Staaahrt Sorting Legos, Sorting Legos... (Part I)

If you are reading this, you have done your warm-up stretches, grabbed a bottle of Gatorade, and cheerfully began your brisk power-walk down the path to madness.  

Good for you!  

By now, you have looked at the dresser drawers and/or bags and/or bins and/or boxes crammed with thousands upon thousands of little plastic bricks and decided “there must be a better way”.  

Maybe you even started the process of sorting them by color before coming to the stark realizations that a) this is really tedious b) holy cow, there are a lot of different shades of color c) there are about a million times as many black, white, and grey pieces as there are light blue and dark blue pieces what’s up with that d) hey, what do I do with the translucent pieces e) does… does this hinge-y thing that is part red and part grey go in the red pile or the grey pile f) does the little computer monitor go in the white pile or in the minifig pile and g) SCREW IT, HALF THE FUN IS DIGGING THROUGH THE BOX ANYWAY I’M GETTING A BEER (sweeps Legos onto floor in disgust).

You are probably not reading this if:

1. Your kid/kids has/have less than 5,000 Legos.  It is not a real-estate issue (yet) so the idea of sorting them has probably never come up.  I know it sounds like an enormous, unrealistic number but that is actually only a few kits a year for a few years… Birthday parties get a little ridiculous once the moms know/hear/suspect/assume a certain kid likes Legos.  You can pretty much pre-fill-in the Thank You cards a week before the event.  Not a complaint, btw – just an observation.
2. Your kid has never politely and meekly asked you to help him/her find “You know, that one grey piece that looks like a small triangle with the tip cut off” in a bin of random Legos that is about the size of a Chuck E Cheese ball pit. 
3. You have OCD.  (You are too busy sorting Legos to read this).
4. You are an Adult Fan of LEGO (AFOL – yep, that’s a thing).  This article is not for you, dude.   
5. You stopped reading after the title of this post since I use the word “Legos” instead of the “proper” terms “LEGO” or “LEGO bricks”.  Why do I make the conscious choice to use this (apparently) unforgivable grammatical error?  First, because if I tell my kid to “Pick up your LEGO” the six-year-old will pick up exactly one brick and just stare at me awaiting further instructions.  Second, if I slowly and carefully explain to him that the term LEGO refers to the material (like wood) and is therefore technically plural already I would pretty much be signing a death warrant for him once he starts parroting this pedantic nonsense to his classmates. Third, it sounds better to my ears, so it stays.
6. You actually, sincerely believe that “half the fun is digging through the box anyway”.  Half?  Really? That seems high… But, hey, you’re the boss…
7. You super-enjoy the grindy, clattery sound of Number 6 above for hours on end since your response to Number 2 above is “Tough.  Use something else.”
8. You don’t own pets that find Legos irresistibly delicious (dogs) or delightfully smash-y and chase-y (cats).
9. You force your child to keep assembled kits assembled forever and always as per the approved directions.  You, sir, are a monster.

“Wait,” you might say, “That’s a great list and all but how do I know if my kid has less than 5,000 Legos or not?  There’s no way I’m counting all these things and I just want an estimate anyway.”

Again, good for you!  You are a well-adjusted person.  Well, for someone who is considering sorting Legos, anyway…

It couldn’t be simpler to estimate the number of Legos in your kid’s collection!  All you need is a scale, the density of the plastic Legos are made from…um, the packing factor of the Legos... Hmm… I guess you could derive that last one by filling the Lego-filled container with a known volume of water… but then the stickers would get ruined and that’s a lot of water anyway… Not sure a typical household scale that can measure 10 pounds has the precision required here… Maybe you could put them in a vacuum chamber or something and suck all the air out and derive the packing factor that way, but you would still need a really accurate scale for that… Oh, yeah, and a vacuum chamber and vacuum pump…

Ok, forget that… How about this: you sort the pieces into piles based on size, grab a representative volume (like a cupful or something) of each size, smoosh them down good, weigh the cupfuls, count the number of pieces in each cupful, then weigh the whole shebang making use of the density of plastic and the weighted average of the derived packing factors… But some pieces are kinda big and the error bars on this estimate start to get a lot out of control the smaller the number of bricks you have per cupful and here we are back to counting hundreds and hundreds of basically pre-sorted bricks anyway… 

Maaannnn…

Once the number of Legos gets to this “uh, look, nerd-o, just forget I asked” stage, here are a couple rules of thumb to get the “good enough” answer you want assuming your kid gets kits as Christmas gifts, birthday gifts, in-law “just cuz” gifts, or buys them with their own allowance.  If you are the dad from the Lego Movie or something then this estimate will not suit you whatsoever.  Not that you would choose to spend the time away from tweaking your near-perfect Lego scale reproduction of the Shotz Brewery from Laverne and Shirley to care…  

Based on info from the Lego site, I put together a list of all the City-themed kits for sale looking at the number of pieces in each kit and number of minifigs in each kit.  Assuming those 60 or so items make up a representative sample of all the kit offerings from the Lego company, it seems the average number of pieces per kit is about 330 and the number of minifigs per kit (not including dogs and sharks and stuff) is about 3.25.

I know you are but what am I?

So… if you have kept all of the manuals you can just count those and multiply that number by 330 and there you go.  Alternatively, I guess, you can look up each of the kits online by using the manuals and get the real numbers that way… But what if you don’t have all the manuals conveniently bound in one place ripe for the counting?  

Well, another way to estimate using the numbers above is to count the minifigs (just people and monsters – no animals) and multiply by 100.  My thinking here is, barring extreme circumstances, the kits with zero minifigs in a child’s collection will kinda-sorta balance with the non-kit packages that have just a minifig in them. 

Assuming my assumptions are good enough (both the estimates above jive with each other shockingly well for my kid’s collection), the estimates should be within 7% of the actual total.  Even if it’s actually 10% off, the time saved to get your “good enough” answer (a few minutes vs. a few days for 25,000 Legos) is certainly worth it.

Another fun fact: the average cost per Lego in kit form from the Lego site is about 15 cents (higher than the 10 cents or so in stores).  Again using the numbers above, you can make the decision on whether or not you should immediately upgrade your home’s security system or start inquiries as to which universities will accept little plastic bricks as tuition payment ten or so years from now.

Hey, this post was supposed to help with sorting Legos, not counting them!  Let’s get back on track.

(To be continued…)