@hypolite I am looking to buy a bunch of Lego for my son for his birthday. Is there a good tool for looking at a general view of like, weight to volume, and is there a standard bulk-lego supplier?
@silverwizard The answer to both of these questions is unfortunately No. the way LEGO is sold as bulk falls into these three loose categories but all come from personal ads (Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, Nextdoor, Etsy, eBay, etc...):
A full LEGO bin sold as is. Price should depend on whether minifigures are present, and whether there are Star Wars sets, always in demand on the second-hand market. Bonus point for 1990s boat hull parts and train parts. My mainstay.
Unsorted LEGO sold in individual pound bags. Prices hover around US $10 per bag. I hate these, I can't reconstitute sets from them since they come from a big pile of unknown origins.
LEGO sorted by color sold in individual pound bags for around the same price. These usually come from a single collection, and I've tried my hand at buying the whole lot at a per-pound price discount, ended up with specific colors missing, now I ask if any bag has been sold already, if yes I pass.
And that's about it. There's money to be made sorting parts and selling them individually (especially minifigures), so that's what professional sellers do. Bulk selling is mostly done by particulars, I reckon.
Some professional sellers have sometimes thousands of a single element (specific part + color combination) for sale in their shop so I assume there's a way to obtain bulk parts from LEGO one way or another, but this isn't what you need.
Lastly, LEGO still produces basic sets with a bunch of parts in multiple colors (that I have a hard time reselling because they're either too common or specific to these sets, but that's another issue) and several mini-instructions that are perfect for tinkerers, much less so for narrators because of the general lack of details.
Hi @silverwizard and @hypolite if you want to please your son, it doesn't have to say "Lego" on it. Here in Europe, many no longer accept the price policy and quality of Lego. There are more and more suitable alternatives, some of which are of better quality. Here you see 1kg clamping blocks: steingemachtes.de/Steine-Konvo…
@hypolite So we found 30 lbs of Lego (the ad said "Might contain some Megabloks and Hot Wheel), and dithered on spending $250CAD on it until it went down to $190 CAD! And then they threw in a second box. So uh... I think our child is gonna enjoy.
@silverwizard That's because we do radically different things with them. I just can't do unstructured LEGO play, so matching the contents against a finite set catalog, comparing inventories, buying the missing parts, logging the rest in my collection for sale, and selling sets and parts is my jam.
And in the end, processing bins into nothingness (almost) is terribly satisfying.