Download Instructions for More Than 6,800 Lego Kits at the Internet Archive | Hacker News Reader

Download Instructions for More Than 6,800 Lego Kits at the Internet Archive

openculture.com

205 pointsrcarmo43 comments

Dupe from original source last week? Discussion recommended https://lego.brickinstructions.com.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36616398

I thought this was weird because you can get a lot of set instructions from Lego’s website. And you can search by set number or keyword. So unless this has sets that Lego doesn’t, it’s actually less useful.

Internet Archive says it is a dump of Lego’s website. And you can’t search it. And there’s no organization.

Good on IA for preserving the existing collection, but if you’re looking for a specific manual, https://www.lego.com/en-us/service/buildinginstructions

> you can get a lot of set instructions from Lego’s website.

This surprises me. When your product is super easy for someone else to make a compatible set of bricks for, the instructions seem like the only thing you can easily gatekeep and demand royalties for.

> When your product is super easy for someone else to make a compatible set of bricks for

As anyone who has used “compatible” bricks will tell you, it’s not easy to match the quality. Most off-brands don’t hit the right point on the spectrum of connectability-separatability and it makes them noticeably less enjoyable to use.

i did not make this experience in more than 5 years of getting alternative sets. and the sentiment among those builders i know or follow is that the quality is now mostly on par with lego. a few are still worse, and some are even better. also some claim that lego quality is degrading.

Interesting, which ones are widely considered as good or better?

If someone is determined to copy a Lego set, the retail price of one kit (which comes with instructions) doesn’t seem like a very high gate.

Lego is quality from top to bottom. Between the actual design of the bricks to the tolerances the bricks are built to. The moulding and printing of the bricks are top-notch and they make very few mistakes.

Anyone trying to compete with Lego is going to quickly reach Lego's price point.

The only difference is that Lego has to pay their designers and pay for licensing. If you're just going to sell bricks that you build to Lego's designs, you don't have those costs.

Those tolerances were hard to make in a toy back in 1958.

Today, in the age of cheap cnc machining, ABS injection moulds can be made very accurately and cheaply. Nearly all knockoff bricks are now a perfect fit, simply because it is pretty hard to mess up these days.

Eh, LEGO is a corporation making money, but corporations are made up of people, and while I'm sure the people working at LEGO like money, I also am pretty sure they're bigger LEGO fans than most of here.

The cost of putting up ~all old LEGO manuals online [in terms of serving them as well as potential lost revenue] is probably low enough that the rule of cool wins.

“The dog/child/vacuum cleaner ate my instruction manual” is probably a common support request at Lego, so there is no point in making the digital manuals difficult to access.

Yeah, I can’t imagine that hosting their instructions loses more money than sales driven by those site visits.

i am wondering about this too. rebrickable has parts lists which you can upload to vendors of alternative bricks. however that is actually not that much cheaper. you may get the bricks for half the price but from tests i made, about 10% of the bricks you need are not available as alternatives, so you'd have to search them on bricklink where they will be more expensive because the missing ones tend to be the more special and less common ones. so in the end it may not be worth it the effort.

you can get clones of original sets which obviously violates lego's rights, but what i am curious about is that there are alternative instructions for existing sets. that is, you can take a set and use those instructions to build something completely different.

now, what if someone produced and sold a set with those different instructions, you buy it and then build the other set using lego's original instructions.

Have there been any enhancements to AI-based Lego sorters? Like many people, I’ve got bins full of mixed sets of Legos. A world where you can recognize pieces from a set and divide them up would be amazing!

Sorting 2 Metric Tons of Lego

https://jacquesmattheij.com/sorting-two-metric-tons-of-lego/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14226889

Sorting 2 Tons of Lego, The software Side

https://jacquesmattheij.com/sorting-lego-the-software-side/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14280569

Not really a sorter, but https://brickit.app/ was mentioned on HN a while back, and does AI-based lego identification. I haven’t tried it, but it says it can show you where the pieces you need for a specific set are in a photo, so theoretically it should be able to show you everything that belongs in a particular bin as well.

I tried this once but the results were poor. I got only very simple objects, nothing with more than 20 bricks.

I spend literally 2 months sorting lego by type and color and then recreate about 50 lego sets. I still have about 30 to go. I tried brickit app. Doesnt work so good when you have a lot of lego. The sorting and search efficiency can be improved with some tricks. But it takes a lot of time. Fun nevertheless.

https://www.streamhead.com/3d%20printing/ai/2021/11/01/deep-...

There are lots of people who have made a business out of lego sorting - you send them mixed lego in boxes, and they'll send you back (for a fee) sets of sorted lego.

What I would really like is to group Legos back into their sets. Or to recognize the particular sets that are contained in the jumble. I was hoping more advances had been made in recent years.

What does "sorted" mean in this context? What is in each set?

I can't believe nobody created a lego-sorting-l machine out of lego yet

They have. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04JkdHEX3Yk

dang that's a good one. i was going to ask about training a model to assemble based on this corpus of instructions.

but i think the hard part is making a machine with the tactility of a human.

But I enjoy sorting things myself!

I mean it's quite telling I've spent more time sleeving, sorting and storing my MTG cards than I have playing the actual game, lol.

With practice and the right methods, its possible to sort lego for well under 1% of the retail selling price using humans alone.

What I want is a machine with these specs:

Input: lego bricks, assembly manual.

Output: assembled model

Searching the examples listed, the source for the instructions seems to be Lego's site. So while I'm in favor of archiving them, the collection doesn't seem that noteworthy.

I was looking at the Colosseum LEGO kit, but disappointed that it doesn't contain any gladiators, horses, carriages and wild animals.

https://www.lego.com/en-gb/product/colosseum-10276

It’s a repetitive and boring build in micro-scale, not in minifigure-scale. Same for all the stadiums and most architectural landmarks released as Lego sets. It’s something you build once and put on a shelf to impress your guests, probably.

The only sensible large sets are the modular buildings, and a few vintage-inspired sets released recently - a castle, a pirate ship and a space ship.

Sounds like a good use for a 3D printer. LEGO famously has incredibly strict tolerances for their blocks but for the accents you're looking for, that shouldn't be much of an issue unless you're moving the model around frequently.

Has anyone ever attempted to come up with a list of all the pieces you would need to build all (or, maybe, most) of the sets? That is, ignoring brick color and assuming you can only build one set at a time (then deconstruct it for the next build).

I assume the big problem would be specialized pieces. How many specialized pieces are used across multiple sets?

If you discount unique prints and unique colors of existing pieces, LEGO tries really hard to use a mold repeatedly in several sets. If it turns out to be generally useful, they will use the mold for several years before putting it in storage. Unique colors for a part are rare, too -- they typically appear in several sets clustered in time.

I spent a while looking for a free copy of the instructions for the Technics float plane from the 1980s, and the only place I was able to find a scan of it was on https://www.toysperiod.com, which has an extensive Lego reference section.

I'm still downloading and it's over 100gb for the whole collection. So make sure you have the hard drive space.

Is this just for sets? I mean are their instruction sheets for how to build stuff with just standard Lego bricks also?

you can buy books with instructions for various themes. there are also websites with instructions designed by fans, some you can buy, some are free to download. if you have the bricks you can build them.

these sites even allow you to manage your brick collection so you can then find instructions that fit the collection you have. i haven't tried that though because it is a ton of work to enter all your bricks and even if you find instructions that match your collection you still have to deal with the fact that some of your bricks are already used in another model.

Can these be transcoded into an application, anyone know? Seems like a great resource for a mobile app ..

Lego Builder is already an app. For newer sets, it has step by step instructions with 3d models that can be rotated.

Unfortunately that doesn't have anything prior to 1998. Some great kits in the early 80s.

Neither does the Lego site. I've been rebuilding all of my childhood sets (and Bricklinking the missing pieces if any) and there are sets for which I've lost the instructions for various reasons.

Finding a decent copy of the instructions for them has been a thing.

Did we learn nothing from The Lego Movie?

Instructions are the dark side. Master Builders use The Force.

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