How much do I save by buying all the parts instead of a used set?

[pat_teeth_hurt]

Hi and sorry in advance if there is a topic about this already. I recently bought a used set that was supposed to be 100% complete. After auditing the pieces, it was missing nearly 10% plus some of the pieces appeared to not be part of the original set as advertised. Counting pieces can take quite a bit of time, exceeding 10 hours for large sets. As a result of this experience, I am concerned that I will go through this exercise with all my used set purchases. So if I'm going to wind up spending over 10 hours counting pieces whenever I buy large used sets and some of those pieces are not original, I was wondering how much time it takes and money is saved by buying all the parts instead of a complete used set. For discussion point, let's talk about the Cafe Corner - 10182 - 2,056 pieces. 1) How much time would it take to buy all the parts and 2) how much would it cost including shipping at the end of the day? Thanks in advance for any advice.

[DoNotInsertIntoMouth]

This is definitely a tough thing. So I will go through several different things first:

 

1. I only buy used sets off Ebay primarily because I have buyer protection - if they say complete it has to be complete. So this is going to be a big time help.

 

2. Buying off craigslist, unless it is assembled where I can see that it is pretty much complete, I want to get it for low enough that it makes sense me purchasing it.

 

For example, I bought a UCS batmobile the other day for $45 - it is missing about 100 pieces or so. Used price here is $140ish.

 

As far as bricklinking pieces - it is time consuming, but not too crazy. Where you run into problems is if pieces are not available, minimum buys, etc. You will pay less for the set, but all that time really makes it rough. I think it is only really worth it on huge retired sets that are crazy expensive.

 

As for Cafe Corner - you can go to the page and lick the "rebrickable" link under the price area.

 

It found all but about 60 of the parts - looks like it would be about $542 for those.

 

Assuming you find the other 60 on Bricklink, you might pay a guestimate of $20. So you are looking at about a $300 savings or so. But it will take time - you have to get all these in, open them individually, etc.

[pat_teeth_hurt]

Thanks much for the great advice. I think it'd be a great idea if this site can have a specific discussion forum category on bricklinking with each header be a specific set based on those with actual experience. It would be good for those looking to invest/build that way, but then again, may not be great for those selling used sets as it could drive down prices.

[Huskers1236]

If we're truly talking about Cafe Corner, the biggest obstacles are the retired, windows/door/dark blue arches.  Fortunately, the dark blue arches are coming back in the new Winter Village set, so that will save builders of CC and Market Street lots of money.  As for your normal run of the mill set, I always try to do some cost analysis.  Am I looking for 5 parts? 50 parts?  How expensive is the set?  $10?  $100?  Usually, if I'm having to replace more that 10-20% of the set, I don't bother, unless we're talking about a $200 set where my 10% of pieces is only going to run me $10, then it's worth my time.  Lots of variables, and you have to account for what your time is worth. 

[DoNotInsertIntoMouth]

I do think it is important to know its about how much your time is worth to you - and if you enjoy it. Some people really do.

 

I hate when people start going on about - I could do this but it will take 3 hours and I'll make $50 and I make $50 an hour, blah blah blah. That literally means nothing. Can you work every hour of the day at your job? No - this is why I do many things like tihs after work. Do I make tons of money? no - but it is extra money I could not make the other way, so I can't compare it to my salary.

 

Same thing in this situation, you will save some money you couldn't save another way. especially if you have fun, this will allow you to possibly have more sets in the future. 

[Spartikis]

I just finished building 10190 Market street about a week ago. To aquire all of the pieces i had to buy from 17 different bricklink stores! On average i would say it took around an hour to order from each store if you take the time it spent to search for,  find the right one, add pieces, place the order, pay the order, check the tracking, dealing with messed up orders, give feedback, etc... Also i had several stores mess up the order, missing peices, one send black pieces instead of dark blue, you name it, it went wrong. With that being said i was able to build a 99% accurate 10190 Market street for $300 which would have easily cost $600+ on ebay or bricklink.

 

That was a 1200 piece set, so the larger it is the more time it would take to order the pieces. So for these popular, low supply, high demand, high dollar sets like Market street, corder cafe, etc... it is worth building piece by piece. I wouldnt however bother on cheaper retired sets, for example medieval market, emerald night, etc... you would end up spending way more building it than you would buying it used.

 

In the end youre really just trading your time for savings. if you have a lot of free time by all means build your sets peice by piece if it saves you money. I personally dont think ill ever do that again, i work to many hours and my time is very valuable to me!

 

 

 

I do think it is important to know its about how much your time is worth to you - and if you enjoy it. Some people really do.

 

I hate when people start going on about - I could do this but it will take 3 hours and I'll make $50 and I make $50 an hour, blah blah blah. That literally means nothing. Can you work every hour of the day at your job? No - this is why I do many things like tihs after work. Do I make tons of money? no - but it is extra money I could not make the other way, so I can't compare it to my salary.

 

Same thing in this situation, you will save some money you couldn't save another way. especially if you have fun, this will allow you to possibly have more sets in the future. 

 

Not trying to start an argument, i promise! I feel its still important to make the most of your time. For example i run and ebay store selling items other than lego, at one point i was selling items and was only making about $2-3 per hour, instead of going home early to fill ebay orders i could have just stayed at work for an extra hour and make 10x that. In the end i just focus on higher dollar items. I think that applies for building sets piece by pieces, as long as you focus on the high dollar sets items worth your time, for the smaller, cheaper, more recently retired items, just pay the extra couple bucks and be done.

 

Also as someone mentioned the dark blue arches will be coming out soon in the winter market set, i purposely build by market street with black arches and figured i would just wait 6 months and buy them for $0.50 a piece instead of $5.00 a piece!

[pat_teeth_hurt]

 

If we're truly talking about Cafe Corner, the biggest obstacles are the retired, windows/door/dark blue arches.  Fortunately, the dark blue arches are coming back in the new Winter Village set, so that will save builders of CC and Market Street lots of money.  As for your normal run of the mill set,

Thanks - do you think that the price of used sets for CC and Market Street will go down as a result of the availability of previously retired parts?

Thanks for sharing your experience. It sounds like a big investment of time. I'll just stick to buying the used sets. But knowing that some parts that were retired and are coming back cheaper will influence my timing of used sets.

[kenchu2000]

I do think it is important to know its about how much your time is worth to you - and if you enjoy it. Some people really do.

 

I hate when people start going on about - I could do this but it will take 3 hours and I'll make $50 and I make $50 an hour, blah blah blah. That literally means nothing. Can you work every hour of the day at your job? No - this is why I do many things like tihs after work. Do I make tons of money? no - but it is extra money I could not make the other way, so I can't compare it to my salary.

 

Same thing in this situation, you will save some money you couldn't save another way. especially if you have fun, this will allow you to possibly have more sets in the future. 

 

 

Ditto!  Well said.

[kenchu2000]

I have done a lot of bricklinking in the past few months.   My experience is that if you don't already have a lot of existing pieces to begin the project with, then it may be a lot easier (and possibly cheaper) to just hunt for a used set on ebay, especially most used sets include original user manual and a box which bricklinking does not.  So the resale value holds better.

 

For me it is cheaper to do bricklinking especially on larger set (1600+ pieces), because I already have tons of existing pieces to begin the project with.  Most of the sets I have done with bricklinking are for personal hobby/collection anyway, so I don't really care about the user manual/box.

 

Take Eiffel Tower as an example, I don't have most of the dark bluish gray pieces, especially the 1 x 4 fences.  So if I ever want a Eiffel Tower, I'd just get it from ebay for sure.

 

Currently I am working on Grand Carousel 10196, the pieces I acquired from Bricklink vendors so far cost around $150 (since I have most existing pieces already).  I am still debating whether I should spend the extra $250 on those 8 stupid paper canopies, or I should just have my wife to custom make for me with fabrics.  I am sure my wife will happily do it for me if that saves us $250  . 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

[h311m4n]

Hi and sorry in advance if there is a topic about this already. I recently bought a used set that was supposed to be 100% complete. After auditing the pieces, it was missing nearly 10% plus some of the pieces appeared to not be part of the original set as advertised. Counting pieces can take quite a bit of time, exceeding 10 hours for large sets. As a result of this experience, I am concerned that I will go through this exercise with all my used set purchases. So if I'm going to wind up spending over 10 hours counting pieces whenever I buy large used sets and some of those pieces are not original, I was wondering how much time it takes and money is saved by buying all the parts instead of a complete used set. For discussion point, let's talk about the Cafe Corner - 10182 - 2,056 pieces. 1) How much time would it take to buy all the parts and 2) how much would it cost including shipping at the end of the day? Thanks in advance for any advice.

Let's take another example: the 10179 falcon.

 

I got back into LEGO well after this set used to be sold at retail price so when I wanted one, it was over 1500$ to get one...so I undertook the adventure of going through building it myself.

 

First step was making an inventory of all the needed bricks. With my old bricks, I already had about 1000 pieces so that was about 4000 to go...I spent about 3 months buying everything off of Bricklink. Not counting shipping, I spent about 600-700 Euros.

 

The only problem with gathering all the pieces for a set so you can build it yourself are the pieces that are unique to a set. Availability is low to none so those few pieces will cost you a lot of money. In the case of the falcon, those pieces were the 2 grey ship things that you are supposed to put on top of the reactors at the back and the custom sattelite dish. Each of this was selling over 100$ on Bricklink so I ended up buying 2 brown ship things that I painted (lulz) and a classic sattelite dish.

 

Was really fun gathering all the pieces to build this massive thing though. I'd say it's worth it for sets that are really awesome and just to expensive to buy new or used on eBay

[vipul.toprani]

I have done a lot of bricklinking in the past few months.   My experience is that if you don't already have a lot of existing pieces to begin the project with, then it may be a lot easier (and possibly cheaper) to just hunt for a used set on ebay, especially most used sets include original user manual and a box which bricklinking does not.  So the resale value holds better.

 

For me it is cheaper to do bricklinking especially on larger set (1600+ pieces), because I already have tons of existing pieces to begin the project with.  Most of the sets I have done with bricklinking are for personal hobby/collection anyway, so I don't really care about the user manual/box.

 

Take Eiffel Tower as an example, I don't have most of the dark bluish gray pieces, especially the 1 x 4 fences.  So if I ever want a Eiffel Tower, I'd just get it from ebay for sure.

 

Currently I am working on Grand Carousel 10196, the pieces I acquired from Bricklink vendors so far cost around $150 (since I have most existing pieces already).  I am still debating whether I should spend the extra $250 on those 8 stupid paper canopies, or I should just have my wife to custom make for me with fabrics.  I am sure my wife will happily do it for me if that saves us $250  . 

I was looking for someone who has done this and maybe it is something which I should be doing soon..As for the fabrics, I think it would be interesting to custom make them in different colours..would pass into the whole show quite beautifully. Did you manage to get the music brick along in the 150 too?

[Alpinemaps]

I'm also putting together the Grand Carousel. I'm not going to buy the fabric. I'm going to either to go to the fabric store and find the $5 solution. Or, I'm going to try to do something similar to the Millenium Falcon, and use bricks.

Sent from my iPad using Brickpicker

[jgschmieg3]

I prefer buying the set in its incomplete state for a much reduced amount and then bricklinking the rest.  I have a cafe corner, market street, green grocer and taj mahal in various stages right now. 

[kenchu2000]

Actually my Grand Carousel bricklinking project was done weeks ago and I ended up using projector screen fabric for the canopies.  I made a custom projector screen for my home a few years back and I had some spare, so I just cut out 8 canopies and the result is great.   I got the projector screen fabric from this place and the price is very reasonable. http://www.carlofet.com.    I didn't do any sound brick as it is super expensive.   

 

I will post some pictures later today.

[Spartikis]

I prefer buying the set in its incomplete state for a much reduced amount and then bricklinking the rest.

Thats how i built Cafe Corner, bought one that was about 90% complete for about 1/2 the price of a used complete set. All the pieces i needed were common normal pieces and just pulled them out of my collect as i was building it.

[knarrff]

It also greatly depends on the set. For a set that appreciated a lot buying in parts might be cheaper, for a set that didn't it is hardly worth the effort. And then the question is always whether you stick 100% to the exact bricks, or maybe settle for slightly different, but vastly cheaper parts. So, in short: it depends.

[stackables]

I just picked up a used 6097 Fright Knight set.  Pictures looked to have the majority of the pieces.  Ended up pay $56 might be too much but I am one who actually enjoys inventorying sets.  I usually have pretty good success finding the remaining pieces on bricklink for decent prices and end up putting the sets together for well below retail. 

 

I actually scored a big lot of the Viking theme on ebay once.  After inventorying all the sets, most sets were relatively complete and I ended up making a killing on how much I would have spent buying all the sets separate compared to completing the sets through bricklink. 

 

I do notice that you can get deals once and awhile on sets that are not marked complete.  In general, most pieces are not very hard to find.  Bricklink is very extensive.  If you don't mind going through it set, you can find some good deals.  However, I haven't tried bricklinking any big set yet.  I would imagine a 2000 piece set would take some time.