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Comment by HankB99 | Hacker News Reader

When our kids were little, all of their Lego pieces went into a plastic bathub that they could no longer take baths in. I can still hear the noise they made pawing[1] through all the pieces looking for just the right one for the present assembly. That made up for the occasional piece I stepped on in the dark.

I hope to hear the same noise when our grandkids get their Lego collections going. At present their strategy seems to be to spread the pieces out on the floor. Step carefully!

[1] 'pawing' is not really the right word as it implies an animal movement. It was really a careful noisy search.

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We used to have a 65L plastic storage bucket, but lined it with an old bed sheet, and then the lego poured on top.

This means that when the kids want to play, you can lift the entire collection out of the bucket with the sheet, then lay the sheet on the floor.

When they're finished, you pick the sheet up by the corners, and place the thing back into the box. We rarely had orphan parts flying around the house because the sheet both gave the kids a defined "play" area, as well as a much more convenient way to handle a large amount of bricks.

This is exactly what I had as a kid, after too many incidents of my father encountering loose Lego bricks on the way to refill the woodstove in the dead of night

This is no accident, please see exhibit 'A' as evidence:

https://imgur.com/a/Z3tq7

This is genius. I't obvious it's genius because it's so obvious. Once it's said you know it's just the solution you wish you had thought of yourself years ago because it's so obvious and would have saved you so much trouble. That is the true hallmark of genius.

As a father of a few children with multiple bins of lego, thank you.

My bricks were in a circular denim sheet, that pulled closed into a bag by tightening a string that was threaded through eyelets along the perimeter. I believe it was even Lego branded.

My wife's aunt just gave us one of those this summer! I had never seen one made of denim before, I didn't realize it was a marketed product.

My sons and I had all "their" (our!) Lego in a few large plastic tubs and we "pawed" or sifted through these for hours. It's an OK solution, but the problems with it come from the frustration of not finding pieces and also the damage to pieces over time.

I don't know if Lego is getting weaker, or if they just have more elaborate shapes nowadays but when I was a kid back in the 80s I can't remember ever having a broken piece of Lego. Maybe from stepping on one, but not just by sifting through parts. With the tubs approach recently we've had a few twisted or even snapped parts. The 1x1 c-grips collapse, 1x1 "cheeses" snap in half, and that Lego wheel arch... just seeing one of these get flung around in the Lego-soup makes me nervous.

I bought a few small drawers and a compartmentalized case, all designed for sewing parts, to keep the smaller and more fragile parts in and we separated stuff out as we assembled. It makes the whole thing a lot more fun having it even just a bit sorted like that, without going crazy into organization.

> I don't know if Lego is getting weaker

Yes, the new Lego is definitely more brittle than than the old, and also less capable of dealing with tensile stress. I have a couple of examples of very recent bricks that spontaneously broke along a side wall simply by being stacked on other bricks.

The first formulation (Cellulose-Acetate) tends to deform and warp, the first generation ABS bricks are as good as indestructible unless you use main force.

At the moment Lego produces both in Denmark and in various locations around the world and there is a real difference in quality between batches from different locations.

You can also tell by holding up bricks to the light, the more transparent ones (relative to other bricks of the same density and color, best to test with yellow, white and red) are the weaker ones.

Sheesh, is nothing sacred? Thanks for confirming my hunch.

I too had the big bin of Legos when I was a kid. Thinking back on it, I actually preferred that sort of chaotic organization rather than having things sorted by color/type/etc. Part of the enjoyment of Legos for me was not building some specific thing I had some mental image of, but rather the browsing (initial intention + randomness) that would yield new creative possibilities.

I think that's also why, despite my best attempts, I never got into any of the computer Lego modelling tools; some of the fun was lost for me when I could select any piece on demand.

I think "pawing" is a fine description of the action. I also like "slushing". :)

I make Lego (murals?, mandalas?, dioramas?) art and I am sure when I lived in my studio apartment my slushing around in my mess of parts was a joy to my neighbor on the other side of the wall...

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