Finding Lego Bricks in Bulk

Often when building new Lego creations with my GeekSon, I wonder if it would be easier if we had more bricks. After poking around I found several ways to get Lego bricks in bulk.

The Lego Store at your local mall has a wall of bricks that they sell in bulk. It is easy to get a big cup full of the loose bricks they have in stock.

You can also go to the Lego online store and simply add individual bricks to a Pick A Brick bag. You get exactly what you want. Just like when John Baichtal created, ordered and built a Lego replica of his house for Mother’s Day.

If you are not picky, you can also find used bricks for resale by online merchants at a fraction of the price of new bricks. But I discovered a big divide in the way bricks are sold. Some online retailers sell them by the number of pieces and others sell them by weight. How could I compare the prices?

Being a good GeekDad I knew I could answer this question with a science experiment involving the GeekSon. So we pulled out our kitchen scale and a bucket of Lego bricks.

First we set the standard by counting the number of 2×4 Lego bricks in a pound: 180 bricks. But it was easy to see from our bin full of Lego bricks that they come in all shapes and sizes. Most collections are going to include a wide variety of sizes so, sticking with the scientific method, we grabbed several random samples of pieces from our Lego collection to see if we could determine an average number of Lego bricks per pound. Our samples included bricks from my childhood mixed with the remains of Ferraris, a Star Destroyer, an AT-ST, a Republic Gunship, and other Lego Star Wars and Clone Wars kits.

We started weighing and counting. It was fun for the GeekSon to re-discover some lost pieces at the bottom of the bin and to help with counting.

What do you get when you order 10 pounds of Lego brisks? According to our barely scientific measurements, about 3,000 pieces.

What do you get when you order 10 pounds of Lego brisks? According to Mrs. GeekDoug,  “a divorce.”

Photo by Doug Cornelius