About · Brickspender

Metal shelving filled with rows of identical small cardboard boxes — A shelf, and a system

How one collection is kept, and the site built to keep track of it

A closed cardboard box with a set number written on the side — Closed and stacked. The number on the side is the whole label.

An open cardboard box marked 9491, with a bag of parts inside — **9491** — Geonosian Cannon, 133 parts. The bag two sections down is what is inside it.

One box per set

Every set being collected gets a box, with the set number written on the side. Nothing else — no printed label, no colour coding. The number is enough, because the number is what the site knows it by.

A set's progress counts only what is inside its own box. A red 2 × 4 kept for another build is not quietly credited to this one, which is the difference between a percentage you can trust and one that flatters you.

Part way there

Most boxes are not finished, and that is the point. The bag here holds what has been gathered so far for 9491 Geonosian Cannon — a 133-piece set that currently reads 54%. The remaining pieces exist somewhere; they are just not in this bag yet.

A sealed bag of brown and grey LEGO parts labelled 9491 Geonosian Cannon — **9491** — what is already gathered for it.

Loose bricks wait their turn

Anything no set has claimed yet lives loose in bulk boxes. The site still knows it is there: a set showing 0% will tell you how many of its parts are already on the shelf somewhere else, waiting to be moved across rather than bought again.

A clear plastic tub filled with thousands of loose LEGO parts — Bulk. Everything no set has claimed yet.

Sorted as far as it is worth sorting

Below bulk there is a second tier: small tubs, one per kind, for the pieces that are hopeless to dig for — the 1 × 1s and the little clips that vanish into a tub of two thousand.

The cabinet holds the rest of it. Small boxes in the drawers, sticker sheets flat so they do not curl, the big plates that fit nowhere else, and the tubs on top for whatever has not been dealt with yet.

A drawer of small clear tubs, each holding one kind of small part — One tub per kind, for the pieces too small to dig for.

A tall white drawer cabinet with tubs of loose parts stacked on top — Drawers for the small boxes, sticker sheets and big plates.

Minifigures get their own bag

Minifigure parts are the ones that scratch. Each identified piece goes into its own small bag with the part number and the name written on it — torsos, headgear, capes — so a printed torso is not rubbing against a pile of bricks for a year while its set is assembled.

Many small bags of minifigure parts, each hand-labelled with a part number and name — Identified, bagged, and written on. One part to a bag.

An unlabelled bag gets identified

A sealed factory bag with no set number on it is the hard case — just a bag number, a copyright year, and a hundred pieces that could belong to anything. This one had been in a drawer for a while.

Two parts typed in were enough. The rarer of them appears in thirteen sets, which is what does the work: a part that turns up in three thousand sets tells you almost nothing, and one that turns up in thirteen very nearly answers the question on its own.

A sealed LEGO polybag marked only with the number 11 and a 2017 copyright — Bag 11 of something, © 2017. No set number anywhere on it.

The identifier narrowing 21,135 sets to one after two parts were entered — Two parts in, one set left: **17101** Creative Toolbox, 847 pieces.

Where the data comes from

Set contents, part photos and colour names are mirrored from Rebrickable's bulk data — about 1.5 million rows of what goes in what. It is imported and rebuilt rather than queried live, so a set page of a thousand parts arrives in one piece.

Photos can be replaced with your own, which is how the gaps get filled: Rebrickable is missing pictures for plenty of part and colour combinations, and anything photographed here can go back to them.

27940 sets 64205 parts 109035 in colour 17141 minifigures 275 colours 1949–2027