I sincerely applaud <i>everything</i> ending up on IA. However, if you're searching for specific instructions brickinstructions is excellent as it is far more navigable. For a random example see Starguider¹. I wonder if someone has already scraped that site for IA, beyond simply praying to the Wayback Machine.<p>¹ <a href="https://lego.brickinstructions.com/m/lego_instructions/set/6933/Starguider" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://lego.brickinstructions.com/m/lego_instructions/set/6...</a>
My kids being 4 and 6 means we’re full into Lego. I grew up with two brothers so we have like three hundred pounds of it. But lost most of the instructions.<p>It’s been amazing to go online and find any instruction and re-assemble these kits.<p>It also made me realize something: half the value of buying a kit these days is that you aren’t spending hours finding needles in a 300lb haystack.
Lego themselves have an archived copy of every instruction set going back to the 80s, available here - <a href="https://www.lego.com/en-us/service/buildinginstructions" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.lego.com/en-us/service/buildinginstructions</a><p>But for whatever reason, the scans are poor quality and very dark, and it can be hard to make out what piece is which. These ones look much better
Probably an age thing, but I’ve never understood the point of Lego instructions. Or the sets.<p>The whole point of Lego was creative free form building. Remove that & it’s dull as hell. It just becomes model building with poor quality models as the result.<p>I’m happy <i>other</i> people find it fun, but to me it misses the entire point in favor of weak licensed “kits”.
For modern sets, you can also get a PDF from the official site: <a href="https://www.lego.com/en-us/service/buildinginstructions/76223" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.lego.com/en-us/service/buildinginstructions/7622...</a><p>One of these days, I want to learn enough computer vision to write an LEGO instruction booklet to LCAD convertor that could be fed old instructions and generate a 3D model of the set. An archive of the instructions is nice, but a virtual archive of sets would be nicer.
This is a great reminder for parents of lego-addicted kids to get their into STEM by entering in FRC. It starts early, with legos!<p><a href="https://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/fll" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/fll</a>
Over the last several years I've made a habit of downloading PDF manuals for many things I own and saving them in a Google Drive folder for safe-keeping.<p>You never know when you need one until you do and it's a nightmare if you lost it!
My old man recently got a bunch of boxes from my childhood out of his, including multiple tubs of mixed Lego and a box of incomplete instructions. This will prove to be a valuable resource in the coming months, thank you very much!<p>I keep staring at all the artwork included on some of the early Bionicle instructions and I love that dark mysterious island aesthetic.
I was sad not to see the original Technic Super Car. It had a working V8, 4 wheel drive with 4 wheel steering and 3 way differential, and even an actual gear box with shifter. You could see the pistons pump when you pushed it around. One of the best birthday presents I ever asked for.
Internet Archive is a great resource, but man the interface sucks. Part of it’s because there’s no good way browse online, and part of it is because the search is broken. Indexing so much data in such diverse formats with questionable or missing metadata is hard. I’d love a better interface, but I also suspect that a crappy interface is what help IA stay alive. There’s plenty of legally questionable data hosted there if you know where to look.
It wasn't until I started buying Lego for myself (in my 20s) that I learned that Lego came with instructions. When I was a kid my parents would open the box and discard the instructions before giving it to me.<p>Back then (60s/70s) the sets were quite general and open ended. Modern day Lego has the thinking done ahead of time, and has too many specialised pieces.
Now if someone would just make an app that can figure out which set my bricks belong to. I have at least two sets that I can't find the instructions for, because I have no idea what they're called or which number they have. The bricks are fairly unique, they can't be in more than 10 sets.
I'm surprised there's no copyright notice on these instruction booklets. Has LEGO ever stated that their booklets are freely reproducible or is this a gray area?<p>Note: I'm talking about the layout and graphics of the booklets themselves, not the logical instructions (i.e. recipe book versus recipes).
Oh man, this sent me down a trip to memory lane. I had a lot of the Spyrius set as a little kid, and I loved them to bits. I just looked up how much they'd cost to buy them again, and they're like $1000 a pop :o
can we create an AI that has knowledge of the size, shape, color and name of each lego brick ever made??? We then feed it 3d renders and select a desired model scale (ex: 1:4 scale), and it prints out a lists of each piece you will need, as well as instruction/brick location to assemble an item that looks similar from lego parts.