Episode: 3451
Title: HPR3451: Bricklink
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3451/hpr3451.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 23:41:40

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This is hacker public radio episode 3451 for Monday the 25th of October 2021.
Today's show is entitled Brick Link. It is hosted by operator and is about 14 minutes long
and carries a clean flag. The summary is custom third part Lego shops.
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Hello everyone and welcome to the episode of Hacker Public Radio with your host operator. Today should be very quick. It's about Brick Link and Lego's third party Lego.
This was in response to a video game called Borderlands. This video game had a character in it.
I was tracking some of their models and stuff and they had one that you could press a button and it would make a sound.
Of course it was $200 or something ridiculous.
It has since gone up in price to $300 or something ridiculous.
These collectible figurines and that type of market is not something I'm willing to spend that much money on to get something that I think is kind of a gag gift for myself.
So I ventured upon custom Lego stuff and somehow I had come across someone making a custom something from a video game.
I thought you know I don't wonder if anybody's made a custom clap trap and turns out there was and I did find a source for the directions or the diagrams or whatever they call it.
They have different pieces of software you can build your own manuals for Lego type of stuff and then traditionally at the end if you're lucky they'll put the parts list at the bottom until you exactly what parts you need and how many you need of them and you can kind of build it out of your own.
Now the problem with that is obviously you don't have no one has all of those parts and even more interesting is that some of these parts are rare and very expensive and prohibitive to order online.
So if you know what you're doing you can generally probably swap parts out and make it work from a design engineering perspective.
I was just kind of going through the whole motions as a first timer and the site that I use was called brick link.
I stumbled upon a few of them see if I can name some of the ones I didn't decide on for whatever reason brick link brick owl re brickable toy pro and pebble Lego dot com and I looked through all of these in various forms and I might not have been doing it right but I wasn't happy with the checkout process or the inventory process or any of that stuff.
And I ended up using a brick link now like again that might be because I'm not familiar with the site enough to do the right things and order the right stuff.
It might be just something that you know I messed up on but generally speaking at first glance these those other websites were not the right fit for me.
There's also like predefined sets on there that are like custom sets that you can just straight up kind of buy.
So like I'm looking at a parrot which looks looks pretty dang cool that someone created and you know it's like this is an actual Lego dot com thing but there's there's other various diagrams or whatever you can pay for on my guess people sell them you know that type of thing.
But anyways the whole idea is to kind of build your own now the first step is to get it into some moment now you can do this manually which is not recommended at all but I had to do it.
What you want is a parts list and some kind of data form database for what I had to do was look at the PDF and take each part into account and do an excel table.
Then that excel table eventually got converted into I don't remember how I got there I might have manually done it into a database type that these guys will let you import from.
So most of them will let you import a XML file or whatever JSON of a list of different of the different pieces you need.
So long as sort of it is I spent a long time getting the part numbers right getting the parts right I'm getting the amount of the parts right and there's some parts that don't really exist anymore and you have to swap them out and there was one particular rod it was like two these little brown very short you know three Lego bricks long brown rod that I spent like five dollars on a piece or something stupid because I was not paying attention to the order form.
And then this whole build I want to say doesn't say how many pieces it is but I want to say it's from Lego it would probably be a $30 it would probably be like a $50 set on Lego and I spent $150.
Now that's only because I was kind of in a rush and I wanted a one stop place for all my parts and I didn't want to wait around and I was kind of tired of the whole process because it was very daunting and just getting the parts and getting the right sellers.
So you could have probably gotten away with maybe a hundred hundred twenty something like that but it's it's definitely I think more expensive to completely build from a Lego thing what I think happens is most people have your normal pieces most people have pieces to swap out and say oh well you know I don't have six of these but I do have six of this other color or some other some other thing but I would assume a lot of people that are really into this have enough Lego to like save them.
So anyways what I'll say is some of this general caveats is you know beware the shipping prices you'll you'll get you know really cheap Lego but it's from like you know a different country and they're going to charge you an arm to leg for shipping so you buy three parts from them and it's not even worth the shipping to ship it to ship it to you.
So here always use instant checkout which apparently I think they do it kind of if I had to guess it was a batch based order by default so for example if I order six of one thing I won't get that right away they won't pack it up right the well the way till they get a batch of you know fifty or something and then maybe they'll do them in a batch I don't I don't know what the instant checkout is but I think maybe it's a feature of like maybe ratings based.
Maybe the seller doesn't have enough ratings or confidence that they can't do instant checkout or something because there's a lot of back and forth.
I had received two different parts that were incorrect and I had to I think he just dropped shipped them to me so I ended up getting you know you know ten parts for free or something because he sent like two three parts that were completely wrong.
Be sure to check the USA box this is specific to Bricklink website so there is an option in there that says you know only ship to USA or USA only or something that way you're not having to wait for costumes and wait a month wait a month to get your item.
For me it was two to three times the cost of Lego comm set so what generally people like to do is say okay these three sets will give you this item.
So obviously it's going to be insanely expensive to buy three sets as opposed to building it for Bricklink but if you happen to have those sets I guess I don't I don't know what the parity is there but that often you'll see sometimes it'll say you know these three sets make up this this particular build.
Plan on paying you know three to five people via PayPal during the checkout process and this is excruciating if you don't have an auto filler for PayPal and your auto fill in auto login stuff and auto like last pass or password manager.
No way to easy share a wanted list so I can you can build a wanted list through kind of XML and say you know this is my build for the clap trap right but there's no easy way to to share it on their website as far as I can tell.
They might have changed that I don't know but I ended up putting it's probably not even in here anymore because my website is does then yeah.
So these I got the borderlands PDF but I don't see the XML file is missing actually so I still had the PDF of the clap trap but I do not have the XML which is not good.
That's the meat of it that was the hardest part was building the XML file and making sure all the parts were the right parts and the parts that were swapped out were swapped out or whatever.
Let's see I had seven missing out of 216 and one shipping and one shipment so you know the ideally you want to order from one person that's not going to happen like I said it's going to be three to five people.
You know people that use this are people like me that are going to do a one off thing and then realize that they went over their budget because you know for another hundred bucks I could have gotten the.
Whatever clap trap I did end up ordering another little mini clap trap I'll take a picture and put it in the show notes along with the links to the stuff let me add that note in here before I forget sorry.
Pick a clap trap.
But yeah if you know it's go a bit get disposable income you know it's been stupid amounts of money on done.
Other than that you know it was very it was very tedious man I mean this is not even that big of a build this is a tiny little build comparatively to you know some of the builds you see obviously online I want to say it's not even maybe six feet tall.
To six foot tall clap trap not foot six inches tall clap trap you know and it's a lot of parts and it was very pretty excruciating to go through the parts list and get the right parts and get the orders right and get it all out best bet is to find a friend which I should have used my friend who's a letter of maniac I should have gone to his house you know picked out the parts that I needed that he might have had he probably could have saved me 50 bucks I guarantee you.
Dude could have saved me 50 bucks I could get him 20 bucks to take the parts and he would have been 20 but 20 bucks for sure and I would have been you know not the whole $50 or so.
So that's your best bet the other piece of advice I would say is you know if you want to do it it's it's not as easy as it looks I mean even if this is a PDF with one two three four or three and a half pages of parts.
And it still took way too long to build the parts out and get it all matching in order the parts and what I probably spent I probably spent four hours getting all the parts right and ordering the parts and getting it before I actually started building it.
I spent more time paying for the Lego and getting the bits right and then actually building it I think it took very short time to build.
So in that regard you know just be careful about what you do what you order and again I'll say the Lego Lego sites I was looking at brick link was the one I chose with brick owls when I tried re-bricable I'd heard some good things about toy pro I looked at and pebble Lego I looked at but I think re-bricable was another one that I was going to try to use or either toy pro.
I will between those two one of those I was going to use and I ended up fearing brick link out and realizing that they had like an upload function where you could just kind of fulfill your cart with different sellers.
And that's kind of how it is it's like an eBay but for Lego and it's just it's just a hot mess because you have 15 different vendors for the same part and like one vendor will give you three pieces and it's like okay well that's three pieces but then I have to pay $15 and shipping.
So again it's beware of those shipping costs beware of the unique item cost. So for example you might get 216 pieces from one vendor great that's awesome.
Why is it so expensive? If you're not paying attention you look down the item list and say oh I paid $5 a piece for two items and that's just insane. Let's see if I can see my orders placed here.
No these are old. Anyways that's pretty much it hope it helps you out. I'll provide the PDF of the clap trap it's beautiful I love it.
What I say it's worth it. $150 no it's not worth it but it's pretty badass and I did buy a mini a little mini clap trap and I had someone make me it's kind of like this clay malleable clay kind of like sucrose.
That's a malleable clay that you can mold into little small things and I've seen somebody make a friend of a friend make a baby Yoda and I said that's really cool.
Can you I can take a picture of a clap trap and just tell him to name his price because I spend $150 on Lego thing. I mean what's another 50 bucks for a custom whatever and I ended up he ended up it's like donating to a school or something guys in high school or something.
So I ended up giving him 50 20 bucks or something for for a custom little clay clap traps. So I've got three clap traps instead of the one that I really kind of wanted that made noises and stuff.
But anyways that helps you out and find a friend and use one of these brick links sites and have fun. Take it easy.
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