Как найти инструкцию к лего по номеру детали

I am a lifelong LEGO Maniac, and my kits from when I was a kid were passed down to my nephew, who has just passed them down to my son (40 years of history…).

The trouble is that none of my old plans/directions are still around, and neither are the plans/direction from my nephew’s kits. My nephew and I started to do a quick inventory, but he couldn’t remember all of the kits that were in the hoard (three large boxes so far).

Is there an easy way to figure this out? Does LEGO offer any of their old plans for free online or will I need to pay for them?

Can anyone offer help in identifying some of the fairly recent stuff? I can post images if needed. Some of the newer parts are quite unique.

Find for the rarest piece(s)

My usual method for identifying a set I’m not familiar with is to find the rarest part. It’s not always possible to find the rarest part but I can usually guess which parts are rare given how many of them I have in my collection.

For System sets I will usually ignore unmodified bricks, plates and tiles in common colours.

Example

When I was trying to find the set in the example shown below from this question. I ignored all the plates and the two black 1×1 studs as they were all common parts in standard colours.

The only two parts remaining were the blue Minifigure Seat (4079) and the blue Steering Wheel (3829).

From those two parts it was easy to identify it as a vehicle and with the arrangement of the pieces I could tell it was a four-stud wide vehicle. Since around 2005-2010 it has become more common for LEGO to produce vehicles 6 or 8 studs wide so I assumed it was a fairly old set.

To identify these two pieces I used the catalogue search on Bricklink, if I didn’t know the name of these pieces I could have search by category, or if I knew the piece number (found often on the bottom of many parts) I could have searched for that as well.

Every piece on Bricklink has a list of ‘Known Colors’, the steering wheel had 222 set entries for the colour blue and the steering wheel had the minifgure seat had 68 results for the colour blue.

I sorted the list by selecting ‘Year Released’ to ‘Up’ so that I would see the oldest sets first and set the preview mode to ‘List with Images’ so that I could see both a photo of the set and relevant information. (I also recommend using ‘Thumbnail Gallery’).

General Tips

• The colours that I consider ‘standard’ are Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, Black and White. These colours are probably the most common and are almost always included in bulk brick buckets.

• Around 2004, the colour of light/dark grey and brown bricks were changed slightly. Modern grey bricks are often known as ‘bley’ because of their blueish tint. Related: What is the bley (blay) color?

Minifigure Tips

• There was only one variation of the head for Minifigures prior to 1989, the classic smile head. This piece continues to be used for classic releases as well as Modular sets although it is not as common. We can rule out any ‘non-classic’ minifigure heads as being after this year.

• Minifigures with two-sided heads were not produced until 2001.

• Minifigures with short legs were not produced until 2002.

• The first minifigures with realistic skin tones were released in 2003. Only yellow minifigures were available previously. Related: Why do some minifigs have yellow heads and some are flesh colored?

• Microfigures were first released in 2009

answered Oct 25, 2017 at 15:15