Dan’s photos & comments kind of illustrate what I was getting at – a single LUG Support box, sorted only to “roughly level 3”, has over 150 types of brick. And that’s not down to individual elements, let alone individual elements AND colors. The man-hours required to fully sort the quantity of brick in our LUG inventory would be astronomical (and we’d need a TON of storage options).
I think that Saturday’s experience reinforced for me that it is a HUGE time saver while building if one can find the right SHAPE of elements quickly (also, it helps get a feel for if you have enough) – meaning, I got frustrated very quickly with pawing through a big box of “gray” looking for 2×4, 2×6, anything that would help me actually build a mountain. There were tons of fenders, ball joints, and other things that were gray, but not remotely useful for my task, which resulted in much aggravation.
It’s probably unlikely that we’ll ever have a full-on LEGO Company parts vault, where one simply strolls down the Basic Brick aisle to the 2×4 shelf, and the third bin from the left is Dark Bluish Gray. But if we can get to the elemental level (not necessarily broken down by color), that would be a great help for future builds.
On a different vector, I think there’s a bit of ambiguity when describing Josh’s list as “levels”. It’s really more of “categories”, meaning, from one giant unsorted box, here are six general types of brick you might find…
1. Basic brick (just what it sounds like)
2. Slopes and curves
3. Plate
4. Movement (vehicle, technic)
5. Minifig (people, plants, animals, accessories)
6. Specialty (modified and decorated plate and brick, tile)
So, while I don’t think anyone is expecting you to organize all the various Technic axles and wheelbases by individual element, Dan, if you at least throw all the Technic and vehicle stuff into one bag, it’ll be easier to dig through (or do a refined sort) later. If you didn’t already do that, what happened to the Technic & vehicle stuff you encountered during your sort?