About the LEGO Parts Guide

The LEGO Parts Guide was launched on February 21, 2024 after a month and a half of furious coding.

My motivation to create this guide was twofold:

To give users easier access to the ‘Brick Architect’ way of sorting their collection. This hierarchal approach involves just 13 top-level categories which are easy to learn.
As a foundation for future growth of the LEGO Brick Labels collection. The existing collection is collated manually, which is unsustainable given the size of the label collection.

The need for an online sorting guide came as a bit of a surprise to me. In recent years, I have heard from more and more LEGO enthusiasts that do not use my LEGO Brick Labels, but use a printed copy of the Contact Sheet as a sorting guide.

Learn about each category with a text description and a gallery of LEGO parts.

After sharing an early first version of the online sorting guide with a preview audience, I discovered the experience is appealing to a third audience as well — people who want to learn more about how LEGO works!

To better meet the needs of this audience, I spent a lot of time adding a subtitle for every category/folder in the hierarchy explaining which parts are in that category. Many categories also have a detailed description containing a few paragraphs of additional information about that type of LEGO part.

Support the LEGO Parts Guide

The LEGO Parts Guide grew out of my popular LEGO Brick Labels project. I want to thank all of the patrons who have supported these projects — you can see a full list of patrons on the LEGO Brick Labels page.

If you want to join them in showing your support, please visit patreon.com to subscribe!

Version History

The LEGO Parts Guide is comprised of two main parts: A handcrafted database containing the parts which are highlighted in this guide (and high quality images of each part). Users can access this database using a set of scripts that translate the data in the database into an easy-to-use web-based experience.

This version history highlights the most important changes to the Database and the Web Interface. It is not meant to be exhaustive, but rather to show how the experience has evolved over time.

August 23, 2024: A lot more ‘flexible’!

In the past week or so, I added a new ‘Flexible’ sub-category to the ‘Articulation’ category. The most time-consuming part was manually adding 21x Ribbed Hoses, 35x Flex Tubes, and 20x Pneumatic Hoses.
These numbers include retired elements that are currently hidden in galleries sorted by category.

Ribbed Hose, Flex Tube, and Pneumatic Hose all look about the same!

I also moved a few parts that were already in the database to this category (ex: Chain, Flex Axles, and String.)

These flexible parts are a great example of parts which I do not expect most people to sort by part—most people will find it sufficient to have a single drawer or bin for flex tubes of any length instead of a separate compartment for each length. That’s why I never bothered creating labels for each length in my LEGO Brick Labels collection.

Other Changes:
- (bugfix) Most Common view: Increased to limit of 6 pages (1500 parts) for Current Most Common Parts when sorted by Overall Rank. This required creating a lot of additional part images, and adding more parts to the database.
- (parts page – admin only) Easy way to copy HTML containing nicely formatted link to this part page. Might make this available to all users in the future.
- (milestone) This pushed the Brick Architect database to over 2000 curated parts for the first time!
August 19, 2024: Updated “Current” Date range to reflect 2020-2024.

Up to this point, rankings were based on parts from sets released in 2019-2023 to determine which parts are most common. With most of the 2024 sets released in August, I have updated the website to use sets released in 2020-2024 when determining which parts are the most common.

Parts which were released in 2024 now appear in the rankings!

This will result in some parts going up or down significantly in the rankings. (This also occured on my older Most Common Parts articles, which were manually updated about twice a year.)

Related Changes:
- (new) Category view: ‘N’ indicator shown for new parts which were released in past couple years.
  I added this to the Most Common view a few days ago.
- (updated) Most Common view: Increased the number of pages of results shown for several views in the Most Common LEGO Parts views.
  I manually decide how many pages to show to avoid showing pages containing lots of missing parts and/or missing part images.
- (updated) Most Common view: Enabled the ability to sort by ‘years produced’ when viewing the most common current parts.
  This is an interesing view because it highlights some parts that are still being produced after many years, even though they aren’t used in very many sets. A good example is 2×4 Plate w/ Hinge (parts 3639 and 3640)
- (updated) Parts page: If a custom image is not available, bricklink image is shown as a fallback.
- (infrastructure) Rankings: Replaced hardcoded 2019-2023 values for ‘current’ in queries and page text for admin-configurable values. Also created admin-configurable setting for deciding which year is new enough to show the ‘new’ label.
- (admin console) Tool to view/manage/delete obsolete entries in all tables.
  This happens when external data source removes incorrect entries
- (bugfix) Ties in ranking are broken based on part name.
August 16, 2024: Programmatically-generated parts pages

I modified parts page to display information about parts which have not been added to the LEGO Parts Guide yet. This makes it possible to show vastly more parts in the Most Common Parts guide since it is possible to view basic info about parts which haven’t been added to the database yet.

Parts which have not been added to the database will not appear in the galleries of parts sorted by category because I haven’t decided where they should go. They also do not appear in search results. (Many of these additional parts do not have a picture.)

Related Changes:
- (updated) Most Common view: Clicking on parts which haven’t been added to the database yet will take you to the programmatically-generated page.
- (updated) Search: Searches for an exact match to a Part Number in the database are redirected to the matching parts page (instead of seeing a list containing just one matching result).
- (bugfix) New/Updated Parts Pages: New Parts (released in past two years) show a yellow (N) icon in the rightmost column.
August 15, 2024: Resiliency, Code Quality, and bugfixes.

I’ve been fixing bugs while I refactor some of the code in preparation for some new functionality.

Recent Changes:
- (new) “Updated Parts” Page: I created an Updated Parts page to find parts which were recently modified.
- (updated) Parts Page: If you enter the URL for a valid alternate Part ID, you will be redirected to the Part ID used in this guide.
  Ex: 30055 redirects to 15532.
- (bugfix) All Pages: HTML has been refactored to use head and body tags correctly.
- (bugfix) Most Common Parts: Fixed missing search box.
- (bugfix) Most Common Parts: New Parts (released in past two years) show a yellow (N) icon in the rightmost column.
  This column is also used to show a purple (R) icon for retired parts.
- (bugfix) Parts Page: “Pick a Brick” links removed for retired parts (since retired parts are not available to purchase at LEGO.com).
August 14, 2024: Classic Space parts!

A new book about Classic LEGO Space inspired me to add 22 new parts and update 23 existing parts.
June 29, 2024: Improvements to the New Parts page.

This is a small update to make it easier to highlight the new parts added every month. The New Parts page is now sorted by the date each part was added. It is possible to specify a custom date range, such as Parts added between 2024-06-01 and 2024-06-30.
April 8, 2024: Bugfixes & Improvements for very Small Screens.

I made a bunch of small refinements that fix minor issues in the previous update. The most noticeable change is that I have updated the pages to work on extremely small screens. (I have tested down to 320px wide – The browser width of the 2018 iPhone SE.)
April 4, 2024: Parts page improvements.

I’ve improved the overall appearance of the pages where you learn more about each part.

I cleaned up the pages where you learn more about each part. (This is an example showing a retired part.)

Recent Changes:
- Parts Page: Links to learn more about part on External Sites updated to use a tabular style and smaller text.
- Parts Page: Table showing ranking for retired parts updated to align better on large displays.
- Parts Page: Explanatory text under the ranking table only shows text that is relevant to the current part.
- Parts Page: Link to LEGO Brick Labels updated to use a conversational style.
- Parts Page: Fixed issue where page would not load for parts which retired in 2018.
- Parts Page: Show Date Added and Date Modified at the bottom of the Parts Page.
April 2, 2024: New Parts!

I’ve added around 90 parts to the guide after the initial launch in February. Most of these parts were added because they are common parts in either the all-time or current views. This includes a lot of parts which are ‘retired’ because they have not been produced in the past 5 years.

I created a simple page where people can see all of the new parts at: New parts since 2/21/2024.

Note: Retired parts are not visible in the Parts Guide but are visible in the lists of most common parts.
March 24-25, 2024: Minor improvements.
- Parts Homepage: Added a section with links to the Most Common Parts Guide above the section showing the top-level categories.
- Parts Page: Updated the arrows showing when parts are increasing or decreasing in popularity over time. (I was using Emoji in the original implementation, but this was not displaying correctly on mobile browsers so I switched to custom inline SVG graphics.)
- Most Common Parts Page: Added an explanation about the difference between ‘Most Common’ and ‘All Years’.
- Most Common Parts Page: Made “Current” the default view instead of All Years. (It is the most useful view for most users.)
- Parts Database: Added a few dozen parts to the database, allowing me to show an additional page of parts in Current – Overall Rank, Current – # Pieces, Current – # Sets, All-Years – Overall Rank, and All-Years – # Pieces. (Retired Parts was not a high priority for my LEGO Brick Labels collection, so I will need to add a lot of retired parts to the database before I can show additional pages of results in the ‘All-Years’ views.)
March 22, 2024: Most Common Parts Integration.

I launched a completely new feature under the LEGO Parts Guide umbrella… I’ve re-created my Most Common Parts Analysis using this updated data source.

The new guide allows you to sort on multiple dimensions.

The new experience lets you switch between seeing the “Current” parts (based on sets from past 5 years) and seeing ratings based on sets from all years (which is new). You can also sort this updated Most Common Parts Guide in several ways: by Overall Rank, by # of Pieces, # of Sets, # of Colors, and # of Years Produced.

A table of statistics is shown for every part.

The same information is visible when learning about a specific part. The top-line ranking is a weighted ranking that combines number of pieces, number of sets, and number of colors. The second column shows how the part ranks across The LEGO Group’s long history.

Other minor improvements:
- Other refinements to LEGO Parts page (including stylized treatment for retired/current/new).
February 25, 2024: Basic Search UX.

I have added the ability to search the LEGO Parts Guide. This was one of the top requests since launching the beta version about two weeks ago.

A simple search box was added to every page.

This is a very basic implementation which only searches the Brick Architect Part Number and Part Name. I will add the ability to search additional fields in the future.

You can search by part number or text search.

Other minor improvements:
- Spelling and grammar fixes for several categories. (Thanks Laurie).
February 24, 2024: Years produced added.

I added the years that each part was produced to the page where you can learn more about each part.

Range of dates shown for each part. (Very old parts are not showing an accurate start date — 3005 should say 1954-2024.)

This date range is based on data from Brickset, which becomes less accurate going back to the 1990’s or earlier. As such, I am showing an * when a part might be even older. (I will switch to using Rebrickable data in the future.)

This also required that I complete a review of alternate Part ID’s across external sites (like Brickset). Most parts have been reviewed and now include alternate part numbers when applicable. (This also resulted in realizing that about 20 parts had retired, so they are now hidden until I decide to make a dedicated mode for seeing retired parts.)
February 21, 2024: Public Release!

After several weeks of testing by patrons and newsletter subscribers, I launched the site at https://brickarchitect.com/parts/

This update focused on compatibility on very large and very small screens, information to learn more and an option to subscribe to newsletter in the page footer.

All of the parts are sorted into 13 top-level categories (plus a category for DUPLO).

See all of the parts in a given category and a short description.

Learn about each part on a dedicated page, with links to popular sites like Pick-a-Brick, Bricklink, and Rebrickable to learn more.
February 19, 2024: Category Name and Description improvements.

Thorough review of Category Names, Subtitles, and Descriptions. I ensured that every category has a Subtitle, and edits for clarity and consistent capitalization.
February 18, 2024: URL Improvements.

I simplified the URLs for each part and category as follows:
- https://brickarchitect.com/parts/ – LEGO Parts Guide – Homepage
- https://brickarchitect.com/parts/3011 – Part #3011
- https://brickarchitect.com/parts/category-126 – Category #12 (Plants)
February 9, 2024: Initial data entry complete!

After a month of data entry, I finished adding (almost) every part that’s in the LEGO Brick Labels collection to the guide. There are some group parts which have not been added yet. ‘Retired’ parts are hidden until I have added enough of them to make it a useful addition to the LEGO Parts Guide. (Retired parts will remain hidden by default going forward, even when I add an option to show hidden parts.)

Fun Fact: The last category I added was Technic. It’s one of the most complex sections of the LEGO Parts Catalog, and I wanted to take my time and refine the sub-categories while adding all of the parts.
February 5, 2024: External part names & links!

I have imported the list of part names and numbers from the following LEGO Websites: Rebrickable (1/25), BrickLink (2/3), Brickset (2/3), and LDraw (2/5). This makes the page where you can learn about each part much more useful. (Brickset names are also used for LEGO Pick-A-Brick website).

This was implemented using an interstitial table that links the Part Number used on Brick Architect with the Part Number (or Numbers) used on other websites. This makes it possible for a single part on Brick Architect to link to multiple part variants on other sites.

The website assumes that the Part Number on Brick Architect matches the Part Number on other sites. This is usually true, so I only need to manually edit those parts where there are discrepancies.
January 30, 2024: Hover feedback on mouseover.

An elegant border is shown when hovering on each item in the gallery.

Hover feedback in ‘Label’ mode.

Fun Fact: The hover style matches each mode, with a rounded rectangle in ‘Scale’ mode mimicing how parts are shown in LEGO building instructions, and a rectangular rectangle in ‘Label’ mode matching how the labels look when printed and cut.
January 22, 2024: Category cards on homepage.

Category cards on homepage.

As I added more parts to the guide, it was taking too long for the gallery of parts to load. Instead of showing every part on the homepage, it now shows a rectangular card for each top-level category.
January 22, 2024: “Scale” view.

A new ‘Scale’ view lets you see how large parts are relative to one another.

I had a rare moment of inspiration while going for a run, realizing that I could mimic the style that parts are shown in the back of an instruction booklet. This approach has the huge benefit of making it easier to see how large a part is at a glance.
January 10, 2024: “Label” view.

First version of ‘Label’ view.

My first goal was to display parts in the same style as my LEGO Brick Labels collection. This has the advantage of showing a lot of parts in a small amount of space.
January 7, 2024: “Table” view.

First screenshot showing a simple tabular view.

After just a couple days of work, I was able to find parts recursively and display them as a simple table.
January 5, 2024: Coding begins!

Initial proof-of-concept to display a simple page from a SQL database. From there, I created the initial database structure allowing parts to be organized into a folder hierarchy — All data entry was manual at first.