ShaydDeGrai

I don't know if it really counts as "buying," but I cashed in a load of VIP points and walked out of the store with two copies of the LOTR Black Gate (79007), a Lone Ranger Stagecoach (79108) and they threw in a free hot dog stand (40078) and I didn't (technically) spend a dime. Even better, I still have $10 in VIP points on my card for my next trip. I suppose one wants to split hairs, they were "bonus" kits, not "free" kits as I seem to recall spending a fair amount of money to get those VIP points in the first place - but it still feels like getting something for nothing when you "cash" them in.

Thanks, I'm thrilled by the positive responses I've seen both on-line and at BrickFair New England. It's not to the same scale, but yes, my take on Minas Tirith can be found here. The Minas Tirith build is designed to a much tighter scale and fits inside of a 10" (26cm) cube. At that scale, it fits nicely on a bookshelf but looks a little silly if you pose any minifigures near it. I did the math on that one once. At true minifigure scale, a full build of Minas Morgul wouldn't fit in my office and a minifigure scale Minas Tirith would be taller than my house Still, if you know any shopping malls or other large venues that desperately need a Lego version of The White City for their atrium, I'm willing to consider a commission... Will work for Bricks

As has been said, I think it's ill-advised to use degrees earned or time spent in academia as a proxy for "level of intelligence". There are plenty of smart people out there without advanced degrees and plenty of people in academia who just aren't very bright. I used to be a professor (Full disclosure: I have degrees in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, and a Ph. D. in Computer Science so I've earned the right to ridicule academics ) and, although my experiences are purely anecdotal, I can think of plenty of anecdotes to dispel the myth that a sitting in a classroom or getting a fancy piece of paper proves that one person is inherently smarter than another. There are all sorts of PHD students out there: Poor Hapless Devil; Pretty Heavy Drinker; Pretentious Headstrong Dolt; Probably Highly Delusional; Personal Hygiene Deficient; etc. and, at least where I used to work, lots of kids who were not only far from the cream of the crop, but lacking in basic life skills. A lot of them got in because they either came from very wealthy families or were very good at regurgitating data on exams, but when it came to _real_ measures of intelligence (beyond memorizing facts and following instructions) such as spatial reasoning, abstraction, visualization, creativity, adapting to interpersonal cues, etc. our "best and brightest" made me fear for the future of society. Most of them could tell you the history of the paper bag in a heartbeat, but would turn blue if they ever tried to think their way out of one. That said, I think there IS a link between Lego and spatial reasoning. I taught a courses in robotics, data visualization and virtual reality and I could walk though the prototyping labs and know at a glance which kids had played with Lego growing up (and I know my guesses were pretty good as I often asked individuals (both good and bad performers) about "construction toy experience" and found many aspiring engineers who'd brought bricks to campus) In those particular classes, I don't think any of former or active FOLs managed to earn less than an A-. They weren't the only ones to get good marks, but they were the ones who never got BAD ones. Correlations? Causations? Observer bias? Too many confounding variables to quantify? Who knows. It's a great toy and smart people can usually recognize quality - I guess that's something...

Thinking out of the box (or in this case castle) for a moment, you could turn it on its side and cover the loophole. The resulting shape could then become part of a boiler for a steam engine train or an engine housing or equipment/weapons pod for a fighter plane or space ship. Thinking even bigger, maybe it could serve as the nose for a 3 meter tall Colossus of Rhodes statue... Just because it started out life as a castle wall segment doesn't mean you have to limit yourself to towers and other "masonry" applications.

Wow, I wish I had friends like yours... Such a great find. Best of luck restoring these classics.

I just broke the seals on my new Tower of Orthanc, I suspect I'll be away from the keyboard for the next few hours

As a concept I'm fine with it. I own the entire Discovery Theme from a few years back, several versions of the space shuttle including the big Technic Model (8480) which really helped lead me out of a quasi-dark age back in the '90's. I'm a bit surprised by the way this particular model pulled a Purdue Pete Maneuver though. The small model proposed doesn't really grab me (though the larger one he links to is far more impressive) and (not to belittle ATLAS but...) the subject matter isn't one of those "go to" moments of space exploration for me. Yes the moon landing, ISS and multiple mars rovers have been/are being done, so it's natural to turn to other missions, but I'm still taken aback by the enthusiasm for this guy. Perhaps I'm just out of touch but I would have thought that an Apollo-Soyuz link-up or Hubble Telescope, Voyager, or even Sputnik or Lunokhod 1 (first soviet lunar rover) would have struck a bigger spark. Eh, what do I know? In any case congratulations are in order, and best of luck with the review process.

Yes, actually, I do. I've consulted on brainstorming and crowd sourcing projects for companies a lot bigger than TLG and it is those experiences that make me feel that CuuSoo is not a serious crowd-sourcing effort. This is very true. A 10k goal post is an arbitrary and self-defeating goal if the purpose of the exercise is to actually crowd source. For those purposes, the useful data is not how many votes an idea got, but how long it took to get there, how big the initial splash was, how quickly did support fall off to a trickle, where is the support coming from, etc. These things are easy to data mine and extrapolate into real information. Finding a viable idea via crowd-sourcing is a more complicated exercise than winning an election for high school prom queen; just having the most votes doesn't mean you're the best candidate. An arbitrary magic number like 10k is only good if your goal is to create buzz and the illusion of progress in terms anyone can understand. It dumbs the process down to a popularity contest where people can root for their favorites, post stats and, in general embrace a contest-like atmosphere which is good for advertising purposes but not so great for real IP development. The existing themes already cover a lot of ground, particularly Creator, Architecture, and Technic. In what I've seen from following CuuSoo since it went live in the US, in those rare cases where an argument can be made that a given set doesn't map to an existing theme, that same argument suggests that there is room for a new theme to be explored. Certainly themes (particularly licensed ones) change with time, but as you point out these things are mapped out months, if not years in advance. It is not a lack of information that creates issues, it is a lack of communication and a corporate culture that wants to compartmentalize efforts and maintain secrecy. Sometimes changing themes and information sharing can be a good thing. I'm told that the Stagecoach from the Lone Ranger Line was originally developed for the generic Western theme and was going to be shelved when the contract for The Lone Ranger was signed, but they showed the prototype to Disney and the studio execs liked it so much that the wrote the stagecoach scene into the movie to accommodate the kit. I doubt an idea that originated on the current CuuSoo system would have been afforded the same opportunity regardless of quality. In this I believe you've completely missed the point of my argument. The sales of the eventual CuuSoo kit are largely a non-issue (it's like DesignByME - the fact that a kit exists is secondary to the process that led to its existence. The value of CuuSoo as a guerilla marketing tool has nothing to do with whether or not the CuuSoo idea succeeds, it's in how much buzz for the LEGO brand it created during the voting. Whether Purdue Pete eventually becomes a kit or not, the value of that project to TLG is in the number of Purdue students and alumni who were reminded of the days when they played with Lego as a child and are now more likely to buy kits for themselves or as gifts because of the hype and frenzy over the voting. Those voters aren't going to wait a year or more until a 'Pete kit comes out, in fact they might have forgotten all about it by then, but in the weeks that followed that massive campaign to hit 10k in record time, I'll bet Lego sold a fair number of kits to people who hadn't thought about Lego in years. Likewise, there were probably people at other schools who went out and bought a bucket of bricks to tackle the design of their own school mascot, dreaming of their own fame and riches when Tufts' Jumbo the Elephant, the MIT Beaver or the Clemson Tiger becomes the next Purdue Pete. Even "failed" projects are wins for the LEGO brand. As a lawyer friend of mine is fond of saying, "you can't un-ring a bell." How much would it cost TLG to get Simon Pegg or Nathan Fillion to go on national television and repeatedly endorse LEGO? Probably a lot more than the cost of a web site and 1% royalties on the occasional limited run kit. CuuSoo got the celebrity endorsements even though The Winchester and Serenity projects were ultimately rejected. Yes, there were good reasons for the rejection and yes a lot of AFOLs didn't like it, but the LEGO brand overall came out ahead. Likewise, if Purdue Pete gets rejected, I doubt the people who bought Lego during or after the 'Pete campaign are going to try to return the kits in protest. The cash register bell has run and it sounds like cheap advertising and a sales bump regardless of the outcome of the CuuSoo process. I'm not saying that crowd-sourcing is a bad thing, I saying that TLG does not give the impression that it takes crowd-sourcing seriously. Marketing aspects aside, it feels more like when Lego Factory first came out and they held a contest to select a handful of AFOL submitted designs as actual kits. The value to the company is not on who wins (provided that the ultimate winner is in fact satisfactory) but rather on the attention paid to the process outside of it's normal advertising channels. Crowd-source isn't a competition, it's a process; if it feels like a competition then you're doing it wrong. Neither do I. The success of Minecraft aside, I think that as a marketing tool for the Lego brand it is a very cost effective platform. Volunteers (I call them this because most people who post ideas will never see their set produced and even those few that do won't exactly be positioned to give up their day job ) provide the content. We volunteer our time, screen real estate and disk space promoting pet projects and debating pet peeves. When some of us take exception to how CuuSoo operates or whatever decisions it hands down, others of us rush to CuuSoo's defense touting the party line and decrying the critics; the AFOL community argues amongst itself and TLG walks away with clean hands. In the grand scheme of things, the cost to TLG is trivial. What would it cost to buy perpetual advertising space on three quarters of a million web pages (a rough count of the number of unique URLs with at least one link back to CuuSoo that a spider of mine found while I was typing this)? How much would multiple celebrity endorsements from fan-boy favorites on national media cost? My guess is quite a bit more than the combined salaries of the (relatively small) CuuSoo Team plus the overhead of maintaining the web site. As for the kits that _do_ get produced, 1% of the money from a $35 kit with a production run of 10,000 is less than half of what I spent on Lego last year alone. Companies have spent far more on a single Superbowl ad and had less to show for it as far as branding is concerned. So, no, if I were TLG I probably wouldn't want to change a thing because as a marketing gimmick for the LEGO brand, CuuSoo is fine just the way it is. The "dishonesty" comes in when it claims to be all about crowd-sourcing when they've yet to demonstrate any true commitment to that product development model while benefiting from the creativity, effort and emotional commitment of fans with unrealistic expectations.

I'm aware of the issues and yup, that's pretty much what I'm proposing. If a kit isn't up to LEGO standards or market demand as a normal set, it should be rejected as a "CuuSoo Set". But to clarify a couple points I think you misread (or I expressed poorly): 1) I'm not saying all proposals need to map to sets in existing themes. I'm saying that sets that DO map to themes should be held to the standards of that theme and released or rejected as regular sets not "CuuSoo sets" Sets that don't map to existing themes should be handled as "new theme proposals" with example sets, and new parts should likewise be on dedicated new part proposals threads. The CuuSoo website would be restructured to handle them separately (top ten new themes, top ten sets, top ten parts, etc.) 2) I wouldn't wait for a proposal to get to 10k only to get mired down in the review process, I'd put a CuuSoo liaison on every active theme whose job it is to review new proposals to address the issue of "Fit" before the idea ever goes public. If I say I want to propose a new Lone Ranger set and it doesn't play well with the foreseeable future of the planned Lone Ranger line, the process ends there. It's harsh but that's business for you. The extra personnel required to do this sort of thing is part of that lack of commitment to the idea of crowd-sourcing I perceive, it's an expense/investment I don't think TLG wants to make at this point. 3) I'm not saying increase the size of CuuSoo production runs, I'm saying never put a product on the shelf with the word "CuuSoo" on it. If the market research says idea X can only sell 50,000 units but the economics say it needs to sell 250,000 to justify a new mold (or whatever) then the project isn't viable, let it die. If BttF truly is viable, then it should be the BttF Theme with multiple kits, not a CuuSoo BttF kit. 4) You call it creating awareness, I call it guerilla marketing. The end result is the same, you generate buzz without overtly paying for advertising and reach people traditional ads might miss. The difference I see is that CuuSoo SAYS its about imagination first and brand awareness is just a happy by-product but it feels like just the reverse. I don't think _my_ version of CuuSoo would solve any of the many grips AFOLs have with it (slow, arbitrary, too many things rejected, etc.) except one, honesty. CuuSoo feels like a con job at this point, a lot of hype married with with diminishing returns. I'd rather TLG rejected 99% proposals before they even went public based on cursory (but informed) review and only posted the ones they thought might pass a rigorous review later. I think a candid, specific, rejection letter on day-one is both more merciful and more honest than to have a sea of projects struggling to get noticed where the "reward" is to ultimately get shot down for reasons TLG had been aware of since before the proposals were ever posted. The way CuuSoo is currently staffed and structured, they can't do that sort of pre-screening and things go down hill from there.

As I said, I would abolish the idea of releasing the set under the CuuSoo banner. An idea that makes it to 10K gets reviewed to the same standards as any that would have come from an internal (salaried) source and would be subject to the same part and building restrictions as other products in the line. Take the fact that it began as a crowd sourced idea out of the equation, let the review process determine the viability (and production size run) and whether or not it warrants the expense of new parts (unlikely, but new parts have to start somewhere). TLG would assume no more risk than they would have otherwise because whether the next Technic (for example) set begins as the brainchild of a staff designer or some AFOL in Seattle, it goes through the same analysis and must make the same good business sense in order to get produced. Perhaps this would mean that _nothing_ would pass muster. I'm okay with that actually, so long as the process is open and the players know what to expect. I never said to lift the restrictions, I said level the playing field: Hold CuuSoo set proposals to the same standards and practices that apply to their most closely affiliated theme and break down the (perception of?) territorial boundaries between established internal theme fiefdoms and AFOL input. This is precisely why I don't think you'll ever see much "existing licensed theme" stuff allowed under a CuuSoo banner and why I think they should either evaluate the projects under the umbrella of a "native" theme or just disallow such projects from the beginning. If the Lego SW team decides it wants to adopt the Dash Rendars Moldy Crow project and release it as a regular set, great crowd sourcing has succeeded. If the licensing wouldn't have let them make it on their own, they should have said that before long before the proposal crawled to the 10K threshold. If the SW group could make one but chooses not to, but the CuuSoo group can't because they're playing in the SW group's sandbox - that's just internal politics being dishonest with CuuSoo users. As I said I think the 1% commission is (legally) problematic and should be done away with in favor of a flat honorarium. Once that is off the table, the only reason _not_ to fold CuuSoo born ideas into the regular themed kits proposal and review is if the teams doing the work don't want the external inputs. I'm sorry if this sounds overly negative, but I've yet to hear anything come out of CuuSoo (or Lego Reps talking about CuuSoo) that suggests that TLG takes crowd sourcing seriously; it comes off as more of a LEGO Factory/Design byME token follow-on with more of a social networking and free advertising twist. It seems like the amount of time and effort that TFOLs and AFOLs devote to CuuSoo is significantly disproportionate to the amount of resources TLG itself puts into it and, to me, is an indicator of the disparity between what each party expects to get out of it in the end.

The fact that there are "CuuSoo Sets" really speaks to my problem with CuuSoo. If TLG really wants to take crowd sourcing seriously then they need to stop pigeon-holing the ideas solicited into small production runs in a specialty line of kits that don't really fit (or I suppose "conflict") with things they are (or might be) planning to market anyway. I realize there are legal and IP issues that need to be worked out (or simply acknowledged as intractable and related projects disallowed) but, true or not, the way things are done now gives people the impression that CuuSoo is a just a guerilla marketing campaign to promote the LEGO brand. They want people to promote their "LEGO" ideas on Twitter and Facebook and on blogs and various other media (effectively free advertising for Lego) but in the end TLG only wants to produce a few (cheap) token sets (no custom parts, small production runs, essentially things that, if they don't sell, TLG could easily write off as promotional expenses and probably representing a smaller investment of capital than a prime-time TV ad campaign in the US). I mean no disrespect to the projects that have made it through the gauntlet to date (if it were up to me, there'd be a few more of you out there), but in the grand scheme of things, the release of a "CuuSoo Set" isn't exactly a landmark moment in the way TLG does business. The different themes are still little feudal estates that aren't about to sacrifice their autonomy based on an opinion poll on a website. I think there are a lot of people on CuuSoo who think that linking their project to already licensed IP will make it easier for their project to pass review. I think just the opposite is true - for example, I doubt the Lego Star Wars group want (or may not even (legally) be able) to accept outside ideas. Tying a project to a popular IP may make it easier to get 10,000 votes, but it may make the journey moot once you get to the review stage. (In the interest of full disclosure, I'll point out that I have several LOTR related projects on CuuSoo - if any of them were to make it to 10K support, I'd be willing to bet my 1% royalty that TLG would find a reason not to produce any of them.) Were I running CuuSoo (and serious about crowd-sourcing as a form of product development) I would abolish "CuuSoo" as a theme for sets and make it a development channel for the existing themes. If you were to create a set proposal on CuuSoo, one of the first questions you'd be asked is which (existing) theme did it fit into (Creator, Technic, Architecture, Star Wars, etc.) and before your project could even go public, someone from that theme would need to sign off on its match to the theme and lack of conflict with existing plans. I'd also set up completely separate proposal, browsing and support protocols for new parts, new themes and non-brick products and handle each differently from 'Sets'. If a set made it through review, it would be released as a _regular_ Lego set for its respective theme. The only difference is I'd include an "About the designer" page in the instructions book (as one sometimes sees in the Architecture line) and pay a flat fee (more an honorarium than a percentage cut) to the designer. Perhaps, legally speaking, this just isn't possible. There may be a contract signed in blood somewhere with some massive conglomerate like Disney that says no outside consultants on designs for Star Wars, Lone Ranger, Marvel Super Heroes, whatever. If that's the case, fine, be up front about it and lump it in with existing prohibitions against realistic depictions of war, religion and substance abuse. Don't exploit internet buzz for projects you have no intention/legal option of allowing past the review stage - it may be cheap advertising today but it builds resentment in the long term. I just feel that, as more and more sets make it to 10K only to get shot down and TLG revises the rules to scale down what might make a good _CuuSoo_ set, more and more people will get the impression (valid or not) that TLG really isn't interested in the success or failure of crowd-sourced ideas - they just want people talking about LEGO. They don't want to gamble real money on outside ideas (new specialty molds, high part counts, complex licensing issues, etc) when they have internal products and processes that are already profitable. When it comes to CuuSoo, it feels like it's not about products, it's just about the media buzz; a 1% royalty on a small production run of low priced kits is just the carrot they're dangling in front of us to keep us volunteering content and maintaining the conversation.

I think there _are_ subsidies involved in the price differences, but they're not things under the control of TLG. One aspect of an economy of scale that I think people are overlooking is how easy does the government make it to promote consumerism, and do they use tax dollars to do it. I can't speak for higher prices elsewhere in the world, but in the US, we have cheap fuel; we subsidize trucking; we subsidize airlines and air freight; and, in general, through one inflated budget after another, use tax dollars to push down costs that would (normally?) be passed down to the consumer - (and then we try to get that money back through sales tax, income tax on jobs created, excise taxes, estate taxes, etc. but that's a different issue). For example, due to the wonders of the internet I was able to find out that if I wanted to ship a palette of goods weighing 100 Kilos and taking up a 1 meter cubed in volume from Berlin to Paris it would cost about 130 Euros (173 USD) based on averaging quotes from three random private companies I found online. To ship that same palette from Boston to L.A. (5 times the distance) in the US it would 36 USD, roughly one quarter of the price (I didn't factor in time, but 24 hour delivery would have been much more) Now a 1 meter cube can hold a lot of Lego, but let's say these were big kits and the palette held 4 kits per layer stacked 10 layers tall (40 kits). Amortizing the cost in the US would add 1 dollar to price per kit. In Europe, it jumps to about 3,25 Euro (~4.25 USD) per kit. If there were 100 kits on the palette, the amortization would be spread wider (only 1,30 Euro) so really, the size of the box matters regardless of it content. Keep in mind this is an expense incurred by TLG before they even put the kit on the shelves, this is just to get it to the local distribution warehouse and just one of many factors that _could be_ (just guessing here) contributing to the wild price deltas in different markets. Other issues that crop up relating to scale and shipping is how many times do people need to touch the product. If I know I'm going to sell an entire shipping container-full of Ewok Village via US S@H, I can have my factory pack the palettes, fill the container to the brim, put the container on a train, transfer the container from a train to a boat and ultimately back onto another train which takes it directly to my automated distribution hub. I pay for bulk shipping, clear customs once, pay any applicable duties and tariffs, and I'm go to go. I can do this a lot more cheaply than if I need to unpack the container at some point, then send 2 palettes by truck to A, 1 by truck to B, 6 by Train to C, etc. where at each destination they have to break the palettes into even smaller lots and sent 10 kits here, 5 kits there, and deal with local import declarations, duties, tariffs, etc. In the first scenario, I'm effectively moving one very big thing from point X to point Y across one border (and once at Y, I can charge for shipping explicitly on a per unit basis). In the latter, I need people to unload, make decisions, and repackage things at multiple stops along the journey from point of production to point of sale and that incurs a lot more overhead which, naturally, gets reflected in the price. If I can't even fill an entire palette with all one type of kit (or all the kits for one ultimate destination) the situation gets even worse. So yes, Americans do get good prices, in part due to volume of Lego purchases, but also very much because of our spending habits in general and a government set up to use tax dollars to make cheaper and easier for suppliers to get their products into our grubby little hands (just as airfares to Orlando are some of the cheapest around because the theme parks and the state of Florida pay the airlines to keep it that way) I'll be the first to admit that our railway system is pathetic for a nation of our size and technological capability, but the fuel costs, air, trucking and shipping infrastructure designed to get goods to and from our shores and move things around internally does a pretty impressive job of cutting overhead charges out of the MSRP here. The thing that _I_ more often wonder about (more so than how much more kit X is in Australia than the US) is the relative pricing of Lego in various economies. How does, say, the local MSRP of 10237 Tower of Orthanc compare to other things you could be buying with that money? For example, my wife and I went out to dinner last night (not a particularly fancy place but not McDonalds or anything). We had two appetizers, split a pizza and split a desert. She had a glass of wine, I drank tap water. Food, tip, state and local taxes later we'd spent 107 USD, so when I look at the price for a "big" kit like Tower of Orthanc, I think "that's _only_ the price of dinner, a movie and a couple drinks - stay home and cook a few more nights this month and it's effectively paid for. Out of curiosity, what does dinner and movie cost in Australia, or France or Germany? How do local Lego prices compare with "typical" recreational expenses?

For me, I'd say it's mostly about the build followed by its display value (though I don't have a lot of display space to begin with). Even as a child, my expectations toward "play features" were pretty limited: Give me wheels that turned, doors that opened, propellers that spun and trains that ran on tracks and my imagination could do the rest. I recall when the modern minifigure first came out I didn't really like the posable arms and legs, I preferred my old "slabbies" because I could _imagine_ my slabbies as being more dynamic than the poses the new figures could actually achieve and _seeing_ the arms and legs in an achievable pose somehow made it harder to imagine them in the ideal pose. Build-wise, my preference (or pet peeve when my preference is not satisfied) is for the size of the kit to reflect the scale and complexity of the build. I really dislike it when a "big" kit is actually a collection of small, simple builds. For example, compare LOTR Helm's Deep with Mines of Moria (two of the larger kits in the line). Both are fairly modular builds, which is fine, but with Helm's Deep you _feel_ like you're building _toward_ something with each subassembly (like building the floors of Grand Emporium or Palace Cinema), when you're done you have _a_ big build that you can stand back and admire. Mines of Moria, on the other hand, feels like it was designed for people with short attention spans. It's a big box with a bunch of small builds that can be arranged to recreate a scene from the movie, but it just doesn't _feel_ like you just assembled an 800 piece set. It feels more like you just put together a half dozen small kits and polybags. Even Medieval Market Village (a set which I love, BTW) really feels like two mid-size kits (akin to the 3739 blacksmith's shop) rather than a _big_ kit, but I'm more forgiving of MMV because each of the two main buildings have enough going on that you don't feel like you're just wading through polybag-scale kits. I don't know which build style I would have preferred as a child. Back then, I was lucky to afford anything and most of what I did have would have been polybags and stocking stuffers by today's standards. I suppose, in hindsight, if someone had given me the Mines of Moria kit back then, I would not have complained about the lack of a _big_ build, I would have been so thrilled just to get so many parts I wouldn't have cared if it did even come with instructions.

I've never sold any Lego (given it away, sure) but I do use the excuse with my wife that (unlike my collection of single malts) my collection _is_ a form of investment (and has a rider on our house insurance) and if she outlives me, she should either find it a good home or get a fair price. That said, I know people who use bricklink storefronts to help subsidize their hobby, but it is very much a _hobby_ and a _subsidy_, not a profitable business. The mantra is "sell off the excess of what you already have to enable you to buy something else you want more," not "I will invest in the commodity that is Lego, buy low, sell high, like gold - but with more ABS" I do believe that one _could_ make a business out of the latter mindset, but you really need to treat it as a business at that point. Whether a given set appreciates or not, eventually you need to deal with issues of storage, overhead, working capital, risk of diminishing returns and, perhaps most importantly, the drain on your free time (time that could be spent playing with your collection rather than managing your investment). With that caveat in place, if you still want to explore the Lego Commodities market, I can offer some advice that has worked well for me in trading in other collectables (trading cards, matchbox cars, comics, etc.) as well as passing on a few pointers a fellow with a bricklink store shared with me when I asked him if it was worth the effort to have a storefront: 1) Never trade in anything you don't understand. If you don't follow baseball, don't deal in baseball cards. If you're a Marvel fan, don't assume you understand DC Comics. If love Lego Trains, don't assume that means you understand people who love Bionicle. The collectables market is fickle and die hard fans (i.e. the only people crazy enough to pay over-market for used/discontinued products) can spot an under-informed profiteer a mile away. 2) Never "invest" in something you wouldn't want for yourself. This flows from rule number one, how can you expect something to become popular if it doesn't appeal to you today while people are actively trying to get you to like it? If you are a member of the intended audience for a product (today) AND that product is screaming "Buy Me" when you first see it, chances are good there will be people out there, like you, who will want it tomorrow. 3) Never buy any collectable solely because you think it will be a good investment. This is really just a generalization of rules 1 & 2 for those who weren't paying attention. Historical statistics can only give you probabilities, not a guarantee of profits. There are risks wherever you put your money. While there are certainly profits to be made in the collectables market, there are also so many confounding variables (inflation, taxes, storage costs, shipping, deprecation, supply, demand, global recession, etc.) that come into play between buying an item and ultimately selling it again that one man's anecdotal profit from selling a UCS Millenium Falcon may have no bearing on the price you'll ultimately accept for your Ewok Village five years after it's retired. 4) Buy in threes. If you've isolated an item that passed tests 1, 2, and 3, then buy three of them: 1 to keep, 2 to sell. Ideally, you'd like to sell the second copy to cover the cost of all three and then sell the third for pure profit, but unless you're planning really long term, the chances of the sale price of a Lego kit tripling its original MSRP are pretty slim. More realistically, you want to sell the copies at close to double what you paid for them such that the kits have paid for themselves and returned a profit proportional to the original asking price of the kit. You could buy more than three of something to further amortize the cost of your "to keep" copy over the sale items, but this involves both a larger investment in money and space up front and runs the risk of suppressing the price if you try to sell off too many copies at (roughly) the same time. 5) Buy low. Your chances of reaching a doubling point on the resale improve if your initial costs are less, likewise the break-even point is a lot closer. All other expenses aside, if you bought three copies of a $100 kit then sold off two of them you'd need to get $150 each for the other two get get your "to keep" copy "free". If you get the same three kits during a 20% off sale at Amazon, the price only has to appreciate to $120 (20% over MSRP) to break even. 6) Pure profit is usually a good return. That is to say, if you can get something for free, that someone else will pay for, take their money. In the Lego world this usually translates to promotional poly-bags. Unlike "investments" where you need to pass the laws above, if you got a free mini sopworth camel (or ten, because you had them ring up your purchases separately) and don't want them, get what you can for them. It may not sound like much getting $5 here or $10 there, but when you got it (free) in exchange for money you were going to spend anyway, it's pure profit. 7) Track your investments and know when to cut your losses. Not everything appreciates. The best time to get rid of items that are unlikely to improve is right after you've turned a profit on something else. Inventory maturing in your closest can be as much of a liability as it is an investment. If something is taking up space but unlikely to reach it's break-even point, you may be better off liquidating it. If its worth less now than when you bought it, take the loss and use it as a tax shelter against profits from items that have done better. 8) Never invest more than you are willing to lose - kinda says it all right there. I'll close with a small non-Lego Collectables tale. Back in the 1980's a certain Sci-Fi convention organization used to include an auction event where movie scripts, toys and other collectables were sold. I recall watching as a "rare" Mr Spock whisky decanter sold for several hundred dollars. Everyone applauded - sure it was pricey, but it was Star Trek, an iconic character and a whisky decanter - that's a whole collectable market of its own. It _must_ have been a good investment. The next year, the convention and the auction came back, another Mr Spock decanter was up for bid, again it was advertised as rare and they even cited how much a "similar one" had commanded the previous year. Again it sold for hundreds of dollars. Apparently this had also happened at the convention's other stops (Washington, New York, Atlanta, etc.) selling _one_ decanter in each city, citing its rarity and historic pricing. Some people did some digging and discovered that the auction organizers had a whole shipping container full of them that they'd been trying to get rid of for years. News spread quickly throughout fandom despite the fact that Al Gore hadn't "invented the Internet" yet. The next year, the "Boston" Mr Spock decanter sold for $10 or so. The year after one was raffled off as a door prize. Now 30 years later, I see someone is selling one of these decanters on eBay, the current bid is $25. I hope the seller isn't the same guy who spent several hundred bucks to "win" the bid back in 1982. Collectables trading (even with a "safe bet" like Lego or Star Trek) can be a tricky place to play - tread carefully.

I guess I've always been a bit of an obsessive compulsive when it comes to my builds. I don't think I've ever done a "rainbow build" in my life (and I started with Lego back when you could count the number of available colors on one hand) The closest I come is randomly mixing old grey with new bley - and even then it's done deliberately to create weathered-rock effects. To this day, I'm still a bit OCD with respect to gratuitous color mixing. I recall one MOC I was working on where I remarked to my wife that I was going to have to stop until I could get more brick because I'd run out of tan. She looked at the WIP and pointed out all (structural) the tan bricks in the middle that would never be seen in the final build. She said, "Can't you free up these and just do this inside stuff with those buckets of bright red you never use? No one will ever see them by the time your done." To which I relied, "True, but I'll know they're there."

I don't think it's a rude comment all. I think the big/premium price D2C AFOL stuff is really just a question of marketing and personal taste. Some people love mini-figs, some like playability, others want media tie-ins/licensed themes, etc. For me, I savor a big build and the subject matter is secondary. I find building big kits relaxing. I picked up the Taj Mahal because I thought it would be fun and interesting to build (which it was) and it's been gathering dust ever since. I'll likely do the same with the opera house. If they were to release a 6000 piece castle (be it Neuschwanstien (real) or Hogwarts (fictional) ) I'd happy start saving my pennies and pick one up. Big builds certainly aren't for everyone (and when I was a kid I could never even dream of being able to afford half the things TLG markets these days) but I'm glad that every couple of years they do come out with sets like the Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, Taj Mahal and Tower Bridge - or on the fictional side of things, the Death Star, UCS Falcon and Super Star Destroyer. There's just something terribly satisfying about watching a big, seemingly monolithic model grow out of small parts that you just don't get from smaller, immediate gratification/short attention span kits - not that there's anything wrong with smaller, reasonably priced kits, it's just a different experience.

I found the nylon too tough on the ABS of the Lego parts. In some of the applications, I'd just tie a knot on the end of the floss (for added thickness, tuck it in the underside of a brick and click the brick into place. IN others, I'd run the line in the "gap" between two adjacent bricks, side to side or top to bottom. The floss was thin enough and deformed enough such that the pieces fit together while also anchoring the cord. Trying to do the same thing with fishing line scratched up and cut into the brick slightly. The damage wasn't dramatic, and it was confined to internal parts, but it annoyed me none the less so I switched to dental floss. When used in a less constrained application (such as a sling under a model or looped through the hole of a technic part) fishing line should be fine, it's just when it's rubbing against sharp corners in tight spots that I've had issues.

Fishing line alone should be fine for small to average size stuff. For big models, though, getting the load points right can be problematic, as they tend to sag, flex or decouple with long term, unexpected tension and compression along their bodies. I've used dental floss _inside_ models to transfer loads laterally and reduce sag on heavier elements. The floss, particularly the ribbon type such as Glide is thin enough to fit between bricks even when there isn't a clean tie-off point or even wrapped spirally around internal members to balance tension and compression when the load direction is effectively reversed. It allows me to distribute the load more evenly across the bottom (normal load) bricks and to create tiny loops of floss as hanger points on the top surface of the model. Once the internal webbing is done, I simply run fishing line from the ceiling to the hanger points. The technique has worked, so far, on the UCS Falcon, the Super Star Destroyer and the (#10019) Blockade Runner from 2001 (whose stickers are peeling off, but hasn't warped despite hanging from four points for over a decade). The down side, of course is that you really need to build the floss right into the model as you're putting it together (or as I did with the Blockade Runner, rebuild it once you realize it doesn't hang well with just a couple loops of fishing line at either end). Good luck.

Nice idea. Let's see if I can remember what I posted where. I have... The Pillars of the Kings: http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=74130 Minas Morgul: http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=81768 Minas Tirith: http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=70544 The Corsairs of Umbar: http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=76814 Good luck with this useful and interesting project.

In general, I think swapping out most commented for most viewed was a marginal improvement, in that most commented seemed to be pretty static - it remains to be seen (no pun intended) if "most viewed" manages to mix things up a bit. For the amount of screen real estate devoted to that rotating banner however, I'd prefer to see the space better utilized. It's been my experience (in the past year and half or so of participating on the site) that new projects get a lot of visibility in the first few days then languish, unnoticed for months with a vote or two seeping in every day or two. Eventually, some projects make it past some internal threshold and the system starts suggesting them again and support turns into a steady stream for several new votes every day even though the project often hasn't changed and the creator hasn't done anything extra to promote it. To me, this suggests that Cuusoo needs to do more to promote good, but languishing projects from the middle of the pack rather than devoting 45 square inches of screen real-estate to pushing the same 6 projects 2/3 of the time (the other third is the "new" banner and actually does rotate to show frequently changing content) The "new" and "most supported" panels are fine (though I might change "most supported" to - "last week's most supported" or similar time based filter) , but if I were running the show I'd ditch "most view/commented" in favor of a "daily spotlight" consisting of three random picks of the day: 1 project with between 1000-5000 support; 1 project with between 500-1000 support; and one project (at least on month old) with between 100-500 support. The minimum of 100 support to qualify for the drawing is to filter out projects likely that haven't matured enough to draw an audience and is a passive quality proxy. The cap at 5000 support is there because after 5000 support, the project is pretty much going to get noticed anyway (first page of search results, frequently suggested as a "related project" etc.. The three buckets are to try and counter this "rich get richer" "related project" algorithm issue that Cuusoo has had since the early days and give the middle of the pack projects a better chance to get noticed. People are lazy enough about supporting Cuusoo proposals without making them have to actively search for projects that don't show up on the main discovery page (or have to support one project in order to get the system to suggest others like it). There are plenty of great projects there in the 100-1000 support range that have just been gathering internet dust because people don't feel like wading through 25 pages of "most supported" search results to find a project that appeals to them. At least with a random daily showcase on the discovery page, some of the projects could get some exposure.

Drawing upon my _vast_ experience of one whole event (which wasn't Brickfete ) I can offer: 1) I chose to go to my first event as an exhibitor in part because the event I was going to had all sorts of special sessions, games, etc. that was only open to exhibitors and it felt like I get more out of the adventure by diving in head first rather than just wading from table to table during public hours. It was a good choice, the private events, members-only viewing of MOCs and after hours stuff was more fun than the "official exhibit" itself (not that that wasn't gratifying as well. 2) I don't know about crossing borders with a MOC (large or otherwise) but I'd think the bigger issue is just making sure you can pack it to minimize any damage in transit while still being able to open it for customs inspection. I made custom boxes for my stuff and was pleasantly surprised at how well they held up despite numerous pot holes and sharing the roadway with some pretty lousy drivers. 3) I wasn't part of any LUG when I went (which did put me a little on the outside of some of the established social circles at first) but my MOCs quickly drew the attention of several LUG members and at least a dozen people representing three different LUGs asked/invited/begged me to consider joining their organization. Again my experience is anecdotal, but I have to think that rather than frown upon non-LUG members showing up, LUGs would be more inclined to seek out and engage potential new members (strength in numbers, new blood, and all that sort of thing). 4) I brought four MOCs (two of which were fairly large) as that was what fit easily in my car. I was sitting next to someone who brought over two dozen (small, but plentiful). The organizers encouraged people to bring as many as we wanted and promised to find table space for whatever showed up. Many people who visited my area said very nice things like "Just these four huh? Next year bring more, I really want to see more of your stuff..." Which sounds a little cheesy now that I'm typing it, but it felt really good to hear when people were actually saying it. Again, I am most definitely NOT an expert at this sort of thing, but from a newbie perspective, I can say that being an exhibitor was worth the hassles and worries of getting my stuff to and from the show. No one held it against me that I wasn't a member of a LUG though I may sign up for one at some point now. I plan on going back and probably bringing even more stuff with me next time. I hope you decide to go to an event, and whether you decide to exhibit or not, I hope you have as positive an experience as I did at my first show.

Well Brickfair New England 2013 is history and just to give a little closure to this thread, I'll add that: 1) I _did_ end up going 2) My MOCs made it there (and back) with very minor travel issues 3) I met some great folks (including several people who DO apparently exist outside of Eurobricks) and saw some spectacular builds 4) I had a wonderful time talking to both other AFOLs as well as kids and parents in the general public about my works and the hobby in general 5) I won several kits, got some good bargains and overall left with more Lego parts than I came in with -and- 6) I won two Brickies (Should Be A Kit award and Public Fan Favorite award) I was honored just to be nominated and shocked that I actually won. I'd like to a send a big "thank you" to anyone reading this who voted for my stuff. There were some very talented builders and really great MOCs there so I really appreciated it every time some one told me one of my guys was their favorite. I'd also like to thank everyone here who encouraged me to go and I hope others who are sitting on the fence about being a first time exhibitor will find this thread. Other than being a little hoarse from talking, a little sleep deprived from late nights and early mornings and little sore from standing for many hours, I'd say that my experience entirely positive and far more enriching (and downright fun) than I was anticipating. Even my wife (who is not really into LEGO but came along for moral support) was getting in on the fun and is looking forward to returning next year. So (to borrow an old slogan from Nike): If you're thinking of becoming an exhibitor at a LEGO show, just do it.

Faefrost's calculations are dead-on. When I was working on this guy, I started with description from the books, backed it up with models built for the movie and, at one point figured out that it Minas Tirith were built to the same warped scale as the modular buildings line, it would be half a meter taller than my house (a two story building with a "nearly" walk-in basement and small attic). I can appreciate the opinion some hold where no Minas Tirith (play set) is better than a grossly out of scale one, but I also feel that there are enough locales within the city to create more viable play sets (Grond at the gate, the throne room, the court yard, etc.) to pay homage to the importance of the place - similar to the piecemeal Hogwarts castle treatment. TLG never released anything close to a complete minifigure scale Hogwarts, but over the years they put out enough bits to make a pretty impressive keep if you took the time to merge things together. And by the way, for those who have been debating scale, according to the books Orthanc is supposed to be 500 ft tall so if the new Orthanc kit were _really_ to scale it would be nearly four meters tall. The top of the White Tower of Ecthelion (the spire at the top of Minas Tirith in the movie) was a thousand feet above the Pelennor Fields and the tower itself was said to be 50 fathoms (300 ft) tall, so, to scale Minas Tirith would be double the height but roughly 11 times the mass of Orthanc. The exact height of Barad Dur is never given in the books or any of Tolkien's (known) notes other than to refer to Orthanc as a "little" copy and to say that it dwarfed Minas Tirith. People with far more time on their hands than I have written long theses on the subject but I'm particularly fond of one theory that puts it somewhere in the 3000 ft range (+/- 200 ft). Tthis is based on the assumption that the curvature of Middle Earth is similar to our own planet, the scale of Tolkien's own maps and the height of the tower with respect to Mt Doom (whose height IS given) on the horizon from various observation points. Even at minifigure scale, a Barad Dur model might start cracking LEGO bricks under its own weight. (In the books, the foundations of Barad Dur had to be forged by the power of the rings because the keep was too massive for the mantle of the earth to bear it - that's why it fell down when the ring was destroyed. And one other point for those who didn't read the books carefully: Minas Tirith is called the White City because of the White Tree in it's courtyard not because the city itself is white. The text actually says the lower wall is black - made from the same material as Orthanc, the middle tiers are smokey, light gray marble that shines with a pearly white glare in the sunlight, and that only the Tower of Ecthelion IS actually white. The movie version takes some liberties with this. (Sorry if that was a rant it's a bit of pet peeve of mine)

Done. Happy to help and curious to see the outcome. Best of luck with getting a decent sample size.

Oh you are such a tease As for replacement sets, I've been hoping for a Eiffel Tower sized Space Needle but since you likened the form factor to the Taj Mahal, I'm going to cross my fingers and wish for a White House or a Guggenheim Museum. In the mean time, I getter start budgeting for another Tower Bridge before it goes away.