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Do people forget to comparison shop?
In my obsession for getting Legos, I've been following a bunch of auctions on eBay. Some of them are kind of humorous to me because they are priced higher than ordering new direct from Lego or they say "hard to find" when they're on the Lego website. In addition, I've found some other items that are cheaper on a site called BrickLink which is a conglomerate of people selling Lego sets. One reason, I'd guess for not buying direct from Lego is that the regular shipping is via UPS from Connecticut. Since I'm probably the furthest you can get from CT in the continental US (ordering stuff from LL Bean would travel a longer distance), the shipping is slow (the rains last week didn't help) and frankly, the boxes are not packed well. The outer box and many of the inner boxes were dented, but nothing was broken. It must be hard to break Lego sets short of stepping on them.
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I'm lazy
Yes, I'll be the first to admit I'm lazy. No, not the kind of lazy where I'd sit around drinking beer and watching football. I'm talking about finding the easy way to do something. In this case, I was looking to build a table to hold my new Lego trains. I designed 2 tables, each being 3.5' x 7' with legs and wheels. After going to Home Depot and pricing out the materials, I determined the price would be about $200 and require at least a day or two of building it. Somehow I got the brilliant idea to look at a ping pong (for those that want me to be accurate, table tennis) table. A regulation table is 9' x 5' and most of the ones consumers get fold up and have wheels. While not he exact size, this was an excellent solution. I asked one of my neighbors with a pickup truck if he'd help me pick it up and then I put it together when I got home. It is going to work out well and required a minimal amount of effort on my part.
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Value of Lego bricks
In my searching, I found out that new Legos cost $6.99 per 1/4 pound at Legoland which is $27.96 per pound which seems very high, almost the price of gold :-). On eBay, I've found many lots of bulk Lego bricks from various sets. Using the $28 per pound price, I started comparing bulk lots on a per pound basis (including shipping) and only bid up to about $4.50 per pound. I've seen some auctions go to several hundred dollars for less than 20 pounds of Lego bricks. These aren't new bricks and come from random lots. The pictures on the auctions don't really tell you what you're getting, so I'm really confused as to why people keep driving up the price. For now, I've purchase a total of 21 pounds of Legos (in addition to the 10 or so pounds I bought a few weeks ago). Hopefully this will let me build what I want.
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I hope I don't get shocked!
OK, that title is not really a concern of mine for this post. I received the Lego trains I ordered and the box said "Caution: 12 V" or something like that, but it said 12V. I ordered the train from lego.com where the site said that it included a 9V speed regulator and a 9V motor. The speed regulator I got says 9V-12V on the hole for the power supply. The power brick says output: 10.8V AC. So, what's the deal? Did Lego mean to put a 10.8V transformer in there (seems to work fine)? Did the site and the packaging get mislabeled? I don't think Lego really cares about this type of train anymore as they're moving to radio controlled trains, which I think is an excellent move for kids as I spent a few hours laying out my track and getting it to work correctly (and I have a BS in engineering). The trick is that the track switches must be in the correct positions, you can't short circuit the track, and you must have power applied. The layout I put together has 3 concentric loops that allows the train to get to each of the loops. The problems I discovered is that the power must be on the outer loop and the 2 switches for each loop must be in opposite directions; they must also be switched at the same time to keep the train moving when it is on an inner loop. 4 years of college and I can setup a kid's toy!