sentiment stems from and why leaks matter.

Personally, I always like to know what's coming. Of course, when I discover something I like, my next question is always "why can't I have that now?" so I suppose I'm less about "leaks" than I am about release schedules and production runs - in my "perfect" world there'd be no such thing as a leak because by the time the product was mature enough to be a trusted "leak" it would be ready and shipping (and, yes, I know the world doesn't actually work that way, especially when third party IP and coordinated roll-outs are involved.) On the flip side, I acknowledge the risks of leaks to the company. When licensed IP's are involved a leak becomes a legal liability with respect to breach of confidentiality agreements. Leaks also give clone (and outright counterfeit) operations lead time to prepare knock-offs. And, in some cases, leaks can cause future products to cannibalize existing product lines (e.g."I'm not going to buy set X today because I saw set Y and I want to have money to get it when it eventually comes out" How many sets X go unsold while we wait for Y? How much revenue does TLG lose to stagnant shelf stock because people are saving up to buy something that hasn't even been put into production yet?) These issues don't really impact me personally. I'm kinda over the whole IP spoiler thing, I care less about the theme than the build and the model. I don't buy clones. And if I like some set X I'm going to buy it and if I like future set Y more, I'll buy that one too when it comes out. I realize, however, that I may be a minority of one in that regard so, while I'll consume leak data when I find it, I appreciate (and do not object to) TLG (or Eurobricks) stance on the matter

Well that sounds genuinely unpleasant ( a far cry from a quaint vision of century-old windmills grinding slowly in the breeze past the tulip fields), then again, flying over a coal fired smokestack probably leaves a lot to be desired too. I'd seen reports about birds, but I hadn't thought of the bat issue. This re-release doesn't include any parts 30103 does it?

First, thank you so much for the well thought out and comprehensive review. I found it very informative. While I appreciate the scale and the messaging, I don't think this set is for me. The build seems a bit tedious and repetitive and, while the engineer in me is drawn to the fidelity and structural challenges of this model, it really boils down to a fan mounted on a stick. That's not a criticism of the design, that's just the nature of the beast. When I think Creator Expert, I just expect something more intricate with a final product that's more compelling. I'm no stranger to creating MOCs that stand over a meter tall so scale alone isn't really a "wow" factor for me. Oh well, a chacun son gout. Nice review though, thanks again.

I can't speak to Google's APIs as I've been out of that game for a bit now (used to be a professor and had a number of grad students doing ML/AI work back before it was really commercialized) but I would think the first thing you'd want to do is to break up the problem into more manageable problem spaces. The first, most obvious cut is to separate the question of piece recognition from the question of set-of-origin. Then, even within piece recognition you'd most likely want to start with some sort of "blind"/mechanical subdivision. For example there are a lot of examples on the web of Technic and Mindstorms sorters that divide a large mass of Lego by overall size (e.g. Bricks go in one bucket, plates and tiles go in the other). Such machines can be feed even more specialized machines (e.g. distinguish plates from tiles, or classify a bin of Technic axles by length) Mechanical sorting gets tougher was the parts become more similar (consider all the ways a 1x1 brick can be modified; headlamp, clip, technic hole, stud on one side, studs on two adjacent sides, studs on two opposite sides, studs on all four sides, etc.). This is where an AI (or a suite of AIs) can come in handy and presorting the pieces can make that AI easier to train and debug. I used to work with both Neural Nets, Simulated Annealing Optimization and Genetic Algorithms and in all cases it was easier to create multiple AIs that did highly specialized tasks than to try and make one master AI that could do everything. In a probabilistic world of fuzzy logic you want to be able to focus on the important details that difference one piece from another and starting will a common "family" of parts where the similarities can be taken for granted allows you to do that more easily. Once you've recognized all the parts (which, to the moment, we'll assume your smart sorting system has done flawlessly) the second problem actually gets a lot easier, guessing the most likely set a group of parts came from can be done with bit indices. Imagine a giant checklist of all the parts ever made by lego where each unique shape color and ornamentation/printing gets it's own checkbox (yes this is a very long list of checkboxes but memory is cheap these days). Now imagine a copy of this checklist to profile the set inventories of every kit in the Brickset database (we won't worry about quantity at this point). If a set contains a given part in a given color with a given printing set the corresponding bit to 1, if it doesn't, set it to 0. You now have a database of every set inventory expressed as a very long (and sparse, far more zeroes than ones, so in an actual system we could probably compress the hell out of it) binary number. Create the same sort of binary "mask" for your pile of random Lego. Boolean logic defines an AND operation to be a lot like a decimal multiply 1*1 = 1, 1*0 = 0, 0*0 = 0. By doing a bitwise AND between any given kit profile mask and the mask for the pile o' brick and then counting the number of 1's in the result compared to the original profile, you can get a sense as to the likelihood the parts in the pile came from a given kit. While this is tedious, an AI could use this basic comparison to focus on likely candidates for sets of origin. A more advanced AI might examine combinations of masks (Boolean OR operations) to try and get complete "coverage" for all the types of bricks found (e.g. if we started with sets X, Y, and Z then we'd have at least one of every unique part in this cache...) The final piece of our lovely imaginary system is a robot that, given a wall-full of sorted parts and a target inventory, will collate all the constituent parts back into a kit inventory. In theory this is simple, in practice it might be easier to train a magpie to do it for you. ;-> I know I haven't really looked at how one would code any of this using Google's AI (or anyone else's for that matter) but hopefully this gives you a better sense as to how some the the magic might happen under the covers regardless of the particular engine employed.

These generic themes also benefit from a lack of comparison to big name IPs. I sometimes feel that Classic Space, Blacktron, etc. largely went away as part of a non-compete (formal or otherwise) with Lego Star Wars. Pirates got shelved to clear the way for Pirates of the Caribbean. Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings didn't want to share shelf space with classic castle, etc. I can't help but think about where those other evergreen themes would be if they'd been consistently nurtured the same way the Playmobile has been consistently selling their castle-theme for decades. I remember several exchanges with Castle fans (AFOLs) comparing things to LOTR. People were jealous of the attention to detail on the mini-figures but (with the exception of WeatherTop and Helm's Deep) largely unimpressed with the builds. A lot of friends were hoping that once the LOTR line ended TLG would return to Castle, bringing the best of both worlds, great mini-figs and engaging builds (like Medieval Market Village and classic castles reworked to use modern parts and building techniques), but it never happened. In the waning days of LOTR, you really couldn't introduce a Castle set without people mentally contrasting it with LOTR so we needed time to clear the palette as it were. Once the time was ripe to jump back in with a "swords and armor" offering, we got Nexo-knights which somehow managed to combine Space and Castle to produce a theme that was neither - not that this is bad, but I think it speaks to the idea that some of these "evergreen" themes have lost their needles because they were forced out by (sometimes) short-lived niche specialty themes. Opportunities for a self-perpetuating "legacy" fan base were lost, or, at best, traded for a quick bite of the latest pop culture pie. From a certain perspective, this is undeniable. People like to assume that their personal opinions reflect the will of the masses and cherry-pick "evidence" to "prove" their point. This is not unique to Lego, half of political rhetoric is built around pandering to fringe groups who are so convinced that they're both right and in the majority, that they stopped comparing notes years ago, let alone listening to actual facts. Anecdotally however, as an AFOL and parent, I can say that my daughter and I already have different tastes in Lego and I certainly buy her kits that I'd never consider for myself. Where we do generally agree though is on issues of complexity and quality. She has a good eye and can spot a quality kit that will be fun to build and fun to play with after the fact even when the theme itself holds little value to her. She's not a good basis for comparing the appeal of licensed-IP vs in-house media tie-ins vs generic themes because she doesn't get much screen time and has never seen the films or TV shows of the former, but she can spot a lame excuse to sell a mini-figure a mile away and would much rather have quality, playable set, waiting for her to invent a story (like many Duplo and City kits) than a "defined" character or two and a random collection of parts that get most of their "value" from being tied to an IP that she doesn't recognize.

I can relate, I went through a similar emotional crisis when TLG started printing faces on mini-figure heads. When they were blank, I could imagine any expression the story called for, but stamping the same bloody expression on everyone's face made me want to put the heads on backwards to hid the smilie under their hair/helmet. I think trying to force a uniform narrative on a creative toy like Lego is really tricky; for every kid who embraces the narrative, you risk disappointing/offending/belittling some other kid who dreamed up their own. I guess that's why I've always thought going with the core archetypes (Space, City, Castle, Pirates, etc.) was better than getting bogged down in the details of named characters and well defined backstories.

As both a former child and current parent, I think this really hits the nail on the head. Growing up. I loved Lego (couldn't afford much of it but loved it anyway). I didn't care it it was linked to other media or not _I_ wan't linked to other media in those days either (we only had one TV, it was black and white had a smaller screen than my current laptop and there were only 4 stations). My first "mini-figures" didn't even have face printing or movable arms; none of that mattered. The narrative was in my head. My lego could be anything _I_ wanted it to be and the idea that a mini-figure would _come_ with a name or a backstory wasn't something I even considered. Okay, jumping forward in time (before I start ranting about the old days when we had to walk to school in the snow, uphill, both ways...) my daughter loves her Duplo and "daddy's Legos" as well. We've made a conscious decision to limit her exposure to TV and media powerhouses (she'll get that soon enough, despite our best efforts) so I KNOW she's never seen Lego media tie-ins (even licensed ones). Just yesterday, we got a new Lego catalog in the mail and we sat down together and she told me what she liked and what she didn't. It was amazing the way she looked at the stuff with the eye of an AFOL, she picked good sets and gave brutally honest reviews to a lot of licensed and in-house IP kits that she felt just weren't very good. Maybe being tied to media would encourage some people who are fans of that offering for be more accepting, but a lame kit is still a lame kit and deep down even kids know it. Make a kit that's compelling (regardless of media tie-ins) and kids will want it. My daughter has never seen Star Wars (at least not yet) but when she saw the new Sandcrawler she declared that the one I have is better, same thing for the latest remake of the Cantina. She doesn't know what it's supposed to be, but recognizes the older versions as being superior. As for characters, she recognizes Batman (not quite sure how), but everyone else is whomever she wants them to be. Poor Darth Vader got folded into one of her play sessions as "bucket head monkey" and was the pet of one of her Duplo figures. At her age, trying to give her a narrative to buy into just gets in the way, give her a clean slate to build on, and she'll fill it with a more meaningful story (to her) than anything she's see on TV anyway. Does linking a kit to a particular IP (in-house or otherwise) make it easier to market to certain demographics? Probably, specially if the commercial for the set is during the same show. Is having a tie-in gaurantee success/acceptance of the kit? Definitely not. Does the lack of a tie-in make a good set less appealing? I doubt it. If I had to reduce Lego's brand reputation to just one word, that word would be "quality" People (even kids) recognize quality, and historically that has trumped issues of media tie-ins, popular fads and quarterly earnings. Quality kits become popular; mediocre kits tied to popular culture end up in the discount bin at Target.

Growing up, I didn't have enough lego to be able to afford to keep sets as sets, it was all about tear down, recombine and reuse. I kept all the instructions in case I wanted to build the factory model again but my "collection" was really about parts, not kits. As for those parts, I haven't made a conscious effort to keep them separate for sentimental reasons, but they are somewhat sequestered for practical ones. I have some old Samsonite Lego (sold in the US half a century ago) that just doesn't mix well with "modern" Lego - color mismatches, scratches, mold variations, etc. I only use it when I think it brings something special to the table, which, given its age and its condition and the type of MOCs I usually build, isn't very often. I do like my old faceless, armless "slabbies" ( I even remember when mini-figures were first introduced and I recall, at the time, liking the Slabbies better ), but, again, they typically don't mix well in a modern context. In most cases the modern bricks are just better, I remember the days when we used Roof Tiles 2x4/45 done in clear as windscreens and thinking that the stippling of the roof texture and the half circles visible where the internal tubes connected were really distracting. Once I got windscreens that you can actually see through and looked "real," these old trans-clear slopes went into a box that I don't think I've opened in 40 years. I know they're there so if there ever comes a day when I need a yellowed trans-clear roof slope for some reason, I've got a couple dozen, but that day hasn't happened yet (and I've been at this for a while).

Welcome aboard! If you're north of Aberdeen I hope you have good lighting to go along with that Lego this winter. My Dad was from the "sunny tropical south that is Dundee" (as he sometimes put it) and as I recall they were lucky to get two hours of sunshine a day in December and January (of course the family is originally from the Isle of Lewis so any more UV exposure than that and he probably would have burst into flames). Happy building!

While I very much appreciate the wit and creativity behind your LUG Bulk carrier, my first thoughts when I saw it went to a Spacing Guild Heighliner from Dune. "The bricks must flow..."

Great review. Thank you for taking the time to do this. While I already own this set, I was actually thinking of picking up a few more copies for exactly the many reasons you cite. While Architecture sets are usually a bit pricey to use as parts packs, the plethora of useful parts in unique colors more than justifies the cost for me. Also, I really appreciate the discussion of modifications to the face, arm and neck. I'd been thinking about exploring such mods on my own and this has convinced me the changes are worth while. Wonderful job.

I know of a technique that lets you build curves (and cylinders) of fairly arbitrary radii (provided R is greater than about 7 studs) but it requires a butt-load of 1x2 palisade bricks and a minimum height of 3 bricks. Basically it consists of making a zig-zag wall of 1x2 elements, where the missing corners of the palisade bricks allow the wall to flex "out of system" using the studs as pivot axles. (That sentence would make a lot more sense with an accompanying diagram but I don't happen to have one at the moment). I used the technique on my Arrakis Sandworm a few years back: I wasn't trying to skin the thing with plates, but I can very easily imagine using 1x2 w/2 studs or other SNOT bricks to add a "radial studs out" aspect to the basic design. The disadvantages I see to this technique is that it is part-intensive (the worm pictured above took an entire KBox of 1x2 palisades and another of just regular 1x2 block (among other things)), it's really boring to build (tedious and repetitive), and you might need to skin it with 2x plates rather than narrower 1x to cover gaps in the underlying wall. Still, if you're curious, let me know and I'll try to explain the technique in detail (I'm at the office at the moment and don't have the resources to pull together a tutorial here).

There are entire websites dedicated to sharing instruction files and I'm fine with willing authors putting links in thier posts to make such files available, but having received at least one "Instructions Please" post, without further comment or even the simple courtesy of ending the post with a question mark to make it a request rather than a demand, for just about every MOC I've ever posted, I have to agree with the original poster here. It's annoying, and when you dig a little deeper and see that the "requestor" only has a dozen posts to their name and ALL of them are demands for LDD files from all different theme fora, it makes you feel like someone is just fishing for MOCs to rip off. Sometimes the request just defies common sense. I did a MOC of Barad Dur from the LOTR that was somewhere between 70,000 to 100,000 parts (building on that scale you count cases, not bricks). The finished model was a meter and half tall and literally cost thousands of dollars in supplies and took a year to build. I got dozens of people asking for the instructions (both on-line and in-person) as if they could pop over to a pick-a-brick wall and build their own in an afternoon for $15.95. When I pointed this out to one of the posters (on a different forum), they asked if I could scale it down to under a thousand pieces and mail them the directions - the supplied email address ended in .cn (china). As someone who gets paid to design things for a living, it made me feel like they didn't really care about the value of my time or effort, or even the quality of my MOC; they just wanted free instructions they could exploit. I don't even use LDD, I make crap up as I go along, that's the beauty of Lego.

In many ways I can relate to where you are coming from. In the years running up before college I wasn't even sure what I wanted to major in, let alone how I was going to pay for it. I was working several jobs and saving every penny I earned - which left me with precious little time or money to pursue hobbies. I never considered selling off my Lego collection, in part because it was very modest to begin with, but moreover the invention of the Web was a decade away so the only option would have been a yard sale or an ad in the local paper and I couldn't imagine selling off my precious Lego for pennies on the dollar to some random person who might not appreciate it as much as I. In my youth I had been an avid writer (and reader), as well as a talented amateur artist. I'd created a rich Dungeons&Dragons fantasy world which I both gamed in as well as using as a backdrop for my stories and drawings - and I put most of that on hold in my preparations for college, no time for such silly things I told myself. I was wrong, the more hobbies I gave up in the name of focusing on academia, the harder I found achieving at academia to be. Those silly things kept my creative mind going. Reading made me a better writer. Writing my silly fantasy stories made me a better communicator in general. Visualizing my fantasy world help hone my view of the real one. "Playing" with Lego made me a better artist and (ultimately) a better engineer. It may sound silly to suggest that DM-ing a D&D campaign or playing cards made me better at math, but I aced probability and statistics. I know from my own experience "adults" like to obsess over the question of "What would you like to be when you grow up?" As a former professor who had to advise incoming freshmen, I think this does a great disservice to our youth. While having an ambition is certainly desirable, beating a kid over the head with the notion that a career path chosen (somewhat blindly) in his/her early teens is going to define the rest of his/her life, is not. It's okay to diversify. In all likelihood the jobs you'll be applying for in the future haven't even been invented yet. Neil Armstrong didn't grow up saying he wanted to be an astronaut, there weren't any astronauts when he was growing up, he still made it to the moon. Truth is, a lot of people with terminal undergraduate college degrees don't actually use them professionally. It's far more likely that their jobs relate to their academic minors, odd courses taken outside their major or even their hobbies. I had one friend in college who majored in International Relations, she took an Intro to Acting class to satisfy a distribution requirement; she caught the acting bug and now she works as a voice actor in animation. Another friend, a mechanical engineer and avid member of the Gaming Society student club, is now a published game designer. A Comparative Religions major I knew was a great fan of Lego Technic in college, he went on to found a robotics company based on his hobby interest and his minor in Economics. A classmate of mine (we were never that close) Pierre Omidyar, _did_ study computer science, but it was his passion for auctions that led him to found eBay. The thing these people have in common isn't what they studied in school, it's that they kept their minds open to opportunities and were wiling to take a chance following their passions rather than dwelling on other's expectations for them. I know this has been a bit long and meandering (that happens when you work as a professor) but my point it this: Have ambitions, but don't loose sight of the big picture and don't sacrifice parts of yourself in the name of pursuing goals that may not matter in the long run. Of course, passions wax and wane as well, but they should be allowed to do so naturally; and it's that natural process that will help define who you will become as a person. I know I'm not the same person I was in high school, most people aren't. College isn't just about preparing for a career, it's a chance to explore who you want to become and how you want to grow over time. The undergraduate graduation ceremony is called "commencement" for a reason; it's not the end it's a beginning; it's the fledgling birds leaving the nest for the last time and flying off truly on their own for the first time. The most important thing most people get out of the college experience isn't something they read in a textbook, it's something they discovered about themselves while nominally "focusing" on something else, and it's that discovery that takes them forward to the next chapter of their lives more so than any notation on a transcript. So what, if anything does this have to do with Lego? It sound like Lego is a core part of who you are _today_. That may change over time, but today, it keeps you stimulated, creative, and active - and these are all good things. You say you want to focus on your art, but as far as your brain is concerned Lego _is_ art. Maybe it's not the medium you think you want to explore at the moment, but art begins with the imagination and the creative process, the medium is more a question of mechanics and technique. A writer friend of mind keeps a can of Play-doh on her desk. I asked her "why" once, she said it was her treatment for writers block. If she found she couldn't shape a thought with words, sometimes it helped to shape it in clay and then write paragraph or two describing the sculpture. I asked her if that really works and she said, "Sometimes creativity just needs to move sideways to overcome inertia." Now I keep a cup of random Lego parts on my desk, just in case of creative emergencies. If having too ready access to Lego is becoming an obsession or making procrastination too easy, then by all means pare things down; Put some things in storage in such a way that it take an active effort to get them out again; Abide by a "clean-desk" policy that demands that works in progress be put away at the end of the day, not left out as a temptation the next time you sit down to do work, etc. Just don't artificially deny yourself a passion or a creative outlet because you feel guilty about not meeting other expectations. If your other interests, truly matter to you, they will keep you engaged on their own regardless of the state of your Lego collection. I've found that boredom is the _real_ threat to both productivity and excellence, the best way to stave off boredom is to keep yourself challenged and to embrace creative outlets in all their forms. There's never enough time in the day for everything, but somehow it all works out in the end. Good luck.

This reminds me of a little independent store I know of up in Maine that I make a point to stop off at each summer when I'm on vacation. The place is nominally a bookstore but they have a toy section with a healthy Lego area (at least in summer). On my annual visit it's not uncommon to see a 10+ year old set in a faded box selling for at or below (~10% discount for _really_ faded boxes) its original asking price. I asked them about it once and supposedly they stock up on Lego before Christmas (as the nearest toy store is ~100 miles away) then just put everything that doesn't sell into storage until the next summer tourist season. They aren't too careful about rotating their stock so some kits just sit in the locker for years until someone yanks them out to restock the shelf after a rainy day spurs a run on activities for kids of harried parents unexpectedly stuck indoors. Back in 2015 I picked up an Emerald Night (three years after it had been discontinued) for $10 less than MSRP.

One other part source that is often overlooked is education.lego.com. The "shop" tag has a category for replacement parts that usually includes bags of technic parts (lift arms, beams, gears, axles etc) packaged in bulk, as well as individual motors sensors and various Mindstorms accessories. They're intended for replacement consumables for classroom use (where parts get stripped, broken, lost and stolen on a regular basis - I used to be an engineering professor, BTW) but, at least in the US, they will sell to anyone. The only difference is that if you're not in academia (with a tax exemption number) they charge sale tax and won't take purchase orders. The inventory varies and the prices often aren't that great compared to most BrickLink sellers, but things do change over time and every now and then you can buy up clearance lots in bulk at a good price. It's not as precise as ordering exactly what you want through B&P or Bricklink, but if you happen to catch a sale it can be an economical and fast way to build up your collection with a variety of useful parts.

When I first started going to shows, I tried just boxing up things I'd built only to find packing was a real problem. My pieces were too big, oddly shaped and fragile meaning that a) I needed really big boxes, b) I was boxing up a lot of empty space and couldn't fit as much in the car as I wanted to bring, and c) things shifted in transit, meaning I spent the better part of my first day repairing things. So, I started making custom boxes that were tighter fits to the size of the MOCs and tweaked my MOCs slightly to remove protruding or excessively delicate sections. For example, the statue shown in my icon has a removable head and extended arm comes apart at the elbow. This makes the rest of the sculpture a solid rectangular block that packs and travels well. The head and hand are more delicate, but can be boxed separately and won't be sheared off or crushed by the mass of the torso if the weight were to shift suddenly in transit. This practice helped, but creating boxes to make a snug fit around an oddly shaped MOC was a pain. These days, I actually think about the box(es) a MOC will travel in as part of the base design and scale/modularize things accordingly for an optimum fit. I've found that a really snug fit in rigid cardboard box tends to minimized damage in transit. Too much room in the box and a pot-hole or sudden stop will cause the MOC to bounce off the sidewalls of the box. I don't glue MOCs and I've found that cardboard boxes do a better job of damping vibration that might otherwise loosen bricks on long car rides (compared to plastic bins which tend to transfer the vibration). Adding custom foam-core cutouts to bridge the gap between the box sidewall and an odd shaped MOC is sometimes useful to minimized swaying and tipping. I tend to err on the side of developing a modular design that will travel in multiple, smaller boxes rather than just making sure the MOC fits in the biggest box I have. I do a lot of sculptural MOCs and, given the odd shapes, I'd hate to waste space (even if transit damage weren't a concern). When I pack a MOC (or section of a MOC) into a box I want at least 75% of the volume of the box taken up by the MOC, preferably touching the sides of the box at multiple points. I design my MOCs in sections to fill standard boxes (and to be easy to reassemble afterwards). Often re-assembly is something as simple as popping in a few technic pins and butting connection planes together, but on very large pieces, I'll resort to brick-build mortise and tenons, rabbits, and dados. Once I even used sliding dovetail joinery to put sections of a mountain landscape together where pins kept pulling apart. As with any design, breaking a MOC up into modules is a trade-off. It ups the part count, imposes constraints on your design, and raises structural issues you might otherwise be able to ignore. What it buys you (when done well) is ease of packing, minimizing the likelihood of damage and more compact storage. Knowing whether a given design should break down into a dozen shoeboxes, three small moving boxes or just be delicately packed into a custom crate made from the carton your refrigerator came in is really something that needs to be sussed out on a case by case basis.

My wife claims that I never take anything apart, but that's just not true. I scrap my old kits for parts in much the same way that wind and rain tear down mountains; if you look every day expecting to see the differences, you're going to think nothing's happening, but over time, if you pay attention, you'll notice some things that once were, aren't anymore. Usually my cat and gravity select the next model to land in the "to be sorted" pile. As for alternate models, I'll build them if I have hardcopy instructions (like the 3-in-1 kits) and may actually buy multiple copies of the kit so that both the primary and alternate models can persist for a time. If I have to go online for the alternate instructions (as is usually the case in Technic kits) I don't bother. I play with Lego to get away from screens and computers, so making me read instructions off a screen rather than a piece of paper is a total non-starter for me. If I put together a kit and decide it has some really cool/useful parts, I've also been known to by extra copies of the set just to part out while leaving the original build intact for years

Yes and No on the "british" question. On paper, I'm a first generation Yank. My dad's family is originally from the Isle of Lewis before they moved to the "tropical south" that is Dundee, Scotland. On my mom's side, the family came down the coast from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. I grew up in a Scotch & Irish immigrant enclave just outside Boston where you were just as likely to overhear Gaelic on the streets as English (two streets over it was Italian, a block in the other direction, it was Hindi). Anyway, with the bulk of the extended family in Scotland and Canada, and living in a neighborhood where "football" meant "soccer" no matter how well the Patriots were doing in the playoffs, I grew up in a very "British culture influenced" household. My dad might _watch_ the local hockey pros (The Boston Bruins) on TV but, but he was a die-hard Dundee Tigers fan at heart. Half my comic books, toys and what passed for "pop" culture influences of the day came from Scottish relatives or BBC productions. Jon Pertwee was _my_ go to Doctor (though in hindsight it was really UNIT and the Pertwee era incarnation of The Master that drew me to the show, other Doctors got out a lot more (cosmically and temporally speaking) and David Tenet eventually unseated Pertwee for the #1 slot in my book). When I got to watch TV (which was limited as a child) I gravitated to PBS (which showed a lot of BBC stuff) and independent UHF channels, which also picked up a lot of imports) because all the people on the main channels had funny accents - well, at least I thought so, then I went to school and realized I was the one who was talking funny... Getting back to the topic at hand though, is anyone here old enough / "British" enough to remember Captain Scarlet? it was another of Gerry Anderson's Supermarionation productions. As I recall Spectrum had a bunch of funky vehicles that would make interesting Lego models. I could never afford them myself growing up, but I had a friend who had the full Captain Scarlet line of Dinky Toys (he also had their full line from the UFO series, lucky bastard). About the same time that Jack Kirby was coming up with the SHIELD heli-carrier, Captain Scarlett was launching Angel Interceptors from the deck of the Cloudbase. The ground vehicles all had that sort of "Detroit Concept Car" thing going for them that made them at once retro yet timeless. As a Lego theme, I think it would be a lot of fun, as a Licensed Theme though it would be a waste of money as I haven't met anyone born after the Apollo 11 landing who even remembers this IP.