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I saw a video awhile back in which the person only sorted by color. He ended up with single color bins (like you) and his rationale was that while he usually knew what color he wanted to work with, having unsorted parts all in the same color allowed him to discover elements that he could use which he otherwise might not have thought about using. As someone who likes to sort by part rather than color, that gave me pause to reconsider, especially for my own unsorted mess (which is not quite to Apocaclarence” (should it be “Appocaclearance”?) levels but is somewhat substantial nonetheless.
I don’t know what your final storage looks like but for me each of those bins would be another week on average of sorting into individual parts. See you in another year! 😂
>> (should it be “Appocaclearance”?)
Ha, it’s interesting that you say that. Clarence’s name is an homage to Clarence Oveur, the pilot from the original Airplane! movie. Unfortunately, Oveur is a pedophile, so I really didn’t think that one through, but I chose it because my (2nd) favorite scene in the movie is “We’ve got clearance, Clarence.” “Roger, Roger. What’s our vector, Victor?” “Over, Oveur.”
>> Love the file name!
Thanks, I decided not to post old pile photos or a full history of Apocaclarence. The short version is that in 2008, I got an unprecedented haul for my birthday, and around that time I was also watching Jericho on DVD. So when I took all the sets apart and the pieces were in a giant pile, I looked down and said “Huh, it looks like the aftermath of the bombs dropping”, so I put Clarence on top of the pile, called him Clarence of the Apocalypse, and took a couple pics. He’s in the pic I posted of the 2023 pile, but he’s really hard to see, he’s standing on a tan 2×6 plate in the middle.
>> Looks quite pretty I think.
I agree, I consider it a monument to how good Lego is at making nice bright colors.
>> I don’t know what your final storage looks like but for me each of those bins would be another week on average of sorting into individual parts. See you in another year!
The problem is that currently the rest of my Lego collection is in a state of organization that I would describe as “in progress” (which also applies to the rest of my house). For some of it, the situation is excellent, and for some of it, it’s poor. There’s bags of parts from previous color sorts and MOCs that only got partially subsorted, or not at all. There’s all kinds of unconsolidated bags from BrickLink, LUGBulk, and the PaB wall. There’s parts from MOCs that still need to be rinsed of dust. There’s colors that had fit in the same container for ten years or more and finally outgrew that container, and so they’re randomly spread across multiple containers. Ah, the agony of the AFOL.
>> As someone who likes to sort by part rather than color, that gave me pause to reconsider
Frost and I talked about that a little bit when he n Jonah were here to help, he said he sorts by color because that’s the way he builds, and I said so do I. We’re both big fans of the classic space series from the 70s through the 90s that were done on very specific color schemes. I currently have four space projects and one castle project that are specific color schemes as well, the most obvious being the one I just put on display in March. I also plan to do Febrovery some year.
>> his rationale was that while he usually knew what color he wanted to work with, having unsorted parts all in the same color allowed him to discover elements that he could use which he otherwise might not have thought about using.
I’ve done that too, again, as recently as this past March. I have a pretty good handle on what Lego parts are available, and what’s in my collection, but there’s a lot, especially in colors like gray and black, and so it’s easy to forget about some of the less common ones. After I joined the LUG, I started organizing some of the parts by project, but that can run into complications if their parts needs start to overlap, or the scope of the project changes.
I’ve found that sorting by color speeds up the process, because as far as I can tell (I haven’t looked up any scientific studies), the eye picks out the colors much faster than the shapes. There’s some things that ultimately won’t be organized by color because the color rarely matters – the most obvious example is Technic axles, bushings, gears, and pins, which are all stored together. For Apocaclarence 2012, I pulled them out into their own piles as I did the color sort, but I came to the conclusion that this had just slowed me down. Even though the color won’t matter in the long run, it’s easier to sort them by color first, and then weed them out during the category sub-sort.
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