I sincerely applaud everything ending up on IA. However, if you're searching for specific instructions brickinstructions is excellent as it is far more navigable. For a random example see Starguider¹. I wonder if someone has already scraped that site for IA, beyond simply praying to the Wayback Machine.
That is great. I could see a lot it was in the wayback machine, but I have no idea what the pipeline for that is. Poking around from your link was informative, thanks!
Thank you for sharing this. I’m going to show it to my 6 year old and he’s going to lose his mind. Great way to make use of my massive box of childhood legos and empty summer hours.
When brickinstructions goes belly up, or just messes up its URLs for shits and giggles, you will need to go through archive.org to find out what used to be at that URL.
My kids being 4 and 6 means we’re full into Lego. I grew up with two brothers so we have like three hundred pounds of it. But lost most of the instructions.
It’s been amazing to go online and find any instruction and re-assemble these kits.
It also made me realize something: half the value of buying a kit these days is that you aren’t spending hours finding needles in a 300lb haystack.
> It also made me realize something: half the value of buying a kit these days is that you aren’t spending hours finding needles in a 300lb haystack.
What! That is the best part!
Wading through a mound of Lego has to be one of the most satisfying sounds I know, the clatter of a bajillion pieces of precision plastic, each with their different cavities and sonority, moving around each handful you scrape off to the side... Good times.
In the rare occasion I get a Lego set nowadays (no kids yet), the first thing I do is open every bag of pieces into a tray so I can do it on a smaller scale.
You will know no fury as when your kids intentionally mix up all the pieces for fun. We have hundreds of LEGO people, and my kids intentionally dismembered them into their individual pieces (including HANDS!). But how can you get angry at kids playing??? twitch
I recently had the realization... I've carried this enjoyment onwards into how I store parts for hobbies. While I use compartmentalized containers for things, compartments are still a mix of parts. I can search for quite a while without getting frustrated, just knowing, "those servo mounting brackets are in one of these two containers in the garage..."
I don't buy or aspire to own new Lego as an adult, but I'm still basically doing the same thing I did as a kid: every time I decide to do a hardware project is me digging through my bins of assorted parts instead Lego parts.
Oh and of course, my desk is perpetually just as messy as the floor was as a kid, and I'm often fidgeting seeing how random things do/don't fit together.
(also, also... building the set? nah, building my own things without instructions, and similarly writing my own code...)
Agree! My partner disagrees though. She wants the LEGO organized by color or set. I find this blasphemous. It’s legit harder for me to find pieces when they’re sorted like this. My brain is tuned with specialized LEGO bin stirring techniques that reliably turn up what I need… but that doesn’t work at all when the piece has been squirreled away where it “belongs”!
> Wading through a mound of Lego has to be one of the most satisfying sounds I know
There are two sounds I associate with Lego. The one you describe and the other.
The words you can find and the tone you utter them with when you unexpectedly stand on a piece, or even better, when you kneel on a bit when trying to find the tv remote.
> It also made me realize something: half the value of buying a kit these days is that you aren’t spending hours finding needles in a 300lb haystack.
It's a bit of work but I found enjoyment in sorting my old childhood Lego. Don't do colors, do categories (bricks, slopes, plates, etc). Once done, I could complete my old childhood models even faster than the unsorted ones you buy new. It also lowers the threshold to break it down and build something else since it's so easy to find the parts. On the downside, it takes more space than a single bin.
>>*half the value of buying a kit these days is that you aren’t spending hours finding needles in a 300lb haystack.*
Are you NUTS?
Are you trying to shame my 1980s values with LEGO?
"I KNOW that FN piece is in here!!!! I JUST SAW IT!!!!"
You're robbing your kids of a life lesson. and better image recognition, memory, sorting processing thoughts, etc.
There are so many lessons embedded in working with LEGO that can only be learnt through the frustration of a F-ton of brix in a bin and your looking for that specific 1x2 -- or worse yet, 1x1 smooth piece.
I used to buy things in bulk from LEGO at the mall in San Jose and just have bins of smooth pieces and other were parts...
I get what you're saying, but in a large pile, finding the right piece is easily 10x harder now because the number of unique LEGO parts is much, much higher than when you and I were kids.
You need a rule that you cannot mix more than 2000 pieces from different kits. Basically 1/3 of those organizer boxes. A balance between search ability and organization, otherwise you get in these situations where it’s not feasible to rebuild a kit that you have, it’s like mixing different engine parts and expect to build that same engine
> you aren't spending hours finding needles in a 300lb haystack.
I guess that's for people who have a specific thing in mind that they wanted to build. I find a lot fun just picking out random pieces and then thinking about where to attach them afterwards.
I disagree. A whole bunch about Lego is the search. I was recently reintroduced by my son (5) and the fun of searching for what we want to try to complete a build - and occasionally redesigning due to what we find - is amazing.
Also helps him learn to adjust on the fly, which is a great thing to learn at a young age.
I’ll have to check it out again. Last time it looked like it wanted a subscription.
I would just like to pay once for an app that 100% offline scans for blocks. Let me pick an instruction book and begin pointing out pieces to me that belong in the set.
Probably an age thing, but I’ve never understood the point of Lego instructions. Or the sets.
The whole point of Lego was creative free form building. Remove that & it’s dull as hell. It just becomes model building with poor quality models as the result.
I’m happy other people find it fun, but to me it misses the entire point in favor of weak licensed “kits”.
For us growing up, the point of the sets was that you got a cool spaceship or whatever, which you would put your personal Lego guy into, park near your "base", and play with until some other project demanded the parts. Then it would be disassembled mercilessly and consigned to the bin as grist for the constantly evolving construction project laid out on our much-abused air hockey table.
If a set was a particularly cool build, we might disassemble it and then rebuild it - but most of the time, once something got taken apart, no one was ever going to bother trying to reconstruct it from the manual, since doing so would have involved finding all 500 necessary pieces in the mega-bin.
Some people want to play with playsets. Some people want to display models. Some people want to create art. Some people want to construct machines. Some people want to assert allegiance. Some people want to collect.
All of these aims are valid. The diversity of ways to buy LEGO supports them all, while maintaining a high-quality, largely compatible, reasonably consistent medium.
In recent years, there is a general drift towards "collectible display models". This means that the piece count in most sets is inflated by a majority of small "finishing" pieces. The models are finicky to build with lots of unusual building techniques (attaching bricks on sidewalls, for example) and are not easy to repurpose into something else in a reasonable amount of time.
In the 1990s, it was a "construction toy" first, playset second, display model last. A kid could take any set and rebuild it into something else in an hour or so. Now, they would need more time only to sort the tiny 1x1 pieces before starting to build anything.
I'm in my early forties but I still grew up with instructions and sets. Usually I'd assemble a set and probably learn a thing or two along the way, then I'd tear the sets down and build stuff myself.
As a father of three, that's exactly how I see my kids using the sets today. The sets get built once, then they get torn down and the bricks get reused.
I personally agree about the whole point of Lego being free form building - and I still have some Lego magazines from the days when that was explicitly encouraged by Lego - but you need kits and instructions to get to the point where you can do free form building. It's like composing music, you're going to have a very difficult time of it if you don't first study a whole lot of existing, well-constructed music.
Neither did I till I had a kid. My kid loves following instructions, builds a set a few times, then he goes into creative mode and builds his own way. Instructions helped my kid learn the basics of instruction following which is a good skill to have for a 5 year old.
The purpose of the instructions is to learn the techniques. First you build with the instructions, then you tear it apart and build what you want.
Not everyone is into the instructions -- my daughter follows them meticulously and will only build with instructions. My son refuses to follow instructions and will only "master build".
When I was a kid I'd build with the instructions, and eventually I destroyed everything and built a whole city from scratch.
Growing up, myself and my siblings built sets when we first got them as gifts, but after that they went in the pile. We would build whatever was in our imagination, from the multicolored heap.
Now I have my own kids, and they all want to build sets from instructions. The odd time we'll dive into the pile of orphaned bits and build a house or a boat or something, but mostly they want to recreate what they remember. My wife spends hours finding all the pieces of a set and bagging them up for the kids to build later (so she's gonna love this)
It's tempting to say "kids nowadays" but I think it's just different personality types. In other media, my kids are far more creative and imaginative than I ever was, but with Lego sets they prefer to recreate the perfect image than make a hodge podge thing that never existed.
The fun of building new sets off instructions is the satisfying-ness. You know the instructions are correct, that no pieces are missing and all pieces click together satisfyingly into the result, that looks and feels nice. Each click is satisfying.
It is a whole lot different from tinkering with arduino hats/sw, as frustration can creep in if things don't work as expected.
I like both. I think Lego sets are in many ways my first experience of technical documentation and I still use those skills. It also helped me learn about how sets went together so I could design my own. Finally, I wanted to play with what was on the box.
> The whole point of Lego was creative free form building. Remove that & it’s dull as hell.
The point is that Lego can be played with in a bunch of ways. It's parts that you can do whatever with, and it has instructions for one or more models that you can make. Some people like the sheer possibilities of making things up, and some people find that daunting. Lego supports both, and anything in between.
Following the instructions does teach you techniques that you can use on designing your own builds. It's a way to learn from experts.
I am in-between - so, the way I used instructions was for ideas on how things could be put together that were "non-obvious".
I would build it once, then play with that model for a bit, then deconstruct it, put it into my box of loose LEGO and then build whatever I wanted - sometimes it would look similar, but it was never the same way twice.
I fail to understand expensive sets that get built and sit on shelves or in glass enclosures... Might as well break out the Kragle (I think many people failed to see the point of that movie...)
I'm with you. I remember my childhood experience with Legos. Me and a friend down the road would drag out this big bucket full of random stuff. We'd build forts, and then crazy many-wheeled trucks that would assault them.
The whole thing was about those designs just springing from the imagination, and I really don't get what fun building toward a prescribed design would be, especially since it's so low fidelity.
There are no 'models' to build, and the "instructions" that come with it are more a discussion of architectural principles, as adapted for Lego as needed.
Yeah we never had sets or instructions as a kid (of the 80s). But now doing sets it's pretty relaxing, fun, easy. It's a puzzle. Eventually everything ends up in a heap like other comments mention. I imagine once the heap is big enough we'll go back to creative free form building with the variety of generic and tailored pieces we've accrued.
Free building is great, but my experience is that my young son also wants to build his sense of competence - following the steps correctly, fixing mistakes, and making something exactly like the picture. Sure, he plays with it for a minute and then tears it apart to make something original - but, like you said, that’s the beauty of Lego.
I love following instructions. It's so relaxing for me to just follow without having to figure anything out. Building my own stuff with Lego would be a completely different thing and I never enjoyed that, probably because I'm not very good at it.
It gives you a core set of patterns for going off on your own and building. Think of it as lego practice that shows you a neat model at the end you can then scrap :)
I didn’t. That’s my point. Kits were rare (usually just suggestions with a slight subset of blocks) and most “sets” were 100s of pieces & so infinite options to build.
Now that’s still available but VERY much tertiary.
One of these days, I want to learn enough computer vision to write an LEGO instruction booklet to LCAD convertor that could be fed old instructions and generate a 3D model of the set. An archive of the instructions is nice, but a virtual archive of sets would be nicer.
Over the last several years I've made a habit of downloading PDF manuals for many things I own and saving them in a Google Drive folder for safe-keeping.
You never know when you need one until you do and it's a nightmare if you lost it!
Readit News
¹ https://lego.brickinstructions.com/m/lego_instructions/set/6...
[0]: https://archive.fart.website/archivebot/viewer/job/avlad
Edit: What this means is you can open any* link to lego.brickinstructions.com and see it in the wayback machine (IA ingests these archives)
*maybe not the mobile view you linked, not links after the job ran, not pages that couldn't be found in a crawl
I think the lego itself is still somewhere at my parents place, but the instructions were lost long ago
I played so many hours with this one...
It’s been amazing to go online and find any instruction and re-assemble these kits.
It also made me realize something: half the value of buying a kit these days is that you aren’t spending hours finding needles in a 300lb haystack.
What! That is the best part!
Wading through a mound of Lego has to be one of the most satisfying sounds I know, the clatter of a bajillion pieces of precision plastic, each with their different cavities and sonority, moving around each handful you scrape off to the side... Good times.
In the rare occasion I get a Lego set nowadays (no kids yet), the first thing I do is open every bag of pieces into a tray so I can do it on a smaller scale.
You will know no fury as when your kids intentionally mix up all the pieces for fun. We have hundreds of LEGO people, and my kids intentionally dismembered them into their individual pieces (including HANDS!). But how can you get angry at kids playing??? twitch
My friend, let me introduce you to this Spotify playlist: LEGO White Noise [1]
[1] https://open.spotify.com/album/6qZUya0mkucuxvoIp4akVT?si=RgH...
I don't buy or aspire to own new Lego as an adult, but I'm still basically doing the same thing I did as a kid: every time I decide to do a hardware project is me digging through my bins of assorted parts instead Lego parts.
Oh and of course, my desk is perpetually just as messy as the floor was as a kid, and I'm often fidgeting seeing how random things do/don't fit together.
(also, also... building the set? nah, building my own things without instructions, and similarly writing my own code...)
There are two sounds I associate with Lego. The one you describe and the other.
The words you can find and the tone you utter them with when you unexpectedly stand on a piece, or even better, when you kneel on a bit when trying to find the tv remote.
It's a bit of work but I found enjoyment in sorting my old childhood Lego. Don't do colors, do categories (bricks, slopes, plates, etc). Once done, I could complete my old childhood models even faster than the unsorted ones you buy new. It also lowers the threshold to break it down and build something else since it's so easy to find the parts. On the downside, it takes more space than a single bin.
Are you NUTS?
Are you trying to shame my 1980s values with LEGO?
"I KNOW that FN piece is in here!!!! I JUST SAW IT!!!!"
You're robbing your kids of a life lesson. and better image recognition, memory, sorting processing thoughts, etc.
There are so many lessons embedded in working with LEGO that can only be learnt through the frustration of a F-ton of brix in a bin and your looking for that specific 1x2 -- or worse yet, 1x1 smooth piece.
I used to buy things in bulk from LEGO at the mall in San Jose and just have bins of smooth pieces and other were parts...
My guess is that is why techies keep inventing their own Lego sorting machines
I guess that's for people who have a specific thing in mind that they wanted to build. I find a lot fun just picking out random pieces and then thinking about where to attach them afterwards.
Also helps him learn to adjust on the fly, which is a great thing to learn at a young age.
I would just like to pay once for an app that 100% offline scans for blocks. Let me pick an instruction book and begin pointing out pieces to me that belong in the set.
Fingers crossed.
But for whatever reason, the scans are poor quality and very dark, and it can be hard to make out what piece is which. These ones look much better
This can't be true: I am very sure that there exist Lego Technic models from before 1996, which is the oldest year that can be selected.
The whole point of Lego was creative free form building. Remove that & it’s dull as hell. It just becomes model building with poor quality models as the result.
I’m happy other people find it fun, but to me it misses the entire point in favor of weak licensed “kits”.
If a set was a particularly cool build, we might disassemble it and then rebuild it - but most of the time, once something got taken apart, no one was ever going to bother trying to reconstruct it from the manual, since doing so would have involved finding all 500 necessary pieces in the mega-bin.
Some people want to play with playsets. Some people want to display models. Some people want to create art. Some people want to construct machines. Some people want to assert allegiance. Some people want to collect.
All of these aims are valid. The diversity of ways to buy LEGO supports them all, while maintaining a high-quality, largely compatible, reasonably consistent medium.
In the 1990s, it was a "construction toy" first, playset second, display model last. A kid could take any set and rebuild it into something else in an hour or so. Now, they would need more time only to sort the tiny 1x1 pieces before starting to build anything.
As a father of three, that's exactly how I see my kids using the sets today. The sets get built once, then they get torn down and the bricks get reused.
Not everyone is into the instructions -- my daughter follows them meticulously and will only build with instructions. My son refuses to follow instructions and will only "master build".
When I was a kid I'd build with the instructions, and eventually I destroyed everything and built a whole city from scratch.
Every kid is different.
Now I have my own kids, and they all want to build sets from instructions. The odd time we'll dive into the pile of orphaned bits and build a house or a boat or something, but mostly they want to recreate what they remember. My wife spends hours finding all the pieces of a set and bagging them up for the kids to build later (so she's gonna love this)
It's tempting to say "kids nowadays" but I think it's just different personality types. In other media, my kids are far more creative and imaginative than I ever was, but with Lego sets they prefer to recreate the perfect image than make a hodge podge thing that never existed.
It is a whole lot different from tinkering with arduino hats/sw, as frustration can creep in if things don't work as expected.
The point is that Lego can be played with in a bunch of ways. It's parts that you can do whatever with, and it has instructions for one or more models that you can make. Some people like the sheer possibilities of making things up, and some people find that daunting. Lego supports both, and anything in between.
Following the instructions does teach you techniques that you can use on designing your own builds. It's a way to learn from experts.
Indeed: the exact opposite of a set of instructions & specific, custom produced, build pieces.
I would build it once, then play with that model for a bit, then deconstruct it, put it into my box of loose LEGO and then build whatever I wanted - sometimes it would look similar, but it was never the same way twice.
I fail to understand expensive sets that get built and sit on shelves or in glass enclosures... Might as well break out the Kragle (I think many people failed to see the point of that movie...)
The whole thing was about those designs just springing from the imagination, and I really don't get what fun building toward a prescribed design would be, especially since it's so low fidelity.
Like I understand the appeal of model building but Lego models aren’t very good models & look like ass compared to (often a lot cheaper) model kits.
https://www.lego.com/en-gb/product/studio-21050
There are no 'models' to build, and the "instructions" that come with it are more a discussion of architectural principles, as adapted for Lego as needed.
It's like painting by numbers. Or drawing from one of those "how to draw a pirate" instructional guides.
It's a completely different thing.
I know a guy who prefers the instructions. He builds them and then keeps them on display, on shelves and such.
Now that’s still available but VERY much tertiary.
One of these days, I want to learn enough computer vision to write an LEGO instruction booklet to LCAD convertor that could be fed old instructions and generate a 3D model of the set. An archive of the instructions is nice, but a virtual archive of sets would be nicer.
https://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/fll
You never know when you need one until you do and it's a nightmare if you lost it!